In a pathbreaking meta-analysis of twenty-five imaging studies of different languages, cognitive scientists from the University of Pittsburgh found three great common regions used differentially across writing systems. In the first, the occipital-temporal area (which includes the hypothesized locus of “neuronal recycling” for literacy), we become proficient visual specialists in whatever script we read. In the second, the frontal region around Broca’s area, we become specialists in two different ways—for phonemes in words and for their meanings. In the third, the multifunction region spanning
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