Browsing by Author "Tzeng, Ovid J. L."

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AGE-RELATED AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN ENTROPY-BASED COMPLEXITY OF HEALTHY AGING BRAIN
(2019-09-01)
Huang, Chih-Mao
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Fang, Ya-Wen
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Chen, Guan-Yen
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Tzeng, Ovid J. L.
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Huang, Hsu-Wen
Aging, cognition, and the brain: effects of age-related variation in white matter integrity on neuropsychological function
(2019-07-03)
Fan, Yang-Teng
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Fang, Ya-Wen
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Chen, Ya-Ping
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Leshikar, Eric D.
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Lin, Ching-Po
Alterations in brain structure are viewed as neurobiological indicators which are closely tied to cognitive changes in healthy human aging. The current study used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) tractography to investigate the relationship between age, brain variation in white matter (WM) integrity, and cognitive function. Sixteen younger adults (aged 20-28 years) and 18 healthy older adults (aged 60-75 years) underwent DTI scanning and a standardized battery of neuropsychological measures. Behaviorally, older adults exhibited poorer performance on multiple cognitive measures compared to younger adults. At the neural level, the effects of aging on theWM integrity were evident within interhemispheric (the anterior portion of corpus callosum) and transverse (the right uncinate fasciculus) fibers of the frontal regions, and the cingulum-angular fibers. Our correlation results showed that age-related WM differentially influenced cognitive function, with increased fractional anisotropy values in both the anterior corpus callosum and the right cingulum/angular fibers positively correlated with performance on the visuospatial task in older adults. Moreover, mediation analysis further revealed that the WM tract integrity of the frontal interhemspheric fibers was a significant mediator of age-visuospatial performance relation in older adults, but not in younger adults. These findings support the vulnerability of the frontal WM fibers to normal aging and push forward our understanding of cognitive aging by providing a more integrative view of the neural basis of linkages among aging, cognition, and brain.
BRAIN SIGNATURE OF SUBJECTIVE PERFORMANCE DURING NUMERICAL STROOP TASKS
(2019-09-01)
Huang, Hsu-Wen
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Nascimben, Mauro
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Fong, Dong-Yang
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Tzeng, Ovid J. L.
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Huang, Chih-Mao
Neuroimaging evidence for sensitivity to orthography-to-phonology conversion in native readers and foreign learners of Chinese
(2019-05-01)
Yu, Anya
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Chen, Makayla S. Y.
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Cherodath, Sarika
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Hung, Daisy L.
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Tzeng, Ovid J. L.
Through recent neuroimaging research into brain mechanisms of proficient reading and literacy acquisition in different languages, a common neural network supporting reading has been identified in native readers across various writing systems. However, whether the same or different brain regions are involved in learning to read a foreign language is largely unexplored. To investigate (1) neural correlates of literacy acquisition of Chinese in adults whose learning of this logographic language was relatively late, and (2) to examine which cognitive factors might be predictors of literacy acquisition that would modulate the computation demands on reading-related brain regions, native and non-native Chinese readers were recruited to participate in pronunciation and color verification tasks using Chinese pseudo-phonograms in fMRI while their sensitivity to extracting systematic regularity in nonverbal materials, as well as their IQ and working memory, was measured in a visual statistical learning (VSL) task. The results indicated that native participants activated a left lateralized reading network that is consistent with previous research on orthography-to-phonology conversion (OPC) of Chinese, while a similar but extensive network that also includes regions in the right hemisphere was engaged in the non-natives. Within this network, left inferior frontal sites were found to be crucial to the mapping of Chinese pseudo characters to potential sounds especially in non-natives. More important, only the VSL scores of native and non-native participants, but not their general cognitive abilities, were negatively correlated with the brain activities in the left inferior parietal and left inferior frontal regions, respectively, suggesting that the fundamental capacity of SL supports literacy acquisition through modulating computation demands on the brain regions associated with OPC processing, which is critical to Chinese character recognition.
Neurolinguistic Studies of Reading in Chinese
(2017-01-01)
Tzeng, Ovid J. L.
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Lee, Chia Ying
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Lee, Jun Ren
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Wu, Denise H.
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Lee, Rose R. -W.
Using the Chinese writing system, which is unique with respect to the composition of each character in terms of its graphic shape, as an example, this chapter addresses the neurobiological underpinnings of reading and writing and how these brain circuits are used in different languages. (c) 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
The Explicit and Implicit Phonological Processing of Chinese Characters and Words in Taiwanese Deaf Signers
(2016-01)
Chiu, Yi-Shiuan
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Kuo, Wen-Jui
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Lee, Chia-Ying
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Tzeng, Ovid J. L.
;
交大名義發表
This study investigates the phonological processing that Taiwanese deaf signers engage in when recognizing Chinese characters and words. The deaf participants\' orthography-phonology transformation (OPT) abilities were tested using an explicit Chinese homophone judgment task, and their implicit phonological activations were tested using lexical decision tasks. Chinese characters, whose phonetic radicals are not always reliable guides to pronunciation, are a useful tool for dissociating the influence of phonology and orthography. Experiment 1 manipulated sound-based phonological similarity (similar, dissimilar) and orthographical similarity (similar, dissimilar). Accuracy, sensitivity (d\'), and reaction times (RTs) were recorded for hearing participants, but only accuracy and sensitivity (d\') recorded for deaf participants, who are fluent signers of Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL). Additionally, the predictive abilities of log word frequency and the consistency values for homophone judgment performance were analyzed. Experiment 2-1 was designed to compare the effects of three primes (semantically related, sound-based phonologically related, and unrelated primes) on the performance of deaf and hearing participants on a lexical decision task. In Experiment 2-2, TSL phonologically related primes were compared with unrelated primes for deaf and hearing subjects. The results of Experiment 1 show that the accuracy of deaf subjects was poor (. 66) and was lower than that of hearing subjects (. 87). Particularly, the deaf subjects\' accuracy and sensitivity in the orthographically dissimilar condition were significantly lower than in the orthographically similar condition. For hearing subjects, log word frequency significantly predicted their accuracy and RTs, whereas the consistency values predicted only the RTs. For the deaf participants, the accuracy could be efficiently predicted by both log word frequency and consistency values, which reflect knowledge of OPT rules. We suggested that although deaf individuals had acquired knowledge of OPT rules, this knowledge was neither complete nor sufficiently robust to make homophone judgments. In Experiment 2-1, the results show that there was a semantic priming effect but no sound-based phonological priming effect for the deaf participants. The results further reveal that deaf people with a limited hearing ability did not automatically process the sound-based phonological representations under time-constrained conditions. In Experiment 2-2, there was an action-based phonological priming effect for deaf signers but not for hearing subjects, indicating that deaf signers automatically activated related action-based phonology to access the semantic meaning of words when reading Chinese. This study finds that deaf signers acquire OPT rules but that their OPT rules are not sufficiently robust or complete to allow them to make explicit phonological judgments and homophone judgments. Deaf signers automatically activated action-based representations rather than sound-based phonological representations when reading Chinese characters.
The Explicit and Implicit Phonological Processing of Chinese Characters and Words in Taiwanese Deaf Signers
(2016-01-01)
Chiu, Yi-Shiuan
;
Kuo, Wen-Jui
;
Lee, Chia-Ying
;
Tzeng, Ovid J. L.
;
交大名義發表
This study investigates the phonological processing that Taiwanese deaf signers engage in when recognizing Chinese characters and words. The deaf participants\' orthography-phonology transformation (OPT) abilities were tested using an explicit Chinese homophone judgment task, and their implicit phonological activations were tested using lexical decision tasks. Chinese characters, whose phonetic radicals are not always reliable guides to pronunciation, are a useful tool for dissociating the influence of phonology and orthography. Experiment 1 manipulated sound-based phonological similarity (similar, dissimilar) and orthographical similarity (similar, dissimilar). Accuracy, sensitivity (d\'), and reaction times (RTs) were recorded for hearing participants, but only accuracy and sensitivity (d\') recorded for deaf participants, who are fluent signers of Taiwanese Sign Language (TSL). Additionally, the predictive abilities of log word frequency and the consistency values for homophone judgment performance were analyzed. Experiment 2-1 was designed to compare the effects of three primes (semantically related, sound-based phonologically related, and unrelated primes) on the performance of deaf and hearing participants on a lexical decision task. In Experiment 2-2, TSL phonologically related primes were compared with unrelated primes for deaf and hearing subjects. The results of Experiment 1 show that the accuracy of deaf subjects was poor (. 66) and was lower than that of hearing subjects (. 87). Particularly, the deaf subjects\' accuracy and sensitivity in the orthographically dissimilar condition were significantly lower than in the orthographically similar condition. For hearing subjects, log word frequency significantly predicted their accuracy and RTs, whereas the consistency values predicted only the RTs. For the deaf participants, the accuracy could be efficiently predicted by both log word frequency and consistency values, which reflect knowledge of OPT rules. We suggested that although deaf individuals had acquired knowledge of OPT rules, this knowledge was neither complete nor sufficiently robust to make homophone judgments. In Experiment 2-1, the results show that there was a semantic priming effect but no sound-based phonological priming effect for the deaf participants. The results further reveal that deaf people with a limited hearing ability did not automatically process the sound-based phonological representations under time-constrained conditions. In Experiment 2-2, there was an action-based phonological priming effect for deaf signers but not for hearing subjects, indicating that deaf signers automatically activated related action-based phonology to access the semantic meaning of words when reading Chinese. This study finds that deaf signers acquire OPT rules but that their OPT rules are not sufficiently robust or complete to allow them to make explicit phonological judgments and homophone judgments. Deaf signers automatically activated action-based representations rather than sound-based phonological representations when reading Chinese characters.
Universal brain signature of proficient reading: Evidence from four contrasting languages
(2015-12-15)
Rueckl, Jay G.
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Paz-Alonso, Pedro M.
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Molfese, Peter J.
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Kuo, Wen-Jui
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Bick, Atira
We propose and test a theoretical perspective in which a universal hallmark of successful literacy acquisition is the convergence of the speech and orthographic processing systems onto a common network of neural structures, regardless of how spoken words are represented orthographically in a writing system. During functional-MRI, skilled adult readers of four distinct and highly contrasting languages, Spanish, English, Hebrew, and Chinese, performed an identical semantic categorization task to spoken and written words. Results from three complementary analytic approaches demonstrate limited language variation, with speech-print convergence emerging as a common brain signature of reading proficiency across the wide spectrum of selected languages, whether their writing system is alphabetic or logographic, whether it is opaque or transparent, and regardless of the phonological and morphological structure it represents.
Universal brain systems for recognizing word shapes and handwriting gestures during reading
(2012-12-11)
Nakamura, Kimihiro
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Kuo, Wen-Jui
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Pegado, Felipe
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Cohen, Laurent
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Tzeng, Ovid J. L.
Do the neural circuits for reading vary across culture? Reading of visually complex writing systems such as Chinese has been proposed to rely on areas outside the classical left-hemisphere network for alphabetic reading. Here, however, we show that, once potential confounds in cross-cultural comparisons are controlled for by presenting handwritten stimuli to both Chinese and French readers, the underlying network for visual word recognition may be more universal than previously suspected. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in a semantic task with words written in cursive font, we demonstrate that two universal circuits, a shape recognition system (reading by eye) and a gesture recognition system (reading by hand), are similarly activated and show identical patterns of activation and repetition priming in the two language groups. These activations cover most of the brain regions previously associated with culture-specific tuning. Our results point to an extended reading network that invariably comprises the occipitotemporal visual word-form system, which is sensitive to well-formed static letter strings, and a distinct left premotor region, Exner's area, which is sensitive to the forward or backward direction with which cursive letters are dynamically presented. These findings suggest that cultural effects in reading merely modulate a fixed set of invariant macroscopic brain circuits, depending on surface features of orthographies.