Here I shall write about the late Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) and contextualize this important philosopher’s work with respect to concrete, everyday pedagogical issue of language learning. To demonstrate Stiegler’s applicability education studies, address character amnesia (提筆忘字, tibiwangzi in Chinese, literally “pick up pen, forget character”), a relatively recent phenomenon experienced China...

Do the neural circuits for reading vary across culture? Reading of visually complex writing systems such as Chinese has been proposed to rely on areas outside the classical left-hemisphere network for alphabetic reading. Here, however, we show that, once potential confounds in cross-cultural comparisons are controlled for by presenting handwritten stimuli to both Chinese and French readers, the...

Despite linguists’ necessary reliance upon writing to present and preserve linguistic data, writing systems have remained a largely neglected corner of linguistics. While the linear and normative aspects of Gelb’s [1963] teleology have been unceremoniously rejected by more recent work on the classification of writing systems, an acknowledgement that more than one dimension may be necessary to c...

BACKGROUND The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) has been linked to attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and reading disorders. In this study, we examined whether diminished anticipatory dopamine cell firing - typical of the long variant of the DRD4 allele - is related to emergent and advanced alphabetic skills, and whether executive attention is a mediator between this allele and alp...

Previous bilingual studies showed reduced hemispheric asymmetry in visual tasks such as face perception in bilinguals compared with monolinguals, which suggested that hemispheric asymmetry in visual tasks could be modulated by experience in reading one or two languages. Here we examined whether difference in hemispheric asymmetry in visual tasks can also be observed in bilinguals who have diffe...

The article reports the case of a patient who showed a selective inability in reading multi-digit numbers following recovery from aphasic disorders. Although his ability to read words, non-words, syntagms and sentences was almost preserved, he made errors with Arabic numerals and number words. Different types of errors with alphabetic material were also observed: he made only rare phonological ...

Un compilador es un programa desarrollado en un lenguaje de programación que lee un archivo llamado programa fuente. Luego lo traduce y lo convierte en otro programa llamado objeto, o bien en su defecto genera una salida. Por tal motivo, una manera correcta de entender cualquier lenguaje de programación es analizando su proceso de compilación, el cual es muy similar entre todos los paradigmás o...

Chinese script encodes phonology less transparently than alphabetic writing systems, but provides more clues to meaning. We propose that amount of activation depends on encoding transparency, a plausible theoretical statement which has received mixed support using standard priming tasks. The repetition blindness (RB) paradigm was employed to infer activation during reading of Chinese vs. Englis...

This event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (efMRI) study aims to investigate the central representations of Chinese orthography-to-phonology transformation (OPT) by simultaneously manipulating character frequency and consistency. Bilateral inferior frontal cortices (including Broca's area and insula), the left temporoparietal region (superior parietal gyrus and supramarginal gyrus...

A theory of how children progress through different phases of reading should be an asset both to reading researchers and teachers alike. The present paper provides a brief review of Ehri’s influential four phases of reading development: pre-alphabetic, partial alphabetic, full alphabetic and consolidated alphabetic. The model is flexible enough to acknowledge that children do not necessarily pr...