Tech

Is the English-reading brain somehow different from the Hebrew-reading brain? You might not expect any major differences; after all, both languages are alphabetic and are read more or less phonetically by breaking words into their constituent sounds. Compare English and Hebrew to a logographic language like Chinese or Japanese, and the similarity between the alphabetic languages becomes obvious. But new research by Hadassah University researchers Atira Bick and colleagues, published online in October in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, found that despite their similarities, there are some key differences in the way the brain processes English and Hebrew words.