Neural substrates of Japanese words listening

In this paper we attempted to resolve the neural substrates of spoken Japanese word, nonsense word, and separate KANA perception, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We found that word and separate KANA activated more areas than nonsense words perhaps for the sake of the different familiarity level; word condition activated part of the right primary motor cortex and part of the left pre-motor cortex which may be related to articulatory-gestural representations of word access compared with separate KANA and nonsense word condition.