Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 112, Issue 50, Pages 15510-15515Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1509321112
Keywords
cross-language invariance; word recognition; functional MRI
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [P01 HD001994, R01 HD078351, R01 HD067364]
- Israeli Science Foundation [214/17]
- Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan [102-2410-H-010-004-MY2]
- Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) [PSI2012-32093, RYC-2014-15440]
- MINECO [PSI2012-32123, PSI2012-31448]
- European Research Council [ERC-2011-ADG-295362]
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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.
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