Because of my typographic interest, I am always fascinated by anything that remotely touches letters. I found this article in the Wall Street journal today discussing the how the brain learns to read, but interestingly, how different languages effect how we learn. I am reminded again of how little we really know about this incredibly complicated process and humbled by the small part (or perhaps not so small after all) typographers play in this process.
By any measure, reading is a complex and peculiar task. At the speed of thought, readers of English turn letters they see into sounds, sounds into words, and words into meaning. Fluency is measured in milliseconds. Spelling variations are speed bumps in the brain.
Until recently, researchers who study reading abilities focused mostly on Western alphabets. English and 218 other languages, from Alsatian to Zulu, share variations of the same Latin character set. But that set is only one of 60 writing systems used among the world’s remaining 6,912 spoken languages. Even so, those studies convinced many scientists and educators that the brain’s response to the written word, regardless of the language, is universal.
The new research suggests they’re wrong. The schooling required to read English or Chinese may fine-tune neural circuits in distinctive ways.
To learn the ABCs of English, we essentially harness our listening skills to a phonetic code. To become literate in Chinese, however, we must make much heavier use of memory, motor control and visual-perception circuits located toward the front of the brain. Children can master the 6,000 or so Chinese characters used in Mandarin and Cantonese text only by laboriously copying them out over and over again, until each abstract form becomes second nature.
“We have to recognize that the writing system in China is different, the demands on the brain are different and the characteristics of dyslexia are different,” said Georgetown University pediatric learning specialist Guinevere Eden, who is incoming president of the International Dyslexia Association.
Words do make a lasting impression, depending on the alphabet in which we read and write them.
Indeed, in Chinese text, reading engages different parts of the brain than English text. At the University of Hong Kong, linguist Li-Hai Tan and his colleagues reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the reading problems of dyslexia also affect the brain differently depending upon the writing system.
In Nature Neuroscience, Georgetown University dyslexia expert Guinevere Eden and her colleagues tracked how literacy reorganizes the brain by studying neural changes in people between the ages of 6 and 22 years old as they learned to read and write English.
As the mother of a son with reading difficulties, Tufts University child development expert Maryanne Wolf explores the neurobiology of reading in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
Harvard experimental psychologist Steven Pinker explains how the mind works by examining how we use words in The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature.
The U.S. National Research Council consulted psychologists, neurobiologists, and educators about the literacy problems plaguing as many as four in ten American children for its report “Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children.”
To document the effects on brain development, Dr. Eden and her colleagues are launching a five-year study in Beijing and Washington to compare the neural changes in 60 schoolchildren learning to read either Chinese or English. “Nobody has ever done this across two writing systems,” Dr. Eden said.
In ways that ancient scribes never imagined, text has transformed us. Every brain shaped by reading, whether it is schooled in Chinese or English text, measurably differs — in terms of patterns of energy use and brain structure — from one that has never mastered the written word, comparative brain-imaging studies show. “There are real differences that emerge because of literacy,” Dr. Wolf said.
Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January’s Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.
No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.
“Once you have different writing systems in place,” said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. “They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120965705088459637.html
I watched the incredible Wimbledon men’s final on Sunday like many of you may have. I couldn’t help but notice the subtle yet finely orchestrated Wimbledon branding - green everything. I am convinced the British own green, as in “British racing green” Starting from the actual lawns, to the green rain covers, to the green seats, green rails, green panels on the stadium, green covers on the TV cameras and even green Army beret. What really impressed me was
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