Ramesh Kumar Mishra

How Literacy Acquisition Affects the Illiterate Mind - A Critical Examination of Theories and Evidence

At present, more than one-fifth of humanity is unable to read and write. We critically examine experimental evidence and theories of how (il)literacy affects the human mind. In our discussion, we show that literacy has significant cognitive consequences that go beyond the processing of written words and sentences. Thus, cultural inventions such as reading shape general cognitive processing in non-trivial ways. We suggest that this has important implications for educational policy and guidance and research into cognitive processing and brain functioning.

Learning to read alters cortico-subcortical cross-talk in the visual system of illiterates

As little as 6 months of literacy instruction leads to neuroplastic changes in deep structures of the brain of illiterate adults. Learning to read is known to result in a reorganization of the developing cerebral cortex. In this longitudinal resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging study in illiterate adults, we show that only 6 months of literacy training can lead to neuroplastic changes in the mature brain. We observed that literacy-induced neuroplasticity is not confined to the cortex but increases the functional connectivity between the occipital lobe and subcortical areas in the midbrain and the thalamus. Individual rates of connectivity increase were significantly related to the individual decoding skill gains. These findings crucially complement current neurobiological concepts of normal and impaired literacy acquisition.

Iconic Native Culture Cues Inhibit Second Language Production in a Non-immigrant Population: Evidence from Bengali-English Bilinguals

We examined if iconic pictures belonging to ones native culture interfere with second language production in bilinguals in an object naming task. Bengali-English bilinguals named pictures in both L1 and L2 against iconic cultural images representing Bengali culture or neutral images. Participants named in both “Blocked” and “Mixed” language conditions. In both conditions, participants were significantly slower in naming in English when the background was an iconic Bengali culture picture than a neutral image. These data suggest that native language culture cues lead to activation of the L1 lexicon that competed against L2 words creating an interference. These results provide further support to earlier observations where such culture related interference has been observed in bilingual language production. We discuss the results in the context of cultural influence on the psycholinguistic processes in bilingual object naming.

Effect of Exogenous Cues on Covert Spatial Orienting in Deaf and Normal Hearing Individuals.

Deaf individuals have been known to process visual stimuli better at the periphery compared to the normal hearing population. However, very few studies have examined attention orienting in the oculomotor domain in the deaf, particularly when targets appear at variable eccentricity. In this study, we examined if the visual perceptual processing advantage reported in the deaf people also modulates spatial attentional orienting with eye movement responses. We used a spatial cueing task with cued and uncued targets that appeared at two different eccentricities and explored attentional facilitation and inhibition. We elicited both a saccadic and a manual response. The deaf showed a higher cueing effect for the ocular responses than the normal hearing participants. However, there was no group difference for the manual responses. There was also higher facilitation at the periphery for both saccadic and manual responses, irrespective of groups. These results suggest that, owing to their superior visual processing ability, the deaf may orient attention faster to targets. We discuss the results in terms of previous studies on cueing and attentional orienting in deaf.

Attention and the Processing of Sentences

This chapter is about how attentional mechanisms influence the processing of sentences during listening and reading. It asks the question if processing a sentence costs attention. This chapter shows that attention could modulate the processing of different aspects of a sentence. Sentences are comprehended through a range of interactions with other cognitive processes like memory and attention. Different cognitive processes like memory and attention interact with different sub-levels of language such as syntax and semantics constantly, updating mental representations during sentence processing. The notion of automaticity in syntax parsing is discussed as this issue is intimately linked with attention processing.

Made you look! Temporal and emotional characteristics of attentional shift towards gazed locations

Abstract Studies using a cued gazing paradigm show that attention is reflexively shifted to the gazed-at location. However, there is disagreement as to the factors modulating attention orienting due to gaze cueing. In a series of three experiments, we investigated the role of the emotional expression of the cue (Exp. 1, 2 and 3), cue-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) (Exp. 2 and 3) and emotional valence of the target (Exp. 3) in the participants’ ability to attend to the target. Experiments 1 and 3 were discrimination tasks. Participants had to differentiate between two neutral targets in Exp. 1 and between two emotionally laden targets (a “square” and a “circle” associated with positive or negative emotions) in Experiment 3. In Experiment 2, participants had to detect a single target presented at different time intervals. The results suggest that attention is oriented towards gazed locations regardless of the accompanying emotional expression, SOA and emotion target association. Thus, eye gaze-mediated attention shifts in normal healthy adults seem to be unaffected by the experimental manipulations studied herein.

Cognitive Advantage of Bilingualism and Its Criticisms

This chapter is about the various theories and controversies around the question of bilingualism and its influence on cognition. In the last decade or so many investigators have proposed different theories to account for the evidence that bilingualism and its practice enhances some aspects of general cognitive capacity. However, we also see many others who have not replicated the original findings or have proposed alternative accounts. While the psycholinguistic basis of bilingualism is well understood, how and why such processes influence non-linguistic cognition remains debatable. At this juncture, there is overwhelming research interest to understand whether bilingualism leads to cognitive reserve and if this pushes the onset of old-age neurodegenerative disorders. The evidence for these ideas is open to discussion. This chapter does not review all of the theories and the vast research that has gone into these but synthesises them around the key theoretical notions. The chapter specifically focuses on non-replicable results.

Neuroscience of Bilingualism

This chapter is about the brain and bilingualism. Neural data are very important in understanding behavioural outcomes or the consequences of it. However, neural data do not always guarantee what kind of behavioural performance we may expect in experiments. An emerging claim in the bilingualism literature is that bilingualism strengthens neural tissue and enhances functional connectivity. The chapter explores the theories and facts related to the biological basis of bilingualism. One of the important questions is if the brains of bilinguals and monolinguals are different structurally, and if so why? A related question is what acquisition and gradual mastery of a second language do to the brain and its networks? Many studies have claimed that the neural machinery is itself different for bilinguals and monolinguals. This difference is an outcome of the different language experiences that bilinguals and monolinguals go through during their lifespan. Neural differences and how they have contributed to executive control difference is often not clear from the debates. Often, neural differences in experiments do not reflect in behavioural results.

Bilingualism, Context and Control

This chapter highlights how the bilingual experience is context bound. This context can be other interlocutors or the general environment around them. Most experimental evidence for/against cognitive control has come from experiments that do not manipulate context. But bilingualism is a socio-cultural phenomenon that does not take place in isolation. The social and cultural context is an important variable to consider while theorising on bilingual language processing. Several studies show that bilinguals are sensitive to cues in the environment that they use to control their languages. Cultural icons and interlocutor faces have been shown to affect language selection and production in bilinguals. Further, context can also influence domain-general non-linguistic executive control in bilinguals. This chapter highlights the importance of context and reviews studies in this emerging domain.

The Evolution of Bilingualism

This chapter explores how a critical cognitive skill such as bilingualism might have evolved in early hominins and why. Bilingualism has flourished and is growing in spite of many changes in social, cultural and cognitive variables. Unless bilingualism facilitated social–cultural interaction, it would not have been selected by evolution. What one achieves socially, culturally, cognitively and economically by bilingualism is well-documented. Available evidence from the evolution of neural systems and cognitive systems in Homo sapiens and their time scales hint at both a cultural and biological basis of the evolution of bilingualism. It is important to explore how the brain prepared itself to accommodate two languages, basically two different symbolic systems, and how the necessary neural architecture might have supported it. Possible answers may be found in theories of language evolution and cognitive archaeology. Cognitive abilities that support bilingualism (inhibition, executive control, task shifting, goal maintenance monitoring, goal planning and contextual awareness) evolved first. If we are interested in knowing how the brain gained the ability to deal with two languages, we should investigate the emergence of some core cognitive systems, and also what kind of social and cultural forces shaped such mechanisms.