Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing - Issue 94: Evolving - Nautilus

• Ancient writing took the leap from drawing a picture as a picture (a logogram) to using it to depict a sound (or phonogram). A "bee" can be used for the sound "be", and when used together with a drawing of a "leaf", they produce the meaning "be-lief."
• But ambiguity arises when we don't know when a bee is a bee, and when is it a sound. Classifiers were added to clear up the confusion. Chinese still uses this system, with pictures, classifier elements, plus phonetics.
• Around 4,000 ago, the alphabet was invented, where symbols only depicted a sound.

Different areas of the brain are active when we read. We extract visual information that is correlated with sound to get meaning.

Reading does not just involve learning the letters. You have to understand and recognize the words, too. Skilled readers learn to recognize the whole word as a unit and connect it directly to meaning.

Japanese children learn two writing systems: The kanji system is based on Chinese characters, and the kana system is purely phonetic.

• Research shows that the same areas in the brain are activated when reading both types of script.
• There are dyslexic readers in both areas, whether they are reading pictographic Chinese or the phonetic alphabet, suggesting that dyslexia has nothing to do with script.