Researchers find reading uses the same brain regions regardless of language

A team of French and Taiwanese researchers has found evidence to indicate that people use the same regions of the brain when reading, regardless of which language is being read. In their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they describe how fMRI brain scans made while people were reading revealed that there are very few differences in how the brain works as reading occurs.

The researchers note that previous research has suggested that different neural networks might be involved when people read text written in very different types of languages. French, for example, is an alphabetic language, whereas Chinese is logographic. Those of Roman origin are based on abstract concepts while Chinese characters are based on realistic depictions of handwriting strokes.

To learn more, the researchers ran fMRI scans on volunteers reading either Chinese or French material as their native language. The material presented was shown in various forms, e.g. normal, static, backwards or distorted. The researchers also employed priming, which is where words are flashed on a screen for such a short period of time as to be unknown to the reader. Priming has been found to influence the rate at which readers recognize words that are shown thereafter for a normal duration of time. The material written in French was presented as cursive rather than block printed letters.

In analyzing the results, the researchers found the differences in brain activity between the two groups as they read to be minimal. Those differences that were found, centered around a slight increase in the brain regions associated with processing the physical movements that had occurred in creating the characters, which in the brain is recognized as motor skills.

The researchers suggest that their results indicate that because reading is a relatively new process for the human brain, it likely evolved using previously existing neural network circuitry, which would explain why it appears the brain works in roughly the same way when reading, regardless of language.