Script Reading Research Articles

Categorical perception of color: evidence from secondary category boundary.

Despite a plethora of behavioral research exploring the phenomenon of color categorical perception (CP) known as “better discrimination between pair of colors stimuli from different categories and pair of colors stimuli from the same category even when the stimulus differences between the pairs of stimuli are equal”, most of the evidence for the CP of color was derived from Roman or top-to-down script readers and very rarely from right-to-left script readers in primary category. To date, no studies of color CP have been conducted on right-to-left script readers in secondary category boundary to support this theory. Three experiments have been conducted: Experiments 1 and 2 established the Arabic blue–purple secondary category boundary, and Experiment 3 tested the CP of color in the blue–purple category boundary. Sixty participants (30 men and 30 women) took part in this study. All spoke Arabic as their first language, and all were undergraduate or postgraduate students at King Saud University. Their ages ranged from 18–35 years with a mean age of 21.9 years (SD =5.2). The result indicated that for Experiments 1 and 2, it appeared that the Arabic blue–purple category boundary was approximately 10PB and it is in the same location as for English. For Experiment 3, reaction times in the between-categories condition were significantly faster than those in the within-category condition; this suggested that CP of color was shown in the Arabic’s blue–purple secondary category boundary.

Mirror invariance � A comparison between Thai and Roman script readers

Mirror invariance � A comparison between Thai and Roman script readers

Left Hemisphere Lateralization of Categorical Color Perception among Roman and Arabic Script Readers

So far, the Left Hemisphere (LH) bias in color Categorical Perception (CP) has been related to the linguistic nature of the LH and converging evidence to support this hypothesis has been presented in several studies. As, to date, no evidence of lateralized CP has been shown on right-to-left readers in support of this theory. However, the influence of reading habits to perception has been shown in various studies. This study aimed to investigate the possible effect of habitual scanning on lateralization of color CP, by comparing participants from two languages who vary in their reading direction: right-to-left in Arabic and left-to-right in English. Lateralization of CP was then tested in two groups of Arabic and English. The Arabic group consisted of 35 undergraduate students at King Saud University. The English group consisted of 29 native English-speakers who were undergraduate students of Surrey University. Their ages range from 18 to 30 years. Two tasks were used to test this hypothesis: a visual search task with a reaction time measure; and a target detection task with eye-movement measure. Both samples performed similarly and the pattern of lateralization has been replicated, but this time, it has also been shown that the effect is independent of habitual reading direction. It appears that reading direction has no effect on how color CP is lateralized.

Learning to read in Arabic: the long and winding road

We examined the relative contribution of visual abilities, accessibility of letter names, and phonological awareness, to text reading speed and accuracy of Arabic in first, third, and fifth grades. The results revealed that for all levels of skill, phonological awareness contributes significantly to reading accuracy, to the same degree. For reading speed, letter naming speed is crucial in first and fifth grade, whereas phonological awareness is crucial in third grade. These patterns differ from those found of readers of other scripts and are interpreted in the context of diglossia, and the visual aspects of the Arabic orthography.

밥 크로울리 무대디자인에 나타나는 시각적 은유에 관한 연구 - 뮤지컬 '아이다' 무대디자인을 중심으로 -

The main purpose of (the) performing arts is to efficiently communicate the themes and meanings which performances contain under limited time and place to the audience. Stage design should visually express play writer's scripts and director's interpretations of works, amid limitations. Although it is mostly designed metaphorically, in many cases, it is used only as a tool describing the background of performances but fails to effectively convey the true message of scenes to spectators. On the other hand, Bob Crowley has been recognized for his own design presentation skills to win 'Best Scenic Design of a Musical' of Tony Awards for six times and still exerts great influence on the musical and performing arts fields as a set designer. This study analyzes his reading of scripts and visual metaphor expressions, focusing on the musical, 'Aida' where the skills are mostly notable. To that end, we studied the concept of stage arts and theory of visual metaphoric expression to derive the features of his own technique in visual metaphor. Then, the features were applied to each scene of 'Aida' to see how they are displayed on stage. The result shows that Bob Crowley not only describes the background on stage, but also visualizes characters' personality and emotions in scenes. Such method of his expression is a proof to enhanced performance level by maximizing the atmosphere. Considering that a stage design should be based on the capacity of a designer to reinterpret the space with renewed viewpoints, visual metaphoric expression can serve as an effective tool to deliver clear messages to the audience under limited time and space, which is open to various methods of expressions.

Eye movement control in reading: Logographic Chinese versus alphabetic scripts.

Eye tracking is widely used to study the reading process in different languages. Given the unique properties of written Chinese, it is important to identify the similarities and differences in eye-movement controls between readers of Chinese and alphabetic scripts. In this article, we review the data available for comparison in four domains: (a) the perceptual span, (b) parafoveal processing, (c) the basic encoding unit, and (d) computer modeling. Our review indicates that, while some aspects of eye movement control in reading appear to be universal (e.g., the availability of orthographic information in the parafoveal preview), others are more script-specific (e.g., the size of the perceptual span). It is concluded that the study of cross-language differences is important for the development of reading models that are generalizable across readers of different scripts.

Shallow and Deep Orthographies in Hebrew: The Role of Vowelization in Reading Development for Unvowelized Scripts

The present study explored the speed, accuracy, and reading comprehension of vowelized versus unvowelized scripts among 126 native Hebrew speaking children in second, fourth, and sixth grades. Findings indicated that second graders read and comprehended vowelized scripts significantly more accurately and more quickly than unvowelized scripts, whereas among fourth and sixth graders reading of unvowelized scripts developed to a greater degree than the reading of vowelized scripts. An analysis of the mediation effect for children's mastery of vowelized reading speed and accuracy on their mastery of unvowelized reading speed and comprehension revealed that in second grade, reading accuracy of vowelized words mediated the reading speed and comprehension of unvowelized scripts. In the fourth grade, accuracy in reading both vowelized and unvowelized words mediated the reading speed and comprehension of unvowelized scripts. By sixth grade, accuracy in reading vowelized words offered no mediating effect, either on reading speed or comprehension of unvowelized scripts. The current outcomes thus suggest that young Hebrew readers undergo a scaffolding process, where vowelization serves as the foundation for building initial reading abilities and is essential for successful and meaningful decoding of unvowelized scripts.

Writing for the contemporary theatre: towards a radically inclusive dramaturgy

ABSTRACTThis article describes elements of the first Writing Space project, which took place at the University of Winchester in 2008. I use this as an example of a ‘radically inclusive’ dramaturgical practice, by which I mean to imply an expanded view of the theatre writer and the theatre text, including, yet moving out from, the foundational definitions of ‘playwright’ and ‘play’ that underpin conventional literary management. The project, which should be seen in the context of related moves to embrace a wider range of writers and writing within the contemporary theatre, attempted to construct a process in which writers across a wide range of performance forms might work together. Thus, different formal approaches could be explored, debated, developed and cross-fertilized. The article comments on the ways in which this inclusivity prompts a re-examination of fundamental principles that underpin contemporary writing practices. Examining these broad questions in turn—‘What is a writer? What is writing? What do we do with writing? Where does writing take place?’—the article both questions the assumptions that are implicit in conventions of script reading and play development and speculates that there might need to be more spaces within which these questions can be freely explored.

Model for phonemic awareness in readers of Indian script

Previous studies have shown that segmental awareness tasks are usually influenced by the script. In this paper, we extend these studies further to propose a more concrete, script-centric metric for evaluating phonemic awareness in readers of Indian scripts. We propose that the ease or difficulty with which syllabic and phonemic segmental tasks are performed is directly proportional to the editing operations involved in applying the same task on the graphic form of the stimulus. We also present a computational model that calculates visual edit distances and uses these to determine if the phonemic task on any given word is easy or difficult. Finally, we tested the predictions of our model using Tamil data.

A case study of the effect of age-of-acquisition on reading aloud in Chinese dyslexia

This paper reports the influence of age-of-acquisition (AoA) effects on the oral reading accuracy of a Chinese brain-injured individual, FWL, who has anomia and dyslexia resulting from moderate-to-severe semantic deficits. We found an effect of the phonological consistency of a character and tentative evidence for an interaction between AoA and consistency. These observations converge on previous reports of an effect of AoA on reading and spelling of alphabetic scripts and in the reading of Japanese Kanji, a non-alphabetic script. An effect of AoA is also the expected outcome of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis which assumes that the locus of the AoA effect resides in the connection between levels of representations in the lexical processing system. We consider alternative interpretations of the AoA effect being located at the representations themselves, including phonological output and the semantic system. We propose that future studies of dyslexic individuals who rely primarily on the semantic reading route for reading in Chinese may reveal effects of semantic variables, including those associated with the semantic radical in phonetic compound characters.

Cortical areas involved in Arabic number reading

Distinct functional pathways for processing words and numbers have been hypothesized from the observation of dissociated impairments of these categories in brain-damaged patients. We aimed to identify the cortical areas involved in Arabic number reading process in patients operated on for various brain lesions. Direct cortical electrostimulation was prospectively used in 60 brain mappings. We used object naming and two reading tasks: alphabetic script (sentences and number words) and Arabic number reading. Cortical areas involved in Arabic number reading were identified according to location, type of interference, and distinctness from areas associated with other language tasks. Arabic number reading was sustained by small cortical areas, often extremely well localized (<1 cm(2)). Over 259 language sites detected, 43 (17%) were exclusively involved in Arabic number reading (no sentence or word number reading interference detected in these sites). Specific Arabic number reading interferences were mainly found in three regions: the Broca area (Brodmann area 45), the anterior part of the dominant supramarginal gyrus (Brodmann area 40; p < 0.0001), and the temporal-basal area (Brodmann area 37; p < 0.05). Diverse types of interferences were observed (reading arrest, phonemic or semantic paraphasia). Error patterns were fairly similar across temporal, parietal, and frontal stimulation sites, except for phonemic paraphasias, which were found only in supramarginal gyrus. Our findings strongly support the fact that the acquisition through education of specific symbolic entities, such as Arabic numbers, could result in the segregation and the specialization of anatomically distinct brain areas.

Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 (review)

Reviewed by: Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937 Scott R. Irelan Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923–1937. Jonathan L. Chambers . Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006. Pp. xv + 268. $55.00 (cloth). Over the past five years the Southern Illinois University Press's "Theater in the Americas" series, edited by Robert A. Schanke, has produced an array of manuscripts that explore some of the most provocative and largely overlooked practitioners, organizations, and movements of the modern theater tradition in the United States. Titles have included works on Sophie Treadwell, the little theater movement, and Mordecai Gorelick; with this new study of John Howard Lawson, the SIU Press series continues not only to preserve, but also to enhance, its inimitable voice in the study of both modernity and theater within U.S. national culture. This recent addition to the SIU Press series deftly situates the marginalized, half-hidden work of communist playwright John Howard Lawson within a broader community of socially-aware, politically-engaged creative artists. It also offers an astute look at the trials and tribulations of the literary and artistic left in the years between the First World War and the Second World War. In doing so, Messiah of the New Technique encourages not only the "reconsideration of Lawson's career and the cultural and political left of the interwar years" but also the "larger cultural matrix of that historical moment" (3). The potency of this much needed study is enriched by Chambers's meticulous examination of Lawson's lived experiences, play scripts, letters, and theoretical writings regarding 1920s and 1930s theater as "material manifestations chronicling one man's journey to define who he was and where he belonged in the world as he ventured from 'artist-rebel' to 'political revolutionary'" (204). From the start it is apparent that Chambers is neither necessarily concerned with, nor particularly intrigued by, value judgments of Lawson's plays in production, choosing instead to concentrate his efforts on illustrating ways in which Lawson "was both a product and producer of the social energy specific to this era" (204). By way of introduction, Chambers takes great care to highlight the fact that a preponderance of existing scholarship has all but dismissed Lawson as a key "player in the evolution of United States drama" (4), with many publications offering nothing more than a "reductive view of Lawson's career in theatre" (5). This judgement, argues Chambers, warrants greater reflection given that during the interwar years Lawson penned Roger Bloomer (1923), Processional (1925), Success Story (1932), Marching Song (1937), among several other plays, as well as the innovative [End Page 197] fusion of his Marxist aesthetics and writing style, Theory and Technique of Playwriting (1936). Chambers's egalatarian approach provides a thoughtful, cogent inquiry into all of Lawson's life in theater. Having carved out both niche and need, Chambers sets about the task of delineating his research frame, which is noticeably indebted to both neoMarxist criticism and the tenets of New Historicism. This deployment of materialist historiography provides a "long-overdue new reading of Lawson scripts for the theatre" as well as "a much needed study of the context that enveloped him" (13). Opening with Lawson's early life as the son of practicing Christian Scientists, continuing through his 1914 graduation from Williams College, and converging on the awakening of his aesthetic sensibilities and political beliefs, Chambers recounts the beginnings of Lawson's "intellectual and spiritual upheaval that would continue and intensify through the middle years of the 1930s" (21). This upheaval led Lawson both to make an early foray into commercial theater and then out of it shortly thereafter when he enlisted in the French ambulance corps where he became fast friends with John Dos Passos. For Chambers, the relationship with Dos Passos and wartime service in France provided the seed for both Lawson's commitment to revolutionary politics and his certainty that theater is a "pulpit from which he could communicate radical content" (22). Aesthetically and ideologically somewhere between Sheldon Cheney and Michael Gold, Lawson's scripts of the mid-1920s bore the mark...

Make Room at the Table for Teachers

Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen. --Woody Guthrie Some will rob you with act of Congress. --Educator Roundtable IT DOES not surprise us that we have much in common with NEA leadership. After all, a number of Educator Roundtable founders have a long history of strong union activity. We agree with Joel Packer when he argues correctly that NCLB not working, that AYP (adequate yearly progress) policies are fundamentally flawed, and that legislation is an unfunded, unfair, and unattainable mandate that largely labels and punishes schools and denies all children their basic right to a great public school. Despite these statements, we fear that NEA leadership--by insisting that it cannot work to dis-mantle NCLB and replace it with education policy more suitable to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness--teeters close to moral bankruptcy. We call on union leaders, members of Congress, and their Business Roundtable allies to do something radical: we ask them to listen to highly qualified teachers who work with children every day. People who claim to care about survival of public education need to know that No Child Left Behind is sucking very life's blood from our profession, demanding that teachers become readers of scripts rather than professionals engaged in critical work of educating children in their care. As long as union leaders refuse to insist that teachers' voices be brought to forefront in curriculum decisions, teachers remain muzzled and impotent. Make no mistake about it: this silencing of teachers is catastrophic to health of our nation. What is at stake is not only status of teaching as a profession but very future of a generation of children who are being regimented into Stepford automatons. Finding little resistance from educators, corporate reformers have replaced language of growth, development, creativity, ingenuity, and responsibility with words straight from factory floor: performance, accountability, standardization. An education system that valued informed voices of America's teachers would look much different from system that teachers and students currently suffer under. And it is time to give teachers respect that most of them deserve, by inviting them to become central figures in shaping classroom practices and local education policy. We make these issues quite clear in our petition (see sidebar, page 273) and on our website, though Mr. Packer continues to push NEA lie that our organization does not propose any changes or alternatives. The duplicity here is twofold: 1. Mr. Packer was privileged to witness our earliest conversations and knows exactly what our proposed positive change is: give teachers a genuine voice in policy setting, implementation, and evaluation. 2. The NEA leadership agrees with that position. As Mr. Packer put it: We know that top-down programs and mandates developed by those far removed from classroom don't work. Programs that actively involve educators and parents in shared decision making with their school leadership and that include support from federal government--through technical assistance and useful educator-friendly guides to best practice--should be focus of next Note use of phrase the next ESEA. Don't they mean the fixed NCLB? The NEA leadership cannot use acronym NCLB because they know what we've maintained for better part of a year: NCLB will never allow type of shared decision making that NEA leadership correctly calls for. NCLB is premised on belief that teachers and administrators are primarily problem and not worthy of being part of solution. This is a fundamental tenet of law. Furthermore, NCLB mandates a predetermined path to educational salvation--regardless of what parents or teachers might desire--as failing schools must follow NCLB's sanctions, sanctions that ultimately lead to firing of very teachers and administrators that NEA leadership claims to support. …

Magic on the Early English Stage (review)

Reviewed by: Magic on the Early English Stage Beth A. Kattelman Magic on the Early English Stage. By Philip Butterworth . New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005; pp. xxii + 295. $85.00 cloth. The performance of magic and conjuring has been around since at least 2600 BCE when the magician Dedi performed a decapitation illusion for King Cheops of Egypt. Yet, even though this type of performance has existed for millennia, the skills and effects used by Dedi and his successors have remained largely unexamined by theatre scholars. While some areas of popular performance have begun to make their way into academic theatre studies, prestidigitation and sleight-of-hand performances have remained tangential to the "serious" study of theatre history. Recently, however, with the rising interest in cultural studies, theatre researchers have begun to include a broader range of performance and entertainment in their purview. Many popular topics such as chautauqua, circus, sideshow, and puppetry are now taking their place alongside the more "traditional" topics worthy of attention from theatre scholars, and this has also paved the way for a more vigorous study of the conjuring arts. Philip Butterworth's book is one of the first to position the elements of magic and conjuring within the broader context of "legitimate" theatre history. While there have been numerous books devoted to the history of the conjuring arts, most have been aimed at a general readership, often focusing on [End Page 325] biographies of famous magicians or providing an overview of performances with little analysis. Few texts dealing with the subject of legerdemain have been written for an academic theatre audience. Butterworth addresses this oversight as he bridges the gap between the history of magic and the history of theatre. He notes in his introduction that this is a natural amalgam of subjects because "[t]he same fundamental relationship between appearance and reality conditions the core of activity conducted by both conjurors and the staged presentation of illusion in the theatre" (1). Butterworth then proceeds to undertake an extensive source study of medieval texts containing references to "feats of activity," "jugglery," and the like. Through a close reading of manuscripts, financial records, scripts, and eyewitness accounts, he pieces together a picture of stage illusions and legerdemain performances that occurred at a time when theatrical activities were only serendipitously recorded, if at all. Throughout the book Butterworth makes extensive use of documents made available through the Records of Early English Drama (REED) project based at the University of Toronto, many of which have not been previously discussed in academic publications. Butterworth's explication of the sketchy and ambiguous clues found in these texts provides the reader with new insights into medieval itinerant performances and stagecraft. While many books dealing with "magic" in the Middle Ages focus on the mystical arts, ceremonies, and the prevalent belief in witchcraft, Butterworth's attention is on the notion of "pretence" and how it plays into the concept of appearance versus reality. He discusses how the setting in which an illusion is presented can serve to either obscure or foreground "the artificiality of the proceedings" (1). While he is most interested in the use of magic performed in a setting where the audience is aware that an illusion is occurring, he does discuss some deceptions that have been perpetrated upon an unsuspecting audience. One particularly interesting instance of this occurs in chapter 6, when Butterworth recounts the fraud carried out upon the faithful who visited the Rood of Grace at the Abbey of Boxley in Kent during the early sixteenth century. The Rood was an image of the crucified Christ that was thought to be miraculous because it was capable of moving. It was later discovered, however, that the image had been secretly rigged with mechanisms allowing the figure to be operated like a puppet. When the deception was finally revealed, it engendered outrage among the pious. In addition to a good deal of material that is new and unexplored, Butterworth also covers some well-worn territory when he discusses Reginald Scot's The Discouerie of Witchcraft (1584), a text well known to historians of the conjuring arts. By juxtaposing information from new sources with the descriptions contained in...

Brahmi-derived scripts, script layout, and segmental awareness

In earlier work (Sproat 2000), I characterized the layout of symbols in a script in terms of a calculus involving two dimensional catenation operators: I claimed that leftwards, rightwards, upwards, downwards and surrounding catenation are sufficient to describe the layout of any script. In the first half of this paper I analyze four Indic alphasyllabaries — Devanagari, Oriya, Kannada and Tamil — in terms of this model. A crucial claim is that despite the complexities of layout in alphasyllabic scripts, they are essentially no different in nature than alphabetic scripts, such as Latin. The second part of the paper explores implications of this view for theories of phonology and human processing of orthography. Apparently problematic is evidence that “phonemic awareness” — the ability for literate speakers to manipulate sounds consciously at the phoneme level — is much stronger with alphabetic scripts, than with alphasyllabaries. But phonemic awareness is not categorically absent for readers of Indic scripts; in general, how aware a reader is of a particular phoneme is related to how that phoneme is rendered in the script. Relevant factors appear to include whether the symbol is written inline, whether it is a diacritic, and whether it is ligatured with another symbol.

Comparison of aesthetic preferences among Roman and Arabic script readers

The systemic bias for aesthetic preferences demonstrated by prior research is thought to reflect neural organisation. Research on aesthetic preference and laterality has usually been conducted with participants who read a left-to-right Roman script, e.g., English. In order to determine if the aesthetic judgments were influenced by habitual scanning direction, we administered a geometric aesthetic preference test to 578 right-handed adults who represented a range of script experience, i.e., left-to-right Roman script readers (English); right-to-left Arabic script readers; bi-directional readers of Roman and Arabic scripts; and illiterates. We also administered an asymmetric chimeric faces test. Our findings showed that biases in aesthetic preference were influenced by script direction and pictorial dimensions. In a laterally balanced composition, participants preferred to begin their scan with the object representing Interest and terminate with the object representing Weight, the direction being determined by the script. In an unbalanced composition, participants tended to fixate on content, whether Interest or Weight, and move in a direction consistent with the script.

Language, Culture, and Literacy

Language, Culture, and Literacy

Asymmetric bias in perception of facial affect among Roman and Arabic script readers

The asymmetric chimeric faces test is used frequently as an indicator of right hemisphere involvement in the perception of facial affect, as the test is considered free of linguistic elements. Much of the original research with the asymmetric chimeric faces test was conducted with subjects reading left-to-right Roman script, i.e., English. As readers of right-to-left scripts, such as Arabic, demonstrated a mixed or weak rightward bias in judgements of facial affect, the influence of habitual scanning direction was thought to intersect with laterality. We administered the asymmetric chimeric faces test to 1239 adults who represented a range of script experience, i.e., Roman script readers (English and French), Arabic readers, bidirectional readers of Roman and Arabic scripts, and illiterates. Our findings supported the hypothesis that the bias in facial affect judgement is rooted in laterality, but can be influenced by script direction. Specifically, right-handed readers of Roman script demonstrated the greatest mean leftward score, and mixed-handed Arabic script readers demonstrated the greatest mean rightward score. Biliterates showed a gradual shift in asymmetric perception, as their scores fell between those of Roman and Arabic script readers, basically distributed in the order expected by their handedness and most often used script. Illiterates, whose only directional influence was laterality, showed a slight leftward bias.

Dr. Lanius Replies

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Letter to the EditorFull AccessDr. Lanius RepliesRUTH A. LANIUS, M.D., Ph.D., RUTH A. LANIUSSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., Ph.D., London, Ont., CanadaPublished Online:29 Jan 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.161.10.1927bAboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail To the Editor: I thank Dr. Pope for addressing the issues of the script-driven imagery symptom provocation paradigm as a means of examining memory recall and the influence of comorbid conditions on the results of our functional connectivity study with PTSD patients.The script-driven imagery symptom provocation paradigm has been a standard and well-established symptom provocation paradigm in the PTSD literature (1). In our laboratory, PTSD subjects consistently report that listening to the 30-second trauma script serves as a “trigger” for an intense, vivid remembrance or flashback that begins during the script but continues well afterward. Of importance, the period to which the connectivity analyses pertain is the 30 seconds after the script reading has ended and subjects are engaged in recall of their traumatic memory. Thus, while the script may be a particular type of trigger, or eliciting stimulus, PTSD subjects consistently report that the traumatic script elicits an intrusive memory of the traumatic event that is quite typical for them, and it was the neural correlates of such typical memories that we assessed. Furthermore, our approach is consistent with the autobiographical memory literature, in which the recall of autobiographical memory is often examined by using specific techniques to elicit recall of past memories (2–4).In terms of comorbid conditions, flashbacks and reliving symptoms associated with past traumatic events, the focus of the present article, are not part of the diagnostic criteria of any of the comorbid conditions exhibited by some of the PTSD subjects, including major depression, dysthymia, panic disorder, and substance use disorder. It is therefore unlikely that comorbid conditions such as depression or nicotine abuse that characterize some of the PTSD subjects are responsible for the brain activation changes observed.The brain areas that showed significantly different brain activation patterns in the PTSD group included the occipital cortex, the parietal lobe, and the posterior cingulate gyrus. These are not brain areas that have traditionally been associated with changes in emotional arousal (5). Rather, as noted in our article, these areas have been shown to predominate in retrieval of nonverbal episodic memories (3, 4). It is therefore not likely that differences in emotional arousal alone could explain the observed differences in brain activation patterns between PTSD and comparison subjects.In summary, the script-driven imagery symptom provocation paradigm serves as a trigger for intense, vivid memories of traumatic experiences. Flashback and reliving symptoms of past traumatic experiences are not part of the diagnostic criteria of any of the comorbid conditions exhibited by some of the PTSD subjects in the present study. Finally, the overall pattern of brain activation in the PTSD subjects reporting typical traumatic memories with intense emotions and sensations, as compared to comparison subjects reporting normal autobiographical memories, includes regions associated not with emotional arousal but with nonverbal episodic memory retrieval.

Biological abnormality of impaired reading is constrained by culture.

Developmental dyslexia is characterized by a severe reading problem in people who have normal intelligence and schooling. Impaired reading of alphabetic scripts is associated with dysfunction of left temporoparietal brain regions. These regions perform phonemic analysis and conversion of written symbols to phonological units of speech (grapheme-to-phoneme conversion); two central cognitive processes that mediate reading acquisition. Furthermore, it has been assumed that, in contrast to cultural diversities, dyslexia in different languages has a universal biological origin. Here we show using functional magnetic resonance imaging with reading-impaired Chinese children and associated controls, that functional disruption of the left middle frontal gyrus is associated with impaired reading of the Chinese language (a logographic rather than alphabetic writing system). Reading impairment in Chinese is manifested by two deficits: one relating to the conversion of graphic form (orthography) to syllable, and the other concerning orthography-to-semantics mapping. Both of these processes are critically mediated by the left middle frontal gyrus, which functions as a centre for fluent Chinese reading that coordinates and integrates various information about written characters in verbal and spatial working memory. This finding provides an insight into the fundamental pathophysiology of dyslexia by suggesting that rather than having a universal origin, the biological abnormality of impaired reading is dependent on culture.