The brains of Chinese-language speakers work differently from those who speak western tongues, scientists from the Chinese University in Hong Kong say, a finding which may have implications for those studying the language. This idea is not new as I quote from part of the excellent book - Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf and she had similar things to say as seen below. Unlike other writing systems (such as alphabets), Sumerian and Chinese show considerable involvement of the right hemisphere area, known to contribute to the many spatial analysis requirements in logographic symbols and also to more global types of processing. The numerous, visually demanding logographic characters characters require much of the visual areas, as well as the important occiptal-temporal region called area 37, which is involved in object recognition and which Dehaene hypothesizes is the major seat of “neuronal recycling” in literacy. Although all reading makes use of some portions of the frontal and temporal lobs for planning and for analyzing sounds and meanings in words, logographic systems appear to activate very distinctive parts of the frontal and temporal areas, particularly regions involved in motoric memory skills. The cognitive neuro-scientists Li-Hai Tan and Charles Perfetti and their research group at the University of Pittsburgh make the important point that these motoric memory areas are far more activated in reading Chinese than in reading other languages, because that is how Chinese symbols are learned by young readers — by writing, over and over.But back to what was interesting in the news yesterday was that a team led by Professor John Xuexin Zhang of the Chinese University's psychology department, discovered an electric brain wave, dubbed N200 - that allows readers of Chinese characters to process the information differently from how humans usually interpret pictures.
Japanese readers offer a particularly interesting example because each reader’s brain must learn two very different writing systems : one of these is a very efficient syllabary (kana) used for foreign words, names of cities, names of persons, and newer words in Japanese; and the second is an older Chinese-influenced logographic script (kanji). When reading kanji, the Japanese readers use pathways similar to those of Chinese; when reading kana, they use pathways much more similar to alphabet readers. In other words, not only are different pathways utilized by readers of Chinese and English, but different routes can be used within the same brain for reading different types of scripts.
Monitoring mainland college students who had 64 electrodes stuck to their heads, the scientists found that N200 only arose when viewing characters and not pictures. Zhang says that this demonstrates that the Chinese characters are abstract visual symbols instead of images. "While an alphabetic script emphasizes sound assembly, a meaning-spelling script (Chinese) stresses meaning-compounding."
The existence of N200 explains why English speakers find it harder to learn Chinese than other alphabet-based languages, as they may not have trained the brain to generate such waves. "For alphabetic languages, the written language is the record of the spoken language", Zhang said. But he added that Chinese was more nuanced since several characters had the same pronunciation, though they could mean different things.
The written language is more important than the oral part... that is why you have to see the character sometimes, he said. Studies have yet to show if N200 is genetic, which I suspect is not. Anyhow an interesting snippet to share with my readers. For more information on this there is also the following interesting blog post - Mandarin English uses more of the Brain than English.
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