Sex Differences In Chinese Characters Semantic Processing: A Functional MRI Study

Objective Language is an important function of the human brain, it is necessary for our understanding the human brain to know the organization of language function in the brain. The neural mechanism underlying Chinese processing may be different from other alphabetic languages. Thus, research on Chinese language is helpful to elucidate the universality and specificity of the neural basis of the language. We use fMRI to study the cortical organization of language function in normal native Chinese-speakers, and research whether fMRI activation patterns of males and females during semantic processing are different.Materials and Methods 15 native Chinese-speakers with right-handedness were divided into two groups, include 7 men and 8 women. They were asked to perform Chinese synonym judgement tasks. Block designing was performed in this experiment, fMRI data were collected, data analysis was carried out using spm99 software, generated the activation map, and compared fMRI activation patterns of males and females in semantic processing.Results No sex differences in performance were observed for task accuracy, mean accuracy was above 90% for both groups. In males the activation areas were shown bilateral inferior frontal gyrus(IFG), left middle frontal gyrus, left superior temporal gyrus(STG), bilateral cerebellum, in females the activation areas were shown bilateral IFG, left middle frontal gyrus ,bilateral STG, bilateral cerebellum. Compared males with females, we found males only activated left STG , females activated bilateral STG. Compared fMRI activation patterns of males and females, there was different in Chinese characters semantic processing. ( p=0.001).Conclusion fMRI is feasible for localizing cortical areas for language processing in the human brain and have important clinic purpose. We conclude that Chinese characters semantic processing activate a common brain network. The activation areas of Chinese characters are consistent with pinyin, this reflect that the dominant hemisphere of language procession of Chinese characters is the left hemisphere. Overall, there are no differences between Chinese characters and pinyin processing. Our findings reveal the activation areasin males and females during Chinese characters semantic processing are not totally identical, the activation areas in females are more extensive. There are sex differences in Chinese characters semantic processing.