How Letters Are Taught Affects Their Neural Representations

• In Event: Brain, Neurosciences, and Education Paper Session

Abstract

There is increasing evidence that motor experience plays a role in literacy. We investigated the impact of training modality (handwriting, typing, or vision-only) on how letters come to be represented in the brain. We report on a training study of native English-speakers learning Arabic letters under different training conditions, addressing three questions: (1) What region(s) of the brain support letter-learning? (2) What is the representational content of those regions? (3) What are the neural consequences of training modality? Key findings concern the representation of letter shapes and identities in bilateral ventral occipital temporal cortex (vOTC), revealing that motor experience strengthens the visual representations of letters, and that letter identities are more robustly represented in the left hemisphere, particularly after handwriting training.

Authors

• Robert W Wiley, University of North Carolina Greensboro

• Brenda Rapp, Johns Hopkins University