1. Universal brain signature of proficient reading: Evidence from four contrasting languages
- Author
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Rueckl, Jay G, Paz-Alonso, Pedro M, Molfese, Peter J, Kuo, Wen-Jui, Bick, Atira, Frost, Stephen J, Hancock, Roeland, Wu, Denise H, Mencl, William Einar, Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni, Lee, Jun-Ren, Oliver, Myriam, Zevin, Jason D, Hoeft, Fumiko, Carreiras, Manuel, Tzeng, Ovid JL, Pugh, Kenneth R, and Frost, Ram
- Subjects
Language Studies ,Linguistics ,Biological Psychology ,Cognitive and Computational Psychology ,Language ,Communication and Culture ,Psychology ,Behavioral and Social Science ,Basic Behavioral and Social Science ,Neurosciences ,Neurological ,Quality Education ,Analysis of Variance ,Brain ,Brain Mapping ,Female ,Humans ,Language ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Male ,Reading ,Speech ,Task Performance and Analysis ,Young Adult ,cross-language invariance ,word recognition ,functional MRI - Abstract
We propose and test a theoretical perspective in which a universal hallmark of successful literacy acquisition is the convergence of the speech and orthographic processing systems onto a common network of neural structures, regardless of how spoken words are represented orthographically in a writing system. During functional MRI, skilled adult readers of four distinct and highly contrasting languages, Spanish, English, Hebrew, and Chinese, performed an identical semantic categorization task to spoken and written words. Results from three complementary analytic approaches demonstrate limited language variation, with speech-print convergence emerging as a common brain signature of reading proficiency across the wide spectrum of selected languages, whether their writing system is alphabetic or logographic, whether it is opaque or transparent, and regardless of the phonological and morphological structure it represents.
- Published
- 2015