The Korean Writing „Hangul“ and its Cerebral Organization. An fMRI Study

This fMRI-study compared cerebral processing of two completely different languages: the lexical writing of German language and the Korean syllable writing. Korean has not developed evolutionary like most other languages, but scientifically. Comparing activities between both writing systems, in Korean we found an increased activation of the phonological loop (BA 45/BA 6, BA 21/BA 22) as well as in BA 7 and BA 40. In German increased activation in the frontal lobe (BA 10) and in the occipital lobe (BA 18) was found. These activations have recently been found to be used by working memory to match visual pattern. As a consequence, we argued that recognition of visual patterns is predominant while reading German words whereas Korean writing is processed more rhythmic-phonologically.