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Subliminal Convergence of Kanji and Kana Words: Further Evidence for Functional Parcellation of the Posterior Temporal Cortex in Visual Word Perception

¹ EHESS/CNRS/ENS, Paris, France, ² University of Tokyo, ³ Service Hospitalier Frédéric Joliot, CEA/DSV, Orsay, France, ⁴ INSERM U421, Faculté de Médecine Paris XII-IM3, Créteil, France

Reprint requests should be sent to Kimihiro Nakamura, MD, Department of Speech and Cognitive Neuroscience, Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, 3-7-1, Hongo, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan, or via e-mail: kimihiro{at}m.u-tokyo.ac.jp.

Recent evidence has suggested that the human occipito-temporal region comprises several subregions, each sensitive to a distinct processing level of visual words. To further explore the functional architecture of visual word recognition, we employed a subliminal priming method with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during semantic judgments of words presented in two different Japanese scripts, Kanji and Kana. Each target word was preceded by a subliminal presentation of either the same or a different word, and in the same or a different script. Behaviorally, word repetition produced significant priming regardless of whether the words were presented in the same or different script. At the neural level, this cross-script priming was associated with repetition suppression in the left inferior temporal cortex anterior and dorsal to the visual word form area hypothesized for alphabetical writing systems, suggesting that cross-script convergence occurred at a semantic level. fMRI also evidenced a shared visual occipito-temporal activation for words in the two scripts, with slightly more mesial and right-predominant activation for Kanji and with greater occipital activation for Kana. These results thus allow us to separate script-specific and script-independent regions in the posterior temporal lobe, while demonstrating that both can be activated subliminally.

Key Words: subliminal repetition priming • visual word form • cross-script • Kanji and Kana

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