Magnetoencephalography of language: new approaches to understanding the cortical organization of Chinese processing

Chinese is a logographic language. Many of its psycholinguistic characteristics differ from those of alphabetic languages. These differences might be expected to entail a different pattern of neural activity underpinning Chinese language processing compared to the processing of alphabetic languages. The aim of the current study was to investigate neural language centers for processing Chinese language information in healthy Chinese speakers using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Overall, we aimed to elucidate language-specific and language-general characteristics of processing across different language scripts.

Ten healthy Chinese-speaking subjects were asked to silently read genuine Chinese characters and view pseudo-characters in a MEG scanner. The functional language areas were located by overlapping the MEG results over magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) images.

Distinctive late magnetic response waves were observed in both hemispheres while the subjects were reading genuine Chinese characters. The polarization of the response waveforms was found to be greater in the left than the right hemisphere. Broca's area was found to be located at the back of gyrus frontalis inferior or gyrus frontalis medius. Wernicke's area was located at gyrus temporalis medius, gyrus temporalis superior and gyrus supramariginalis. In addition, Wernicke's area was activated earlier than Broca's area.

Native Chinese speakers reading Chinese characters showed neural responses that were lateralized to the left hemisphere. Overall, the functional brain areas activated by reading Chinese in this study corresponded to classical language centers found for alphabetic languages in previous studies, but some differences were also found in the specific patterns of activation.