https://institutducerveau-icm.org/en/ac ... fferently/
Nearly half of humanity speaks more than one language, and many adults can read and master several writing systems. How does the visual cortex adapt to the recognition of words written with different characters? To answer this question, Laurent Cohen at Paris Brain Institute and the Unicog team led by Stanislas Dehaene at NeuroSpin, CEA’s neuroimaging center, studied the brains of 31 bilingual people. 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. These results are published in the journal Science Advances.