Question: Does the brain respond differently to a specific alphabet/language depending on what their first language was? (Russians seeing Russian vs the English seeing Russian, etc)

Clare Lally answered on 10 Nov 2020: last edited 10 Nov 2020 10:01 am

Hi – thanks so much for your question! I love it as it’s exactly what my research is about. 🙂 There is evidence that your brain will respond differently to an alphabet you know, as letters become meaningful shapes that have their own sounds/meanings rather than unknown symbols. We know this because in my lab, we trained some adults to learn to read in a made-up language with made-up symbols. We scanned their brains while looking at words in the language before they learnt it, and also three weeks later after they had practiced reading in the language every day. We found different areas of activation – at the beginning there was activation in the visual cortex but at the end areas of activation overlapped with brain regions associated with reading in our native language.

There is also evidence that the way you read is influenced by how your writing system works. You are more likely to pay attention to which order the letters are in if your language doesn’t have many anagrams (e.g. lots of words with the same letters in different combinations – such as top, pot opt). English doesn’t have many anagrams so readers can still recognise words when letter order is jumbled (e.g. The jugde buoght an expnesvie snadwcih). But in other languages with lots of anagrams (such as Korean or Hebrew), readers find this much harder.