NeuroImage 60 (2012) 419425

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NeuroImage
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Neural basis of phonological processing in second language reading: An fMRI study

of Chinese regularity effect
Jing Zhao a, b, Qing-Lin Li a, b, Jiu-Ju Wang a, b, Yang Yang a, b, Yuan Deng a, Hong-Yan Bi a,
a
b

Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 13 July 2011
Revised 28 December 2011
Accepted 30 December 2011
Available online 8 January 2012
Keywords:
Second language
Chinese character naming
Regularity effect
Left inferior parietal lobule
Left inferior frontal gyrus

a b s t r a c t
The present study examined the neural basis of phonological processing in Chinese later acquired as a second
language (L2). The regularity effect of Chinese was selected to elucidate the addressed phonological processing. We recruited a group of alphabetic language speakers who had been learning Chinese as L2 for at least
one year, and a control group of native Chinese speakers. Participants from both groups exhibited a regularity
effect in a pilot behavioral test. Neuroimaging results revealed that L2 learners exhibited stronger activation
than native Chinese speakers in the right occipitotemporal region (i.e. right lingual gyrus and right fusiform
gyrus). Moreover, L2 learners exhibited greater activations in the ventral aspects of the left inferior parietal
lobule (LIPL) and the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) for irregular character reading minus regular character
reading. In contrast, native Chinese speakers exhibited more dorsal activations in the LIPL and LIFG. According to the accommodation/assimilation hypothesis of second language reading, the current ndings suggest
that native speakers of alphabetic languages utilized an accommodation pattern for the specic requirements
of the visual form of Chinese characters, and an assimilation pattern for orthography-to-phonology transformation in Chinese reading.
Crown Copyright 2012 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction
The way in which a later learned language (i.e. the second language; L2) is organized in the brain relative to the rst language
(L1) is currently unclear. Several neuroimaging studies have explored
the L2 mechanisms, reporting common brain areas which are involved in both L1 and L2 processing, including the left superior temporal gyrus (in a study of SpanishEnglish bilinguals by Marian et
al., 2003), the bilateral occipital lobe (in a study of KoreanEnglish bilinguals by Suh et al., 2007), and the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex (in a study of SpanishEnglish bilinguals by Leonard et al., 2010).
In addition to these overlapping regions, additional activations have
been reported in areas specic to L2 processing (Lehtonen et al.,
2009; Leonard et al., 2010; Marian et al., 2003; Pillai et al., 2003;
Suh et al., 2007; Yokoyama et al., 2006). Inconsistent ndings regarding the common/distinct brain areas between L1 and L2 may be due
to different task difculties and processing stages. Marian et al.
(2003) proposed that shared cortical structures might reect the
characteristics of early stages in language processing, while separate
structures reect the distinction between two languages at later
stages of processing. Although this hypothesis can account for the

Corresponding author at: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 4A,

Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, China.
E-mail address: bihy@psych.ac.cn (H.-Y. Bi).

above-mentioned results in alphabetic language systems (e.g. overlapping in occipitotemporal regions that are associated with the
early processing such as visual and phonetic analysis), it cannot
fully explain the ndings across different types of writing systems
(e.g. alphabetic vs. logographic). Nelson et al. (2009) found that English speakers who learned Chinese as L2 recruited activities in the
left fusiform gyrus while viewing English words, but recruited activities in the right fusiform gyrus while viewing Chinese characters. This
nding suggests that distinct activations between L1 and L2 also can
be found at early stages of processing, such as visual form processing.
Therefore, not only the stage of processing but also specic language
characteristics appear to contribute to the distinctive activation patterns between L1 and L2, and different language systems would be
expected to elicit very different requirements on lexical processing.
The accommodation/assimilation hypothesis (Perfetti and Liu,
2005) offers a general interpretation based on the neural substrate
of bilingualism. According to this hypothesis, in the condition that native language network is sufcient for the processing demands of new
languages, the L1 system can assimilate an L2 system by applying
neural circuits already in place for the native language to process
the later acquired one. However, if the original language network
cannot support the specic processing demands of L2, it must accommodate the corresponding neural structures of the new language. In
view of this hypothesis, ChineseEnglish bilinguals (with English as
L2) should show an assimilation pattern when processing English,
i.e. engaging similar regions as their native language. This notion

1053-8119/$ see front matter. Crown Copyright 2012 Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2011.12.074

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J. Zhao et al. / NeuroImage 60 (2012) 419425

has been supported by several studies, in which the right fusiform

gyrus (subareas of the right occipitotemporal regions, OT regions)
was involved in orthographic processing (Lee et al., 2004; Nelson et
al., 2009; Tan et al., 2003) and the left middle frontal gyrus (LMFG)
was specic for phonological processing (Tan et al., 2003, 2005).
These two regions are thought to be specic for Chinese processing
(Perfetti and Liu, 2005; Tan et al., 2005). On the other hand, when alphabetic language speakers (e.g. native English speakers) learned
Chinese as L2, they would be expected to show an accommodation
pattern, i.e. recruiting brain regions specic for Chinese, not for English. As mentioned above, some evidence indicated that EnglishChinese bilinguals activated the right fusiform gyrus in response to the
additional requirement of visual analysis when viewing Chinese characters (Nelson et al., 2009). Evidence from training studies has
reported similar ndings (Deng et al., 2008, 2011; Liu et al., 2007).
Considering that a major difference between alphabetic and logographic language systems (e.g. English vs. Chinese) is the way in
which visual words map onto speech sounds (assembled vs.
addressed), it is particularly important to test the accommodation/assimilation hypothesis on phonological processing between these two
writing systems. A meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies on native
language speakers has suggested a distinct network for Chinese phonological processing compared with alphabetic language systems
(Tan et al., 2005). The LMFG and the dorsal aspect of the left inferior
parietal lobule (LIPL) are thought to be regions more specic for phonological storage in Chinese, while the left inferior frontal gyrus
(LIFG) and the ventral aspect of the LIPL are thought to be key regions
for assembled phonological processing (more strongly involved in alphabetic processing). Two recent studies explored the phonological
learning effect in Chinese by employing a lexical training paradigm
with native English speakers (Deng et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2007). Liu
et al. (2007) found that L2 learners induced activation in the LMFG,
the dorsal aspect of LIFG (Talairach coordinates [44, 25, 16]), and
the ventral aspect of LIPL ([33, 54, 39]). Deng et al. (2011) also
reported that the right occipital region and the left inferior frontal region exhibited greater involvement after learning Chinese. Thus,
these two studies demonstrated both an accommodation pattern
and an assimilation pattern when native English speakers learned to
read Chinese. However, these studies were based on short-term training, more evidence is needed to examine the effects of assimilation/
accommodation in phonological processing among naturally acquired
EnglishChinese bilinguals, and to compare L2 learners directly with
native speakers. To our knowledge, no such studies have been
reported.
The regularity effect is a commonly found effect in Chinese phonological processing (Yang and Shu, 2008; Zhang et al., 2003). Different
from alphabetic languages, Chinese has no graphemephoneme correspondences (GPCs). Regularity in Chinese is dened by whether
pronunciation of a compound is identical to that of its phonetic radical or not (e.g. Lee et al., 2005; Peng et al., 2004; Pollatsek et al., 2000;
Tan et al., 2001a). When the phonetic radical is pronounced in the
same way as the whole character, this character is referred to as a regular character (e.g. the compound character /you2/ and its phonetic
radical: /you2/); otherwise, it is considered as an irregular character
(e.g. the compound character /xiu4/ and its phonetic radical /you2/).
Although approximately 85% of Chinese characters are semantic
phonetic compounds (Perfetti and Tan, 1998; Zhu, 1988), in which
the phonetic radical provides a cue for the whole-character pronunciation, less than 30% of them are regular characters (Tan and Perfetti,
1998). Thus, the majority of Chinese compounds are irregular characters. Several behavioral studies have found that reading irregular
characters in Chinese was slower than reading regular characters
(Yang and Shu, 2008; Zhang et al., 2003). Therefore, irregular character reading may not be cued by valid phonological-related information; that is, it appears to require address-based phonological
processing (Balota and Ferraro, 1993). Several neuroimaging studies

(Peng et al., 2004; Tan et al., 2001a) have also found that some
brain areas were involved in the regularity effect, including the left
inferior temporoparietal area (involved in the storage of phonological
information), and the LMFG (particularly in addressed phonology,
with irregular characters). Thus, the regularity effect reects the
unique characteristic of Chinese phonological processing.
In the current study, we sought to explore the neural basis of Chinese
phonological processing in alphabetic language speakers (including English and Indonesian speakers) who learned Chinese as a second language. The pattern of neural activation associated with the regularity
effect was compared between L2 learners and native Chinese speakers.
According to the accommodation/assimilation hypothesis, if there is an
accommodation-based pattern, we would expect to observe the additional recruitment of the right fusiform gyrus (Lee et al., 2004; Nelson
et al., 2009; Tan et al., 2003), the left middle frontal gyrus (Liu et al.,
2007; Perfetti and Liu, 2005; Tan et al., 2001a, 2005), and the dorsal aspect of the left inferior parietal lobule (Deng et al., 2011; Peng et al.,
2004; Tan et al., 2005) in L2 learners. In contrast, if an assimilationbased pattern is applied, we would expect that regions relevant to the
phonological processing of alphabetic languages would be activated, including the left inferior frontal gyrus (Bitan et al., 2007; Bokde et al.,
2001; Bolger et al., 2005, 2008; Fiez et al., 1999; Gold and Buckner,
2002; Homae et al., 2002) and the ventral aspect of the left inferior parietal lobule (Bolger et al., 2005; Booth et al., 2002, 2006; Ravizza et al.,
2004; Tan et al., 2005).
Material and methods
Participants
Twenty native alphabetic language speakers participated in a pilot
behavioral test to select appropriate experimental stimuli. Participants were international students, and had been learning Chinese as
L2 for one to two years in China. Selected from the same student
group, another fteen L2 learners (eight males, a mean age of
23 years, ranging from 19 to 30 years) took part in the following functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. Their native languages were English or Indonesian, both of which are alphabetic
languages.
Thirty native Chinese-speaking university students participated in
the pilot behavioral study, and another 15 students (eight males, a
mean age of 22.5 years, ranging from 19 to 25 years) took part in
the following fMRI study.
All participants reported normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
Written consent was obtained from each participant prior to the experiment. This study was conducted in the State Key Lab of Cognitive
Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, China, and
was approved by the ethics committee of Beijing Normal University.
Design and materials
A mixed 2 2 factorial design was conducted, including one
within-subject factor: regularity (regular vs. irregular), and one
between-subject factor: participant type (native Chinese speakers
vs. L2 learners).
Seventy-two Chinese characters, equally consisting of two stimulus types: regular (reg) versus irregular (irreg) characters. Regular
characters were those whose phonetic radical sounded the same as
the whole-character, referring to the same initial consonant and compound vowel. Otherwise, the characters were classied as irregular
characters. All characters were of high frequencies (a mean value of
60.98 occurrence per million), selected from level A and B in the vocabulary self-testing handbook of Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK)
(Pan, 2002). These characters all had left-right structures, with the
phonetic radicals on the right side. The phonetic radical of each character was a single character. All the characters had unambiguous

J. Zhao et al. / NeuroImage 60 (2012) 419425

meaning, i.e. they were not functional words. All characters had a low
level of consistency, 1 which was balanced between regular- and
irregular-conditions, with a range from 0.06 to 0.4. As shown in
Table 1, the average character frequencies and the number of strokes
were not signicantly different between regular and irregular
conditions.
The pilot behavioral naming test conrmed the regularity effect in
twenty L2 learners and thirty native Chinese speakers. Results of a
paired-samples t-test for reaction time (RT) showed a signicant regularity effect for both groups. Regular character reading was faster
than irregular character reading (L2 learners: t(19) = 2.942, p b 0.01;
native Chinese speakers: t(29) = 3.309, p b 0.01), mean reaction
times were shown in Table 2.
fMRI procedure
Fig. 1 shows the arrangement of the whole fMRI scanning session
and the presentation format of each trial. A block design was used for
presenting stimuli. In the fMRI scanning session, there were four task
blocks (two blocks for regular characters and two blocks for irregular
characters), and four baseline blocks prior to each task block. There
were 18 characters in each task block, resulting in a total of 36 characters for each type. The whole scanning session lasted 4.8 minutes.
Within each task trial, a visual character was presented for
1500 ms followed by a 500-ms blank, followed by the appearance of
the next trial. Participants were instructed to pronounce the target
characters covertly. In the baseline blocks, the same presentation format was used. Within each trial, a xation cross was presented instead of a character. Participants were asked to stare at the xation
without making any other response.
Hemodynamic responses were acquired on a 3 T Siemens Trio MR
system (Siemens Trio Magnetic Resonance Imaging system, Germany). Participants were instructed to keep still inside the scanner,
and their heads were aligned to the center of the magnetic eld. For
each participant, three-dimensional anatomical images with high resolution were acquired using a Siemens magnetization-prepared rapid
acquisition gradient echo (MPRAGE) sequence. For the functional imaging studies, a blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD)-sensitive gradient echo-plane imaging (EPI) sequence was acquired. The following
scan parameters were used: repetition time = 2000 ms, echo
time = 30 ms, ip angle = 90, matrix size = 64 64, eld of
view = 20 cm, slice thickness = 4 mm, gap = 0.8 mm, number of
slices = 30. In addition, a high-resolution, T1-weighted threedimensional image was acquired (repetition time = 250 ms, echo
time = 2.46 ms, ip angle = 70, matrix size = 256 256, eld of
view = 20 cm, slice thickness = 4 mm, gap = 0.8 mm, number of
slices = 30).
Imaging data analysis
Image processing and statistical analysis were conducted by the
Analysis of Functional NeuroImages (AFNI) software package (Cox,
1996; Cox and Hyde, 1997; http://afni.nimh.nih.gov/afni/). Slice timing correction, motion correction, and temporal ltering of functional
images were performed on each individual dataset. The MPRAGE anatomical scan was normalized to Talairach space (Talairach and
Tournoux, 1988). The Talairach-aligned dataset was spatially
smoothed by a 6-mm full-width half-maximum Gaussian kernel.
General linear modeling (GLM) was used for single-subject analysis
1

Phonological consistency is dened by how consistent the pronunciations of characters with the same phonetic radical (orthographic neighbors) are. Consistency (c) of
a Chinese character was calculated as follows: the number of its orthographic neighbors with the same pronunciation as the target (n) divided by the whole neighborhood
size (N), c = n/N (Fang et al., 1986). When all neighbors sound the same, target naming
is faster, a phenomenon known as the consistency effect (Shu and Zhang, 1989; Yang
and Shu, 2008).

421

Table 1
Stimulus characteristics in all conditions.

Frequency
Number of strokes

Regular

Irregular

52.04 (70.9)
9.17 (2.5)

69.92 (81.8)
8.83 (1.7)

Note. Frequency values are occurrences per million. Standard deviations are in
parentheses.

of functional images (deconvolution analysis), producing the hemodynamic response function (HRF) for each experimental condition.
A group mask was created to remove voxels outside the brain, produced by multiplying masks from each participant to include only
the voxels with valid signals.
A random effect group analysis was performed with two-way
ANOVAs, including regularity as a xed effect, and participant as a
random effect. Monte Carlo simulations with AFNI's ALPHASIM program were used to set the voxel-wise intensity threshold at
p b 0.001 uncorrected, and the cluster size threshold at 2 contiguous
voxels (voxel size: 3 3 3 mm 3) for a corrected signicance level
of p b 0.01.
fMRI results
No explicit behavioral performances were recorded in the fMRI
session because of the silent naming task. The fMRI data were averaged for the comparisons of characters vs. xation within each
group. Brain areas of signicant activation are summarized in
Table 3. The similar activation peaks between groups in character
reading were mainly located in the right inferior frontal gyrus, bilateral occipitotemporal junction (fusiform gyrus, lingual gyrus, inferior
and middle occipital gyrus), and the left cingulate gyrus. The amount
of activated voxels in each region was consistently larger for L2
learners than for Chinese speakers. Fig. 2 shows activations in the
OT regions for two groups. For L2 learners, additional activations
were observed in the left medial frontal gyrus and the right inferior
parietal lobule; while Chinese participants produced additional activations in the left precentral gyrus, left middle temporal gyrus, right
superior temporal gyrus, right cingulate gyrus, and right insula.
Direct comparisons between regular and irregular characters in
each group are shown in Table 4. For native Chinese speakers, reading
irregular characters produced greater activations than reading regular
ones in bilateral inferior frontal gyrus, left inferior parietal lobule, left
precuneus, left superior temporal gyrus, and right posterior cingulate
gyrus. In contrast, regular character reading produced greater activations in the right superior temporal gyrus, right inferior parietal lobule, left fusiform gyrus, and right cingulate gyrus. For L2 learners,
reading irregular characters produced greater activations in the left
medial frontal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus, left inferior parietal
lobule, left middle temporal gyrus and right lingual gyrus; while reading regular characters induced greater activation in the left cingulate
gyrus. Overall, the overlapping regions between two groups were
found in the LIFG and LIPL, which were greater activated in irregular
character reading compared with regular character reading, but the
activation peaks were slightly different. L2 learners showed activities
in ventral LIFG [ 49, 24, 4] (BA 44/45) and ventral LIPL [49, 47,

Table 2
Mean reaction times (ms) in the behavioral study.

Regular
Irregular

L2 learners

Chinese native speakers

564.4 (51.3)
571.3 (51.8)

534.2 (53.1)
554.0 (56.6)

Note. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

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J. Zhao et al. / NeuroImage 60 (2012) 419425

Right occipitotemporal regions were activated in L2 learners for

Chinese character reading, including the right lingual gyrus and
right fusiform gyrus. Activation of the right fusiform gyrus was commonly found in Chinese reading. This region may be associated with
visual spatial analysis (Chen et al., 2007; Cohen et al., 2004; Tan et
al., 2001b), or related to storage of the holistic information of characters (Dien, 2009). The right lingual gyrus was also found to be a critical component in processing the logographic properties of Chinese
characters (Kuo et al., 2004; Tan et al., 2001a, 2001b). The involvements of these regions were also reported in previous bilingual and
training studies, in which English speakers learned Chinese as a second language (Deng et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2007; Nelson et al.,
2009). Because the visual conguration of word forms is markedly
different between alphabetic languages and logographic languages
(such as Chinese), alphabetic language speakers need to make more
efforts in visualspatial processing of characters when processing
Chinese. Activation increases in the right OT regions indicate an accommodation pattern in L2 learners for Chinese orthographic
processing.
In terms of the greater activation in right occipitotemporal region
for L2 learning, it is possible that L2 participants were not so familiar
with Chinese characters relative to native speakers. However, relationship between prociency and activation intensity of the right OT
regions is still controversial. It was reported that there was a negative
correlation between the right fusiform gyrus and reading skill in English, i.e. the OT activities decreased as the reading skill increased
(Shaywitz et al., 2002; Turkeltaub et al., 2003). In a laboratorybased L2 learning study of Liu et al. (2007), after a very short period
of learning (3-days) on Chinese characters, native English speakers
activated bilateral fusiform gyrus for viewing Chinese. As compared
with the novel characters, learned ones induced less activities in the
right fusiform, indicating that activation intensities decreased with
the progressive prociency. However, opposite evidence was also
reported. In Deng et al. (2011), activations in the bilateral lingual
gyrus were greater at the end of the fourth week's training than
those at the end of the second week's training. In addition, Xue et
al. (2006) reported a non-linear change of right OT activities during
lexical training by showing a decreased activation after word-form
learning but an increased activation after semantic and phonological
learning. To our knowledge, the prociency explanation has not
been tested in L2 learners with different L2 prociencies and a relatively long time for the L2 learning in terms of the activation of
right OT region. In our present results, L2 learners all have learned

Fig. 1. Arrangement of the whole fMRI scanning session and the presentation format of
each trial.

22] (BA 40) (Fig. 3), while native Chinese speakers showed activities
in dorsal LIFG [39, 4, 33] (BA 9) and dorsal LIPL [39, 49, 37] (BA
40) (Fig. 3).

Discussion
The present study examined the accommodation/assimilation
hypothesis regarding the neural basis of phonological processing in
second language reading. Particularly, we examined neural activation
associated with the regularity effect in Chinese character reading
among L2 learners whose rst language was alphabetic. The current
study had two major features: 1) the regularity effect was used to reveal the addressed phonological processing in Chinese; 2) our L2 participants learned Chinese as a second language in a class situation for
a relatively long time, rather than a short-term training in the laboratory, and were compared with native Chinese speakers.
Overall, the current results revealed that L2 learners strongly
recruited right occipitotemporal regions for Chinese reading, and
the activation intensity in L2 learners was greater than that in native
Chinese speakers. Regarding the regularity effect, L2 learners exhibited activations in the ventral aspects of the LIFG (BA 44/45) and
the LIPL. In contrast, native Chinese speakers exhibited activations
in the dorsal aspects of the LIFG (BA9) and the LIPL. In accordance
with our predictions, the current ndings revealed that L2 learners
exhibited brain activation suggesting both accommodation and assimilation patterns for Chinese characters reading.

Table 3
Brain activations of character-baseline subtraction for two groups.
Regions

R inferior frontal G./R precentral G.

L precentral G.
L medial frontal G.
R inferior parietal lobule
L middle temporal G.
L middle temporal G.
R superior temporal G.
R superior temporal G.
R inferior occipital G./R fusiform G./R lingual
G./R middle occipital G.
L fusiform G./L inferior occipital G./L lingual
G./L middle occipital G.
L cuneus
L anterior cingulate G.
L cingulate G.
R cingulate G.
R insula

L2 learners

Native Chinese speakers

Vmul (mm3)

BA

(x, y, z)

(30, 1, 28)

7.54

4158

6
40

( 4, 16, 43)
(45, 33, 27)

3.52
3.71

135
54

18/19

(37, 69, 5)

37

( 41, 52, 11)

8.7

24
32

( 10, 28, 5)
( 9, 24, 29)

4.81
3.56

10.4

111,483

2835
108

Vmul (mm3)

BA

(x, y, z)

9
6

(37, 7, 28)
( 30, 13, 3)

5.3
9.96

270
1458

21
19
38
28
18/19

( 49, 1, 12)
( 36, 60, 10)
(39, 3, 23)
(30, 7, 24)
(27, 75, 2)

5.41
5.42
5.89
7.88
5.75

162
567
135
81
189

17

( 21, 82, 8)

6.64

513

31
24
13

( 23, 41, 21)

(19, 17, 42)
(34, 29, 15)

4.83
8.83
16.08

54
2646
999

Notes. G., gyrus. L, left; R, right. x, y, z are Talairach coordinates. Vmul (mm3), volume of activated regions in unit of cubic mm. These brain areas exhibited peak activation for the
comparison between character reading and baseline. Signicance level of t-test was set at p b 0.01, corrected for multiple comparisons.

J. Zhao et al. / NeuroImage 60 (2012) 419425

423

Fig. 2. The task-baseline subtraction of activations in the bilateral occipitotemporal regions from the sagittal sectios. The upper row shows brain activity of L2 learners, while the
lower row shows brain activity of native Chinese speakers.

Chinese for at least one year in China and they showed greater OT activities in Chinese processing comparing with native Chinese
speakers. Current ndings could not exclude the possibility of prociency effect on the OT activation in L2 Learner, i.e. increased OT activities might be due to their low prociency in this new language
system. Further studies are needed to test higher skilled samples of
L2 learners as comparison, so as to directly examine the inuence of
L2 prociency on right OT's activation pattern.
In the current study, participants from both groups recruited
greater activity in the left inferior parietal lobule for the irregular
character reading minus regular character reading. However, peak activation was more ventral for L2 learners, and more dorsal for native
Chinese speakers. Several studies have suggested that the ventral aspect of the LIPL plays an important role in GPC routes (Bolger et al.,
2005; Booth et al., 2002, 2006; Tan et al., 2005) and phonological
encodingrecoding processes (Ravizza et al., 2004) in English.
However, as proposed by Tan et al. (2005), the dorsal aspect of the
left inferior parietal region is more important in Chinese reading, and
this region may be associated with temporary phonological storage of
Chinese characters. In previous training studies, participants learned
Chinese for a very short period of time, and failed to show activation
in dorsal LIPL (Deng et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2007). Interestingly, our participants continuously learned Chinese as their second language for at
least one year before the experiment, and also showed no activation
in the dorsal LIPL. This nding suggests that activation in the ventral aspect of the left inferior parietal region may indicate an assimilation pattern in L2 learners despite the length of the learning period.

Although Chinese characters lack GPC rules, the regularity effect of

Chinese in fact relies critically on sublexical processing (or the interaction of sublexical and lexical phonological processing). Present L2
learners recruited ventral IPL to process Chinese regularity, suggesting there were some similarities in the sublexical processing between
Chinese and alphabetic language systems. Zhou and Marslen-Wilson
(1999) suggested that the phonetic radical-sound correspondences
in Chinese compound characters could be considered as similar as
the GPC rules in alphabetic languages. Previous behavioral results
showed that reading regular words (i.e. words follow the GPC rules)
is faster than reading irregular words (i.e. words do not follow the
GPC rules) in alphabetic lexical decision and naming tasks
(Coltheart, 1978; Coltheart et al., 1993; Coltheart et al., 2001; Jared,
2002). Similarly, reading regular Chinese characters (i.e. identical
pronunciation between phonetic radical and the whole character)
took a shorter time than reading irregular characters (i.e. phonetic
radical sounded differently from the whole character) (Yang and
Shu, 2008; Zhang et al., 2003). Some neuroimaging studies also suggested a common network responsible for the sublexical processing
across English and Chinese language systems, covering left medial
frontal gyrus, left inferior/superior frontal gyrus, bilateral superior
temporal gyrus, right inferior parietal lobule, and left cingulate cortex
(English: Binder et al., 2005; Bolger et al., 2008; Fiez et al., 1999; Chinese: Tan et al., 2001a; Peng et al., 2004), however, there still existed
language-specic areas just as discussed above, ventral aspects of inferior parietal regions for alphabetic processing while dorsal aspects
for Chinese processing. Thus, in our study, the involvement of ventral

Table 4
Brain activations of regularity effect for two groups.
Regions

Irreg > Reg

L medial frontal G.
L inferior frontal G.
L inferior frontal G.
R inferior frontal G.
L inferior parietal lobule
L precuneus
L superior temporal G.
L middle temporal G.
R lingual G.
R posterior cingulate G.
Reg > Irreg
R superior temporal G.
R inferior parietal lobule
L fusiform G.
R cingulate G.
L cingulate G.

L2 learners

Native Chinese speakers

BA

(x, y, z)

Vmul (mm3)

6
44
45

( 5, 15, 48)
( 52, 14, 14)
( 49, 24, 4)

4.11
3.93
4.04

621
486
81

40

( 49, 47, 22)

4.67

297

22
18

( 58, 25, 1)
(16, 91, 15)

5
3.9

189
81

( 25, 22, 41)

5.25

BA

(x, y, z)

Vmul (mm3)

9
47
40
18
22

( 39, 4, 33)
(29, 21, 18)
( 39, 49, 37)
( 22, 67, 19)
( 47, 16, 7)

4.93
5.26
5.33
4.36
4.91

54
216
189
54
81

30

(14, 56, 14)

9.27

594

38
40
20
24

(36, 3, 15)
(34, 39, 32)
( 40, 7, 20)
(15, 6, 35)

6.14
6.61
5.07
5.92

108
135
54
54

189

Note. G., gyrus. L, left; R, right. x, y, z are Talairach coordinates. Vmul (mm3), volume of activated regions in unit of cubic mm. These brain areas exhibited peak activation for
irregular character reading minus regular character reading. Signicance level of t-test was set at p b 0.01, corrected for multiple comparisons.

424

J. Zhao et al. / NeuroImage 60 (2012) 419425

Fig. 3. Activations related to regularity effect (brain activity in response to irregular character reading minus activity in response to regular character reading) in the left inferior
parietal lobule (a) and the left inferior frontal gyrus (b) from the coronal, sagittal and horizontal sections. The left column shows brain activity of L2 learners, the right column
shows brain activity of native Chinese speakers.

IPL for reading Chinese in L2 learner presented an alphabetic-specic

activation pattern, indicating an assimilation mechanism applied by
L2 learners to process Chinese regularity.
A third region that L2 learners recruited for Chinese character
reading was the LIFG. Similar nding was also reported in a recent
training study (Deng et al., 2011). The LIFG is thought to play an important role in grapheme-to-phoneme conversions and phonemic
processing in alphabetic languages (Bitan et al., 2007; Bokde et al.,
2001; Bolger et al., 2005, 2008; Fiez et al., 1999; Gold and Buckner,
2002; Homae et al., 2002). The current recruitment of this region in
L2 learners also suggests an assimilation mechanism involved in Chinese reading. Together with our nding in ventral LIPL, these results
suggest that L2 learners may utilize existing neural networks associated with their native language to access phonology from orthography, especially for irregular character reading, resulting in the
robust assimilation pattern we observed in these two regions.
The accommodation/assimilation hypothesis has given a better
explanation to the present L2 mechanism. But there were some other
possibilities inducing the current brain activities. Previous studies
reported increasing LIPL and LIFG activities accompanied greater task
difculties (Assmus et al., 2005; Lewandowska et al., 2010). Because
the phonetic radical did not provide valid phonological information
for the whole character's sound, reading irregular characters was
more difcult than reading regular ones in our present study. Then,
the present robust activations in these regions for the comparisons between irregular- and regular-conditions might be due to more effortful
processing for irregular character reading.
Previous alphabetic studies reported that responding to conicting information in language processing (such as reading more inconsistent/irregular words) activated regions of left inferior/middle
frontal gyrus (Fiez et al., 1999; Herbster et al., 1997; Katz et al.,
2005), left superior/middle temporal gyrus (Bolger et al., 2008), left
superior/inferior parietal lobule (Binder et al., 2005; Bolger et al.,
2008), and left medial frontal gyrus/anterior cingulate cortex
(Binder et al., 2005). As to our experiment, conicting information
exists in the irregular characters, in which phonetic radicals sound
differently from the whole characters. Therefore, the two groups of
current participants both recruited the brain regions responsible for

conict resolution for Chinese irregular character reading, such as

the LIPL, left medial frontal gyrus and left cingulate gyrus, indicating
that the current neural activation pattern in L2 learners might be
associated with the processing of conicting information.
In our present experimental design, there was no L1 effect of native
alphabetic processing, and we compared current L2 activities with the
converging ndings in previous studies of alphabetic processing. If L1
effect was taken into account, the inferences of L2 mechanism based on
the accommodation/assimilation hypothesis would be more powerful.
Conclusions
The current study explored neural activation related to the
regularity effect in both L2 learners and native Chinese speakers, to
examine how a later learned language becomes organized in the
brain. The present results suggested that L2 learners utilized both
accommodation and assimilation patterns in Chinese processing.
They exhibited activation in right occipitotemporal region (such as
the right fusiform gyrus, right lingual gyrus) for orthographic processing of Chinese, reecting an accommodation pattern. L2 learners also
induced alphabetic-specic areas of ventral aspects of the LIPL and
LIFG for phonological processing of Chinese, reecting an assimilation
pattern. Further studies are required to examine whether these accommodation/assimilation mechanisms are independent of language
experience by recruiting EnglishChinese bilinguals with higher reading skills in the Chinese, and to examine the possible long-term
changes of L2 processing mechanisms.
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by National Key Lab of Cognitive
Neuroscience and Learning at Beijing Normal University, Chinese Natural Science Foundation (30770726 and 30970910) to Hongyan Bi,
Chinese Natural Science Foundation (30700232), and a Project for
Young Scientists Fund, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of
Sciences (O9CX052005) to Yuan Deng. We thank Magnetic Resonance Imaging Research Center, Institute of Psychology, CAS, for
help in our data analysis.

J. Zhao et al. / NeuroImage 60 (2012) 419425

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