The Seattle Times – John Higgins
“We’re not born with the brain circuitry we need for reading. We have to be taught. Specifically, beginning readers learn to sound out words by matching what they see to what they say. As reading becomes more effortless, the brain forms efficient circuitry linking the visual system to the speech centers in the left hemisphere. That process is well established for English and other languages that use alphabets, but scientists disagree about whether reading works the same way for Chinese, which offers far fewer clues about how to pronounce the words depicted in its written form. That’s why I was interested in a new study showing that reading in English and Chinese — and Spanish and Hebrew — activates the same speech regions of the brain.”(more)