Brains and Reading

General discussion about learning languages
DaveBee
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Brains and Reading

Postby DaveBee » Sun Sep 10, 2017 7:23 pm

Interesting (french language) lecture on what happens in your brain when reading.

https://www.franceculture.fr/conference ... la-lecture

EDIT
Selected publications of Stanislas Dehaene (man giving the lecture)

http://www.unicog.org/biblio/Author/DEHAENE-S.html

EDIT2
Relevant to lecture papers seem to be

[English] The Massive Impact of Literacy
on the Brain and its Consequences for Education
http://www.unicog.org/publications/Deha ... 202011.pdf

[French] L’influence de l’apprentissage du langage écrit sur les aires du langage (The impact of literacy
on the language brain areas)
http://www.unicog.org/publications/cea9 ... cAAAAM.pdf
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Iversen
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Re: Brains and Reading

Postby Iversen » Sun Sep 10, 2017 8:17 pm

Definitely interesting. I'm listening right now, and I like that he says so much about the changes in the brain while children learn to read, and how the brain is organized after it has happened. In short, it seems that the brain cells that do the conversion of signs to meaningful signs should have been studying faces - and they still do that by elderly natives from the Amazonas jungle. And this decoding of symbols (without the organisation into syntactic strings) can also be taught to apes ... though I don't know how they could test that. I can't see them inviting a chimp to lie down and study sign in a scanner, which is what they do with humans test subjects. He uses the expression "boîte des lettres" for this part of the brain. But the following process where the signs are connected to the spoken language takes place in the occipito-temporal cortex.

PS: when I listened the first time there were some weird stops. When I listened to the beginning a second time these intervals were filled with nausating advertisements - so I dropped the second listening.

BoiteDesLettres.jpg
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reineke
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Re: Brains and Reading

Postby reineke » Sun Sep 10, 2017 9:10 pm

[Catani] and other researchers..." focused on a tiny area of the brain known to be involved in recognizing words, the visual word form area (VWFA), found on the surface of the brain, behind the left ear. The VWFA's right hemisphere analogue is the fusiform face area, which allows us to recognize faces. In young children and people who are illiterate, the VWFA region and the fusiform face area both respond to faces. As people learn to read, the VWFA region is co-opted for word recognition."

See below.

rdearman wrote:
reineke wrote:Scientists identify key to learning new words

" Dr Marco Catani, co-author from the NatBrainLab at King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry said: “Often humans take their ability to learn words for granted. This research sheds new light on the unique ability of humans to learn a language, as this pathway is not present in other species. The implications of our findings could be wide ranging – from how language is taught in schools and rehabilitation from injury, to early detection of language disorders such as dyslexia."

"Researchers used diffusion tensor imaging to image the structure of the brain before a word learning task and functional MRI, to detect the regions in the brain that were most active during the task. They found a strong relationship between the ability to remember words and the structure of arcuate fasciculus, which connects two brain areas: the territory of Wernicke, related to auditory language decoding, and Broca's area, which coordinates the movements associated with speech and the language processing."

"Dr Catani concludes, “Now we understand that this is how we learn new words, our concern is that children will have less vocabulary as much of their interaction is via screen, text and email rather than using their external prosthetic memory. This research reinforces the need for us to maintain the oral tradition of talking to our children.”

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/ioppn/news/records/2013/July/Scientists-identify-key-to-learning-new-words.aspx

When We Read, We Recognize Words as Pictures and Hear Them Spoken Aloud
Words are not encoded in the brain by their meaning but rather by simpler attributes such as sound and shape

"As we become more proficient at reading, then, we build up a visual dictionary in the VWFA—much as we accumulate a catalogue of familiar faces on the opposite side of our brain."

We “hear” written words in our head

"Sound may have been the original vehicle for language, but writing allows us to create and understand words without it. Yet new research shows that sound remains a critical element of reading.

When people listen to speech, neural activity is correlated with each word's “sound envelope”—the fluctuation of the audio signal over time corresponds to the fluctuation of neural activity over time."

"This article was originally published with the title "What Happens in the Brain When We Read?"

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-we-read-we-recognize-words-as-pictures-and-hear-them-spoken-aloud/


Interesting, you see any practical application for this? Something to help me improve my French say? :)
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DaveBee
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Re: Brains and Reading

Postby DaveBee » Sun Sep 10, 2017 10:03 pm

A language learning application of this might be the amount of reading vs listening you do. (where the language uses an alphabet).

If the spelling and the sounds don't match, that would presumably complicate things.
First, analysis of how reading operates at the brain level provides no support for the notion that words are recognized globally by their overall shape or contour. Rather, letters and groups of letters such as bigrams and morphemes are the units of recognition.
Another important observation for education is that the speed of reading acquisition varies dramatically with the regularity of grapheme-phoneme re- lations, which changes across languages (Paulesu, et al., 2000; Seymour, Aro, & Erskine,2003;Ziegler&Goswami,2006).InItalyandGermany,childrenac- quire reading in a few months, simply because the writing is highly regular, such that knowledge of the grapheme-phoneme correspondences suffices to read essentially all words. English and French lie on the other end of the scale of alphabetic transparency: they are highly irregular systems in which excep- tions abound (e.g.‘though’ versus ‘tough’) and are disambiguated only by lexical context. Behavioral research shows that English learners have to dedicate at least two more years of training before they read at the same level as Italian children (Seymour, et al., 2003). Neuroimaging experiments show that, to do so,they expand their brain activation in theVWFA and the precentral cortex relative to Italian readers (Paulesu, et al., 2000).


http://www.unicog.org/publications/Deha ... 202011.pdf

EDIT
Or perhaps you just need to put in extra-time on phonology for languages where the spelling is known to be irregular?
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reineke
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Re: Brains and Reading

Postby reineke » Sun Sep 10, 2017 11:30 pm

Computational models of reading posit that there are two pathways to word recognition, using sublexical phonology or morphological/orthographic information. They further theorize that everyone uses both pathways to some extent, but the division of labor between the pathways can vary. This review argues that the first language one was taught to read, and the instructional method by which one was taught, can have profound and long-lasting effects on how one reads, not only in one’s first language, but also in one’s second language. Readers who first learn a transparent orthography rely more heavily on the sublexical phonology pathway, and this seems relatively impervious to instruction. Readers who first learn a more opaque orthography rely more on morphological/orthographic information, but the degree to which they do so can be modulated by instructional method. Finally, readers who first learned to read a highly opaque morphosyllabic orthography use less sublexical phonology while reading in their second language than do other second language learners and this effect may be heightened if they were not also exposed to an orthography that codes for phonological units during early literacy acquisition. These effects of early literacy experiences on reading procedure are persistent despite increases in reading ability..."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articl ... po=57.0122
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