The Quest for the Universal in Reading: Writing Systems, Languages, and the Brain

• In Event: 60.047 - Research in Reading and Literacy SIG Business Meeting

Abstract

Written language has developed from relatively new cultural inventions originating in diverse locations across the globe. Literacy, accordingly, seems not universal but highly varied across languages and cultures where it is present. I show how this cross-language variability is both an important and incomplete part of the story of literacy. The human brain seems to solve the problem of reading—understanding language through writing—in a surprisingly systematic way that partly (but only partly) depends on the writing system and the language. From this perspective, learning to read English (and any language) is a special case of learning to read that inherits what is universal and solves what is special.

Author

• Charles Perfetti, University of Pittsburgh