Reading in Chinese or English Involves Different Brain Parts

Imagine a person having a stroke. How will the stroke affect that person's reading skills? Well, this depends on the mother tongue. For example, Chinese-speakers and English-speakers process reading differently, thus they appear to have reading impairments connected to different brain nuclei.

A new research published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences" and focused on dyslexia has come with crucial neurological differences in how the brain processes the reading in two languages. Five to 10% of the population in both US and China is dyslexic, associating with difficulty the sight and sound of a word. In the case of English (and the other languages using an alphabetical writing), this causes word distortions or letter transpositions (for example "dyslexia" could be read "lysdexia"). In Chinese, dyslexia can make a person decode a symbol (hieroglyph) wrongly into both sound and meaning.

Brain imaging researches made on reading-impaired Chinese children had revealed that reading and writing in English and Chinese are controlled by different brain nuclei.

The new research led by Li-Hai Tan at the University of Hong Kong has found that dyslexia in Chinese and English speakers is caused by different brain anatomy.

The researchers used voxel-based morphometry to achieve precise 3D brain measurements of the brain of 16 dyslexic Beijing schoolchildren and 16 non-dyslexic Chinese readers.

The dyslexics appeared to have a greatly reduced left middle frontal gyrus, a brain nucleus involved in detecting images and shapes, but also controlling recalling memory. A 2007 research had shown that the brain of English-speaking dyslexics had a reduced left parietal region, an area involved rather in decoding letters in sounds than decoding the meaning of shapes.

"The findings make sense based on the vastly different nature of the Chinese and English written languages. Whereas Chinese relies on complex images to represent entire words, English is an alphabetic language that relies more on rules and less on pattern recognition and memory," said neuropsychologist Robert Desimone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge.

A recent research has showed how the different tonalities of English and Chinese can influence brain development.