Do adults acquire a second orthography using their native reading network?

Publication date: Available online 16 April 2018Source: Journal of NeurolinguisticsAuthor(s): Lea Martin, Elizabeth A. Hirshorn, Corrine Durisko, Michelle W. Moore, Robert Schwartz, Yihao Zheng, Julie A. FiezAbstractAdult second language learners typically aim to acquire both spoken and written proficiency in the second language (L2). It is widely assumed that adults fully retain the capacity they used to acquire literacy as children for their native language (L1). However, given basic principles of neural plasticity and a limited body of empirical evidence, this assumption merits investigation. Accordingly, the current work used an artificial orthography approach to investigate behavioral and neural measures of learning as adult participants acquired a second orthography for English across six weeks of training. One group learned HouseFont, an alphabetic system in which house images are used to represent English phonemes, and the other learned Faceabary, an alphasyllabic system in which face images are used to represent English syllables. The findings demonstrate that adults have considerable capacity to learn a second orthography, even when it involves perceptually atypical graphs, as evidenced by performance improvements that were sustained across weeks of training. They also demonstrate that this learning involves assimilation into the same reading network that supports native literacy, as evidenced by learning related changes in orthographic, phonological, and semantic r...

Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - July 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research