Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have found that an area known to be important for reading in the left visual cortex contains neurons that are specialized to process written words as whole word units. Although some theories of reading as well as neuropsychological and experimental data have argued for the existence of a neural representation for whole written real words (an “orthographic lexicon”), evidence for this has been elusive.
Full article: EurekAlert
A new study provides direct experimental evidence that a brain region important for reading and word recognition contains neurons that are highly selective for individual real words. The research, published by Cell Press in the April 30th issue of the journal Neuron, provides important insight into brain mechanisms associated with reading and may lead to a better understanding of reading disabilities.
Full article: EurekAlert
Monday, April 27, 2009
Most people are expert readers, but it is something of an enigma that our brain can achieve expertise in such a recent cultural invention, which lies at the interface between vision and language. Given that the first alphabetic scripts are thought to have been invented only around four to five thousand years it is unlikely that enough time has elapsed to allow the evolution of specialized parts of the brain for reading. While neuroimaging techniques have made some progress in understanding the neural underpinning of this essentially cultural skill, the exact unfolding of brain activity has remained elusive. Now, a better understanding of the brain basis of reading has been reported in research published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE.
Full article: EurekAlert
Friday, April 24, 2009
A University of Washington computer scientist has led a statistical study of the Indus script, comparing the pattern of symbols to various linguistic scripts and nonlinguistic systems, including DNA and a computer programming language. The results, published online Thursday by the journal Science, found the Indus script’s pattern is closer to that of spoken words, supporting the hypothesis that it codes for an as-yet-unknown language.
Full article: University of Washington News
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Forming a grammatically correct sentence may seem to require advanced cognitive skills, but it turns out that our creative language capacity might rely on a less sophisticated system than is commonly thought. A recent study suggests that our ability to construct sentences may arise from procedural memory—the same simple memory system that lets our dogs learn to sit on command.
Full article: Scientific American
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Through a study carried out at the Universities of La Laguna and Valencia, it has been verified that the brain distinguishes between vowels and consonants. Neuronal mechanisms change when they are processed and, when it comes to lexical access; both have a different status in our mind, thus contributing differently to this basic process of visual word recognition.
Full article: AlphaGalileo
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