Chinese semantic processing cerebral areas

This study has identified the active cerebral areas of normal Chinese that are associated with Chinese semantic processing using functional brain imaging. Ac-cording to the traditional cognitive theory, semantic proc-essing is not particularly associated with or affected by input modality. The functional brain imaging experiments were conducted to identify the common active areas of two mo-dalities when subjects perform Chinese semantic tasks through reading and listening respectively. The result has shown that the common active areas include left inferior frontal gyrus (BA 44/45), left posterior inferior temporal gyrus (BA37); the joint area of inferior parietal lobules (BA40) and superior temporal gyrus, the ventral occipital areas and cerebella of both hemispheres. It gives important clue to further discerning the roles of different cerebral areas in Chinese semantic processing.