Dual route processing in the single Chinese character reading: a fMRI study.

Because of Chinese characters' unique square form and various orthography mapping rules, many studies focused on whether the cognitive mechanism of reading Chinese characters was similar to that of reading alphabetic words. However, it was still in debate. The aim of this study was to investigate Chinese-English bilinguals'reading mechanisms of these two languages in high frequency, pseudo and artificial conditions for providing the further evidences to the above question. Our results showed that compared with high frequency conditions of the two languages, which activated the similarbrain areas, the pseudo English words activated greatervolume in left supramarginal gyrus, while pseudo Chinese characters in left middle frontal gyrus. These results suggested 1) Chinese-English bilinguals might adopt two kinds of dual route mechanism for reading Chinese characters and English words. 2) For Chinese-English bilinguals, the left supramarginal gyrus played a crucial role for converting grapheme to phoneme during reading pseudo English words as native English speakers; the left middle frontal gyrus might play a important role forthe radical analyzing while reading pseudo Chinese characters.