The culturally co-opted brain: how literacy affects the human mind

Huettig, Falk; Kolinsky, Régine; Lachmann, Thomas

doi:10.1080/23273798.2018.1425803

Cited by 35 publications

(22 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…The suggestion is that literacy may in fact help explain why HL grammars do not converge with monolingual norms (feature 7 in Table 1) (e.g., Bayram, Prada, Pascual y Cabo, & Rothman, 2018;Kupisch, 2013). The onset of literacy represents a watershed point in development that has neural, cognitive, metalinguistic, and social as well as linguistic consequences (Huettig et al, 2018). Increasing evidence is also accumulating that differing levels of education and print familiarity create great heterogeneity in adult monolingual native grammars (Andringa, 2014;Dąbrowska, 2019;and Hulstijn, 2019).…”

Section: The Variable Of Literacy In Hld Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By comparison to the gray areas just discussed, two timing categories marking the earliest and latest boundaries for HLD offer themselves as conceptually more defensible: (a) simultaneous bilingualism from birth or age 0 and (b) late sequential, postliteracy bilingualism. At the upper end, the onset of literacy is an arguably reasonable cut‐off point for HLD, given that literacy has been shown to spawn deep developmental changes—neural, cognitive, metalinguistic, and social as well as linguistic (Huettig, Kolinsky, & Lachmann, ). I will return to this variable in a later section.…”

Section: Ontologies Of Timing: What Does Timing Stand For?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

Ortega

2019

Language Learning

141

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Using the lenses of bilingualism and social justice, I reflect on relevant conceptual and methodological issues encountered in the study of the linguistic development of heritage language speakers. Themes examined include the early but varying timing of heritage language learning; the surrounding linguistic environment, including the link between parental input and linguistic outcomes and heritage language speakers’ bilingualism, multilingualism, and multilectalism; the framing of literacy in the minority language; and the unique and language‐shaping experience of minoritization, often an outcome of immigration. I argue that bilingualism is gradient and that better measurement of relevant variables—particularly those related to timing, input/exposure, and literacy—can invigorate the study of heritage language development and make new and more robust insights possible. I propose that heritage speakers and their languages must be understood as connected to minoritized communities and to the experience of inequitable multilingualism.

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Section: The Variable Of Literacy In Hld Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Ontologies Of Timing: What Does Timing Stand For?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

Ortega

2019

Language Learning

141

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“…How, then, do we accomplish this remarkable feat? Learning to read requires the fine-tuning of numerous perceptual and cognitive abilities, including low-level perceptual processes; covert and overt attentional mechanisms; oculomotor and executive control; long, short, and working memory processes; phonological processing; and so forth ( 1 ). These abilities are not specific to reading, but proficient reading requires successful coordination of these skills.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to read recycles visual cortical networks without destruction

et al. 2019

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Learning to read is associated with the appearance of an orthographically sensitive brain region known as the visual word form area. It has been claimed that development of this area proceeds by impinging upon territory otherwise available for the processing of culturally relevant stimuli such as faces and houses. In a large-scale functional magnetic resonance imaging study of a group of individuals of varying degrees of literacy (from completely illiterate to highly literate), we examined cortical responses to orthographic and nonorthographic visual stimuli. We found that literacy enhances responses to other visual input in early visual areas and enhances representational similarity between text and faces, without reducing the extent of response to nonorthographic input. Thus, acquisition of literacy in childhood recycles existing object representation mechanisms but without destructive competition.

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“…The broad significance of literacy has led researchers to investigate the cognitive (e.g. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] and neural [8][9][10][11][12][13][14] processes that underlie the acquisition of this culturally transmitted, evolutionarily very recent skill. A hallmark finding is that in literates, but not illiterates, processing written language activates a surprisingly consistent cortical location in the left occipito-temporal lobe.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning to read does not compete with face and object recognition

Paridon¹,

Ostarek²,

Arunkumar³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Human cultural inventions, such as written language, are far too recent for dedicated neural infrastructure to have evolved in its service. Culturally newly acquired skills (e.g. reading) thus ‘recycle’ evolutionarily older circuits that originally evolved for different, but similar functions (e.g. visual object recognition). The destructive competition hypothesis predicts that this neuronal recycling has detrimental effects on the cognitive functions a cortical network originally evolved for. The converse possibility is that learning to read fine-tunes general object recognition mechanisms, resulting in improved recognition across categories. In a large-scale behavioral study with literate, low-literate, and illiterate participants from the same socioeconomic background we find that even after adjusting for cognitive ability and test-taking familiarity, literacy is associated with an increase, rather than a decrease, in object recognition abilities across object categories. These results are incompatible with the claim that neuronal recycling results in destructive competition.

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The culturally co-opted brain: how literacy affects the human mind

Abstract: Introduction to the special issue 'The Effects of Literacy on Cognition and Brain Functioning

Cited by 35 publications

References 8 publications

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

The Study of Heritage Language Development From a Bilingualism and Social Justice Perspective

Learning to read recycles visual cortical networks without destruction

Learning to read does not compete with face and object recognition

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