Introducing the brain: bilingual, multilingual reading (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, April 08, 2023, 18:03 (384 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by David Turell, Saturday, April 08, 2023, 18:49

Changes the prefrontal cortex:

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-04-bilingual-readers-visual-cortex-latin.html

"Using high-resolution 7T fMRI, the researchers showed that the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is composed of tiny cortical areas sensitive to word perception. These areas are indifferently activated when reading English and French. However, in English-Chinese bilinguals, certain cortical areas react specifically to Chinese ideograms and seem involved in face recognition.

"Learning several writing systems could therefore shape the visual cortex to the point that certain groups of neurons specialize in reading one alphabet.

"Like musicians who can play several instruments and read different types of musical notation, people who regularly read in two languages have developed a remarkable ability to navigate from one linguistic universe to another. This capacity is even more fascinating among those who master several writing systems: Roman, Georgian, or Hebrew alphabets, Japanese kanji, Chinese ideograms, Arabic diacritics... the world's languages each have their way of transcribing sounds and meanings. But how does this reading agility develop in the brain?

"'Within the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex, the recognition of written words mobilizes a specific region called the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) formed during the acquisition of reading," explains Laurent Cohen, a neurologist at Paris Brain Institute. "It is part of a vast mosaic of visual cortex areas specialized in the visual identification of objects—such as faces, silhouettes, tools, or places. People who have this area damaged become alexic, meaning they lose the ability to recognize words or even simple letters."

***

"Using this protocol, the researchers were able to look at the VWFA of each participant. They found that this region is subdivided into several tiny cortical areas highly specialized for word perception and invisible with usual imaging techniques. In English-French bilinguals, all these areas were equally activated for both languages.

"In English-Chinese bilinguals, however, some areas were only stimulated by the recognition of Chinese logograms. Finally, in all participants, pseudowords or badly drawn characters activated these tiny cortical zones more weakly than real, familiar words.

"'English and French use the same alphabet; it certainly explains why these two languages use the same cortical resources even though their spelling rules are very different," explains Minye Zhan. "Conversely, when writing systems differ radically in terms of contour, shape, and complexity of the signs used, specialized groups of neurons appear."

"Even more fascinating, in English-Chinese bilinguals, cortical areas that responded specifically to reading Chinese words were also strongly activated by faces. "We can assume that reading facial features and logograms share some underlying mechanisms. Faces, like Chinese characters, are compact shapes that can only be recognized and distinguished by analyzing the position of their parts in relation to each other," adds Stanislas Dehaene, director of NeuroSpin and professor at Collège de France."

Comment: remember, this brain given to us 315,000 years ago to handle needs then and is handling very new needs now. The new brain was built to handle any future event. In speciation God designs for future needs. It obviously handles immediate needs at first.