ABSTRACT

This chapter will provide an overview of the recent findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies on the processing of Chinese, especially speech processing and reading. It was demonstrated that there are both common and unique neural mechanisms in the processing of Chinese and other Indo-European languages. In addition, the results of previous studies suggest that the cognitive factors of speech processing and reading are hierarchically structured in the brain, from the analysis of sensory input to final linguistic integration and comprehension, and that distributed brain regions are integrated during complex processes of language. Based on these findings, testing psycholinguistic theories and hypotheses using neuroimaging approaches is an important direction for future studies.