The selective contribution of the right cerebellar lobule VI to reading
Extensive studies have reported significant cerebellar activation during reading tasks. However, it is still unclear which regions in the cerebellum are specifically involved in reading and what this involvement entails. With functional magnetic resonance imaging, we compared Chinese-English bilingual children’s cerebellar neural activity between reading and non-reading conditions and between Chinese characters and English words in a passive viewing paradigm. We observed that the posterior part of the right lobule VI showed greater activation in the reading compared to non-reading tasks. Reading specificity index was significantly in this region. Functional decoding via Neurosynth further showed that this region was responsible for phonological processing and connected with the cerebral reading areas. These results suggest that the posterior part of the right lobule VI might be a reading-selective region in the cerebellum. However, we did not observe any significantly separable activation patterns in the cerebellum between Chinese characters and English words, indicating that the region preferentially responding to reading may not be able to differentiate scripts in a passive viewing condition. In general, these findings deepen our understanding of how the cerebellum contributes to reading.