Modulation of neural connectivity during processing of Chinese characters

The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate functional interactions of several regions which were activated during the processing of Chinese characters. Two stimuli were used, including characters and pseudo-characters. We found that the activity in left middle frontal gyrus (BA6) were strongly correlated with the activity in right inferior frontal gyrus(BA9) and activity in left fusiform gyrus for both characters and pseudo-characters, the activity in left fusiform gyrus were strongly correlated with the activity in left middle frontal gyrus (BA6) and the activity in right inferior frontal gyrus (BA9) only for characters, and there was strong functional connectivity between left fusiform gyrus and right fusiform gyrus only for pseudo-characters. Those results indicate that Chinese characters and pseudo-characters demand different modulations of neural connectivity