Chinese Readers Use the Brain Area for Human Face Recognition to Process Chinese Writing

Science Express April 21, 2023

Researchers from Université Paris-Saclay discover that Chinese characters and faces use the same brain space, potentially enhancing face recognition skills.

Researchers from Université Paris-Saclay in France, led by Zhan Minye, initially aimed to identify small patches on the brain cortex responsible for processing specific languages in bilingual individuals. They began by recruiting bilingual volunteers fluent in both English and French for experiments utilizing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). They discovered that the brain areas for these two languages highly overlap, primarily because these languages share a significant portion of their vocabulary. Consequently, they shifted their focus to languages that are not as closely related.

When studying English-Chinese bilinguals, the researchers successfully located the brain areas responding specifically to Chinese writing and, unexpectedly, to human faces. They believe this is because Chinese characters and faces may requir…