The present fMRI study aimed to identify neurofunctional predictors of auditory word learning. Twenty-four native Chinese speakers were trained to learn a logographic arti¢cial language (LAL) for 2 weeks and their behavioral performance was recorded. Participants were also scanned before and after the training while performing a passive listening task. Results showed that, compared to 'poor' learners (those whose performance was below average during the training), 'good' (i.e. above-average)

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... rners showed more activation in the left MTG/STS and less activation in the right IFG during the pretraining scan. These results con¢rmed the hypothesis that preexisting individual di¡erences in neural activities can predict the e⁄ciency in learning words in a new language.