The upper and lower figures show the imaging results for Chinese and Korean learners, respectively. The significance threshold was set at P < 0.001 in height (uncorrected) for ... Figure 2 Differential brain activation Protein Tyrosine Kinase inhibitor during second language (L2) word reading between Chinese and Korean learners. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results of the left middle frontal gyrus. The graphs show the activation profiles for Chinese (red) … Figure 3 Brain activation during L2 word reading that was correlated with vocabulary test scores. The figures show the imaging results of brain

activation that was correlated with vocabulary test Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical scores, as evaluated by single regression and correlation Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical analyses. … Discussion In the present fMRI study, we tested the hypothesis that L1 orthographic experience during development determines cortical activation during L2 word reading processing. Notably, we found that the Chinese learners showed significantly greater activation in the left middle frontal gyrus than Korean learners during L2 Japanese phonographic Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical word reading (Fig. ​(Fig.22 and Table ​Table2).2). Our findings strongly supported Tan et al. (2003)’s hypothesis that cross-linguistic differences in L1 orthography affect the cortical processing of L2 word reading in L2 learners. Because we controlled for differences

in age, AOA of Japanese (L2), and L2 vocabulary proficiency level, which are known to affect brain activation during L2 processing (see Methods), the observed activation patterns of the left middle frontal region were independent of the Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical activation that was elicited

by these factors. Additionally, no differences in the behavioral performances in the reading task were identified between the two groups. Because these factors cannot account for the differences in brain activation, our results indicated that differential cortical activation was induced by orthographic differences in the L1 writing system, namely phonographic Hangul for Korean and logographic Hanji for Chinese. Although the number of subjects that was included in our study was limited due to the highly specialized population, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical previous brain activation studies that have a similar purpose and design have used a similar number of subjects (Wartenburger et al. 2003; Yokoyama et al. 2009). However, we detected statistically robust differences with correction for multiple comparisons nearly between the two learner groups with a random-effect model, which enabled us to generalize the observed results. Hence, our results can be interpreted as an indication that cross-linguistic differences in L1 orthography affect the cortical processing of L2 word reading in L2 learners. Further, it is important to discuss the role of the left middle frontal gyrus during L2 word reading in learners who have experience using a logographic writing system such as L1. In fact, there are two main hypotheses for the mechanism.