Semantic processing is the ultimate goal of language communication¹. English and Chinese, as representatives of alphabetic and logographic languages respectively, are thought to be semantically processed in distinctive manners. English semantics appear to be more dependent on phonology than on orthography, whereas the existence of semantic radicals enables Chinese orthography to directly access semantics without the bridge of phonology often times². Previous studies have examined the semantic brain of English and Chinese independently, but few studies have direct comparisons between them. The current study aims to elucidate how the between-language differences are reflected onto the semantic neuromechanisms of English and Chinese using Activation likelihood estimation (ALE)³ meta-analyses of fMRI and PET studies. ALE meta-analyses were conducted using the GingerALE 2.3.3, in order to seek semantics-related activations that were consistently reported in 163 English and Chinese studies. The 163 studies were selected following the PRISMA pipeline as illustrated in Figure 1. Task contrasts of these studies were categorized into “visual word”, “visual sentence”, “auditory word”, and “auditory sentence” (Table1). English versus Chinese contrasts were then performed, with each language combining both modalities (visual & auditory) and both levels (words & sentences) altogether. Between-modality and between-level contrasts were also conducted within each language, so as to test whether the modality and level effects were differentiated between English and Chinese. Individual ALE maps were thresholded at cluster level p<0.05, with clusters generated under 1000 permutations and a threshold of uncorrected p<0.001. Then individual ALE maps were submitted for contrast analyses, which were thresholded at p<0.05 (uncorrected) with 10000 permutations and a minimum cluster volume of 150 mm³.Comparison of English to Chinese semantic processing showed greater activation in the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL; BA39) and left temporo-occipital cortex (T-O; BAs19/37) for English, whereas the right temporo-occipital cortex (T-O; BA 18/19) and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG; BA9) were more activated for Chinese semantic processing (Figure 2a). Modality effects (Figure 2b) differed between English and Chinese. English listening versus reading comprehension induced stronger activation in bilateral temporal cortex (BAs21/22/38/41), whereas greater recruitment of the left inferior parietal lobule (IPL; BA 39/40) was seen during written versus spoken English comprehension. Chinese auditory-specific activation was observed in bilateral temporal cortex (BA 21/38), and no region was visual-specific for Chinese. Regarding level effects (Figure 2c), the left anterior temporal cortices (BA 20/21/38) were more activated in English sentence comprehension, while left temporo-occipital activation (T-O; BA 19/37) was stronger during English word comprehension. Chinese sentence-specific activation was also seen in left anterior temporal gyrus (BA21), and no Chinese word-specific activation was noted. English semantic processing specifically recruited the left temporo-occipital visual cortex (BA19/37) and left inferior parietal lobule (L IPL; BA39) to decode the linearly-arrayed orthography and transform grapheme to phoneme respectively, while the right temporo-occipital visual cortex (BA18/19) and left middle frontal gyrus (L MFG; BA9) were exclusively employed by Chinese semantic processing probably for holistic visual-spatial analysis and lexical semantic integration^4-8. This language specialization tended to be reflected onto the modality-specific activation of each language. For both languages, the bilateral temporal auditory cortices were reasonably more involved in listening comprehension than in reading comprehension. Written English appeared to involve the left inferior parietal lobule (L IPL; BA 39/40) to convert orthography to phonology in English before accessing semantics, whereas no region was exclusively adopted by written Chinese given that written Chinese is capable to be directly comprehended without the medium of spoken Chinese^9,10. Level-specific activation was apt to be less differentiated by Chinese and English since language particularities seemed to be cancelled out after within-language comparison between levels. Sentences of both languages activated the left anterior temporal lobule to process word sequence information^11-13, while words without contextual scaffolding had to be visually scrutinized recruiting the left temporo-occipital cortex so as to ensure the precision of semantic retrieval^14,15. The current meta-analytic results, though generally congruent with past meta-analyses^4,8,16,17, furthered our understanding of how linguistic features, presentation modalities, and levels come together to shape the semantic brain.