Writing systems differ in various aspects. English and Korean share basic principles of the alphabetic writing system. As an alphabetic script, Korean Hangul has relatively more regular mapping between graphemes and phonemes; however, its letters are written in syllable units, which encourages phonological retrieval at the syllable level.…

Reading is a complex task that requires integration of information across brain systems that support sensory, language and cognitive processing. Individuals vary widely in reading ability: some read almost effortlessly, while others struggle to make sense of printed text. Factors at multiple levels from genes and brain through environment…

Testing language abilities is common in the context of migration. It has been observed that approximately 6.2 million adults in Germany are low literate and that approximately 47% of this group does not have German as their L1. Similar findings have been reported for other modern Western societies with compulsory schooling and a well-developed…

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we examined the process of language specialization in the brain by comparing developmental changes in two contrastive orthographies: Chinese and English. In a visual word rhyming judgment task, we found a significant interaction between age and language in left inferior parietal lobule and left…

The visual front-end of reading is most often associated with orthographic processing. The left ventral occipito-temporal cortex seems to be preferentially tuned for letter string and word processing. In contrast, little is known of the mechanisms responsible for pre-orthographic processing: the processing of character strings regardless of…

Diffusion tensor imaging tractography is a structural magnetic resonance imaging technique allowing reconstruction and assessment of the integrity of three dimensional white matter tracts, as indexed by their fractional anisotropy. It is assumed that the left arcuate fasciculus plays a crucial role for reading development, as it connects two…

Previous neuroimaging studies have suggested that developmental dyslexia has a different neural basis in Chinese and English populations because of known differences in the processing demands of the Chinese and English writing systems. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we provide the first direct statistically based investigation…

Developmental dyslexia is one of the most common neuropsychological disorders in children and adults. Only few data are available on the pathomechanisms of this specific dysfunction, assuming--among others--that dyslexia might be a disconnection syndrome of anterior and posterior brain regions involved in phonological and orthographic aspects of…

The high incidence of number transcoding deficits in aphasic subjects suggests there is a strong similarity between language and number domains. However, recent single case studies of subjects who showed a dissociation between word and number word transcoding led us to hypothesize that the two types of stimuli are represented independently in the…

This volume brings together leading authorities from multiple disciplines to examine the relationship between brain development and behavior in typically developing children. Presented are innovative cross-sectional and longitudinal studies that shed light on brain-behavior connections in infancy and toddlerhood through adolescence. Chapters…

A study examined laterality effects observed in previous studies in which men as well as right-handers show a right-visual field (RVF) advantage for letter recall and a left-visual field (LVF) advantage for letter position recall, suggesting asymmetrical brain organization for these groups. Subjects, 96 undergraduates equally divided by sex and…

New views of intelligence and cognitive learning styles highlight ways to increase educational effectiveness by improving instructional methods. Research shows that both hemispheres of the brain play a role in learning, but evidence indicates that one hemisphere may be more aroused than the other in the case of a particular child. Individuals with…