Brain, Vol. 123, No. 5, 954-967,
May 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press
Participation of the left posterior inferior temporal cortex in writing and mental recall of kanji orthography
A functional MRI study
1 Departments of Brain Pathophysiology and 2 Nuclear Medicine, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine and 3 Laboratory of Cerebral Integration, National Institute for Physiological Science, Kyoto, Japan
Correspondence to:
Hiroshi Shibasaki, MD, Department of Brain Pathophysiology, Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine, 54 Shogoin, Sakyo, Kyoto 606-8507 Japan E-mail: shib{at}kuhp.kyoto-u.ac.jp
To examine the neuropsychological mechanisms involved in writing kanji (morphograms), we used functional MRI (fMRI) in 10 normal volunteers, all right-handed, native Japanese speakers. The experimental paradigms consisted of kana-to-kanji transcription, mental recall of kanji orthography and oral reading and semantic judgement of kana words. The first two tasks require manual and mental transcription of visually presented kana words into kanji, respectively, whereas the last two tasks involve language processing of the same set of stimulus words without recall of kanji. The transcription and mental recall tasks yielded lateralized activation of the left posterior inferior temporal cortex (PITC). By contrast, neither oral reading nor semantic judgement produced similar activation of the area. These results, in good accordance with lesion data, provide converging evidence that the left PITC plays an important role in writing kanji through retrieval of their visual graphic images, and suggest language-specific cerebral organization of writing. The set of fMRI experiments also provides new neuroimaging data on the cortical localization of basic language functions in people using a non-alphabetical language.
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