Neuronal Recycling Hypothesis: 3. Two Routes in Reading

2010/01/08 at 8:11 am | Posted in Cognition, Reading, Thought | Leave a comment

How amazing you can find the word you are reading in your brain!

Before the end of 2009, The New York Times publshed the book review composed by Alison Gopnik. This book obviously touch the popular thought about reading and the education of reading in the western societies. Now let’s understand what is the “perfect reading” to survive in this mordern civilized society.  In other words, what is the nature of reading ability.

The creation of words began from two purposes for human societies: the restore of the speech and the consolidation of meaning. One is the record of communication among people, and the other is the comprehension about this world. Reading is the activity to restore the speech and the meaning the words carry. Traditionally researchers of reading equate both functions and prefer an overall accounting for them in a model. Every model of reading illustrates the route from orthography to phonology and the route from orthography to semantic. The difference between models is the combination and sequence of processing components in one route.

Dehaene certainly suggests that these routes have been “written” in our neural circuits. Our genes which were selected by the neutral selection offer us the limited amount of the raw circuits for the making up of cognitive system supporting our life. Individual learning experience has adjusted the circuits since our birth. In a civilized society, everyone eventually acquire a sound route and a meaning route in brain. According to the summary of Dehaene, the sound route includes the brain areas such as the superior temporal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus, supramarginal gyrus, and the inferior frontal gyrus (pars opercularis); the meaning route includes the brain areas such as the middle temporal gyrus, basal temporal region, and the inferior frontal gyrus (pars triangularis). All of these brain areas locate in our left hemisphere which is consistent with the well known left-hemisphere hypothesis of language. Both routes share a boost mechanism located in the left occipito-temporal region. Dehaene called this region “letterbox”. This region is the core of Dehaene’s theory of reading. I’ll introduce this region and end my summary work in the next article.