Chinese character and figure cognitive processing in the left Broca's area on inflated cortex

The cerebral cortex is the main target of analysis in many functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies; statistical analysis can be restricted to the subset of the voxels obtained after cortex segmentation. We used a event-related design and contrasted the cognitive processing of Chinese character and figure in left Brodmann areas 44 and 45, which constitute Broca's region, in Chinese-speaking individual. Participants carried out a visual judgments task on a list of randomly intermixed Chinese characters and figure. The fMRI data were mapped directly onto cortical surface models. Processing of Chinese characters and figure judgments activated a comparable network of brain regions. In Broca's area, the Chinese character judgment task is also similar but more activations than figure judgment task. The result confirms a popular view that this area plays a role in grapheme-to-phoneme conversion.