Saturday 26 September 2009

The Brain and the Meeting of Different Cultures

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The Brain and the Meeting of Different Cultures

Bruce Wexler explores the social implications of the close and changing neurobiological relationship between the individual and the environment, with particular attention to the difficulties individuals face in adulthood when the environment changes beyond their ability to maintain the fit between existing internal structure and external reality.

These difficulties are evident in:
  • Bereavement.
  • The meeting of different cultures (the experience of immigrants).
  • The phenomenon of interethnic violence.

The experience of immigrants:
The clue of these difficulties comes from the experience of migrants to a new culture, in who suddenly find themselves in an environment that not match internal structure modeled on the rearing environment in their native land.

A common response is to recreate a microcopy of their native culture in their home and their friendship circles. Still, like bereavement, it is prolonged and difficult struggle to reshape internal structure to match the new, general cultural environment.

The children of immigrant families are more successful than their parents at the necessary internal transformations, which often leading to heightened and problematic differences between immigrant parents and their children.

"Brain And Culture" Neurobiology, Ideology, And Social Change, Bruce E. Wexl, 2006, pages 8 - 9

Saturday 12 September 2009

Linguistically-mediated Literacy Development (2)

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Linguistically-mediated Literacy Development (2)

The direct addressed route for accessing meaning without sounding words is likely to be less critical in languages with shallow orthographies, such as Italian, than in those with deep orthographies, such as English.

Brain research supports the hypothesis that the routes involved differ according to the depth of the orthographical structure.

The “visual word form area” (occipital-temporal VWFA) implicated in identifying word meaning based on non-phonological proprieties in English speakers appears to be less critical for Italian speakers (Paulesu et al., 2001a).

Indeed, preliminary results suggest that the brain of Italian native speakers employs a more efficient strategy when reading text than that of English native speakers.

Remarkably, this strategy is used even when Italian native speakers read in English, suggesting that the brain circuitry underlying reading for Italian native speakers develops in a different way than that underlying reading for English native speakers.

"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, page 88

Saturday 5 September 2009

Linguistically-mediated Literacy Development (1)

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Linguistically-mediated Literacy Development (1)

While much of the neural circuitry underlying reading is the same across different languages, there are also some important differences.

A central theme concerning the brain and reading is the way that literacy is created though the colonisation of brain structures, including those specialised for language and those best suited to serve other functions.

The operations that are common to speech and printed word, such as semantics, syntax, and working memory recruit brain structures which are specialised for language and which are biologically-based and common across languages.

There are biological constraints determining which brain structures are best suited to take on other functions supporting literacy. Therefore, much reading circuitry is shared across languages.

Even so, literacy in different languages sometimes requires distinct functions, such as different decoding or word recognition strategies.

In these cases, distinct brain structures are often brought into play to support these aspects of reading which are distinctive to these particular languages.


Therefore, the dual route theory of reading, which was developed mainly based on research with English speakers, may require modification to describe reading in languages with less complex spelling and orthographic features and it is only partially relevant to non-alphabetic languages.

"Understanding the Brain", The Birth of a Learning Science, 2007, page 88