Beginning of the Geek

More on language, which continues to amaze and intrigue me.

Westerners shudder at the idea of reading even the most basic street signs and instructions in Chinese, a language with 6,000 characters to memorize to be considered fluent.

A new set of brain images shows why: Reading English-style alphabets and Chinese characters use very different parts of the brain.

Those results actually came out of the study of dyslexia, a common developmental disorder where people have difficulty learning to master basic language skills such as reading and spelling.

Earlier brain scans show that English-reading dyslexics misfire in the left temporal-parietal region of the brain associated with awareness of phonemes, 44 sounds from the English alphabet. ... Similar results were found with French and Italian dyslexics.

According to the new study, reading Chinese uses some different parts of the brain called the left middle frontal gyrus, or LMFG.

Brain scans show the LMFG fires in normal Chinese readers, but Chinese dyslexics show glitches in that circuitry, said Li-Hai Tan of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., and the University of Hong Kong.

The LMFG is associated with symbol interpretation. Unlike alphabet letters, Chinese characters represent thoughts and physical objects.

So a language based on visual concepts relies on a different set of mental abilities than one based on sounds. In and of itself, that doesn't seem surprising to me. But remember that, as I mentioned on September 2, all languages have the same basic structure - even if they use different parts of the brain to make use of that structure! That, to me, is even stronger evidence of an innate root of language with which we are born as part of our universal genetic inheritance.

Footnote: I remember reading some time ago that many children are dyslexic, a finding which suggested the idea of a developmental disorder, something that a child would normally grow out of. I don't know if it would be considered within the normal definition of dyslexia, where the difficulty is in reading words and recognizing letters, but I recall that as a young child I literally could not see the difference between 6 and 9. Then, almost all of a sudden, I could. I just could. It was obvious.

Of course, now there are those who say I can't tell one certain part of my anatomy from another certain part, but that's a different issue altogether.