Brenda Rapp
Department of
Cognitive Science
Wednesday, January 21
3:00-4:30pm
The Literate Brain:
Cognitive and Neural Bases
As an
evolutionarily recent human invention, written language is
unlikely to be neurally instantiated on
the basis of a literacy-specific
genetic blueprint. Precisely for this reason, the study of the
cognitive and neural bases of written
language provides an opportunity
to examine the
human brain‘s
remarkable flexibility in acquiring
expertise and skill in novel domains. I will present cognitive
neuropsychological and fMRI findings that shed
light on the cognitive
and neural relationships between
written and spoken language as well as
between written language and object/face
processing. The results reveal
an orthographic system that can
operate with considerable autonomy from
the spoken language system;
furthermore, this system makes use of
representational structures that are specifically
orthographic and is
instantiated
, to at least
some extent, in modality and
category-specific neural substrates.