How does the brain read different scripts? Evidence from English, Korean, and Chinese

This study compared brain activation patterns during a visual rhyming judgment task in English, Korean, and Chinese. The results revealed that among the three languages, Korean and Chinese showed greater similarities in brain activation than either of them showed with English. Specifically, English recruited the left inferior frontal gyrus, left fusiform gyrus, and left superior temporal gyrus to a greater degree than did Korean or Chinese. In contrast, Korean and Chinese elicited greater activation than English in the bilateral middle frontal gyri, left inferior parietal lobule, and precuneus. These findings suggest that the brain network for Korean is not simply depicted as the one typically observed with alphabetic scripts (e.g., English) but rather highly similar to that of Chinese, a morpho-syllabic script, possibly because the Korean writing system leads to syllable-level phonological representation and processing.
Source: Reading and Writing - Category: Child Development Source Type: research