writing systems
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No faltan en las artes visuales creaciones que han integrado en su plástica el lenguaje oral, la escritura o la traducción, si bien no es tan frecuente que el lenguaje sea el sujeto de la obra. Ese es el caso de diversas obras realizadas en dos antiguas colonias del Sudeste Asiático durante la década de 1990, que ponen en cuestión la herencia cultural constituida por las palabras y los sistemas de escritura. Desde sus respectivos contextos, Vietnam y Singapur, dos artistas aportan un incisivo comentario sobre los usos politizados de la escritura, las lenguas vernáculas y la alfabetización. Piezas performativas del artista Truong Tan y de la artista Amanda Heng aportan nuevos modos de comprender el funcionamiento del lenguaje y de la violencia ejercida a través de la colonización lingüística. Abstract: There is no shortage of artworks that have integrated the spoken word, writing or translation into their aesthetic form, although it is rare for language to be the subject of the works. This is the case of several works made during the 1990s in former colonies of Southeast Asia. The works call into question the cultural heritage that words and writing systems constitute. From their respective contexts, Vietnam and Singapore, two artists offer an incisive commentary on the politicized uses of vernacular languages and literacy. Performance pieces by artists Truong Tan and Amanda Heng contribute new ways of understanding the functioning of language, and the violence that can be exerted through linguistic colonization.

This chapter discusses orthographic learning, i.e., how children learn the relation between their spoken language and writing system. The process is discussed for children learning to read and write in one language, as well as for multilingual children acquiring literacy in more than one language. In both cases, the developmental course is mapped from children's first insights into the form and function of their writing systems to the development of word-specific mental representations that code for multiple linguistic forms (i.e., sound, spelling, and meaning). The chapter concludes with instructional recommendations for supporting children's orthographic learning throughout development.

This note discusses the reading, the meaning and the history of two Mongolic words, šawa ‘bird of prey’ and čala ‘stone’ of the Kitan language written in the second of the two writing systems of the Kitan Liao Empire, the assembled, or composite, or as commonly called, ‘small’ script.

Millions of people worldwide are taking up foreign languages with logographic writing systems, such as Japanese or Chinese. Learning thousands of characters necessary for literacy in those languages is a unique challenge to those coming from alphabetic backgrounds, and sustaining motivation in the face of such a momentous task is a struggle for many students. Many games exist for this purpose, but few offer production memory practice such as writing, and the vast majority are thinly veiled flashcards. To address this gap, we created Radical Tunes—a musical kanji-writing game—which combines production practice with musical mnemonic by assigning a melody to each element of a character. We chose to utilize music as it is a powerful tool that can be employed to enhance learning and memory. In this article, we explore whether incorporating melodies into a kanji learning game can positively affect the memorization of the stroke order/direction and overall shape of several Japanese characters, similar to the mnemonic effect of adding music to text. Specifically, we conducted two experimental studies, finding that (1) music improved immersion—an important factor related to learning; and (2) there was a positive correlation between melody presence and character production, particularly for more complex characters.

We reproduce in what follows the last writing published in life by G.W. Leibniz (1646-1716) on linguistic topics. Together with other works by scholars of the time, Leibniz’s essay served as an introduction to an important collection of versions of the Pater noster in many different languages (Chamberlayne ed. 1715). In his critical remarks, the philosopher not only summarises his main ideas about the importance and method of linguistic comparison, but also integrates them with interpretative insights from neighbouring fields, such as numismatics, archaeology, and the history of writing systems. The editor’s commentary gives information on the historical and theoretical context in which Leibniz writes and on the numerous authors and works mentioned in the text.

Il-Khanid seals and coins are a type of seal featuring figurative patterns typically characterized by the Rectangular style of Kufic script, the absence of figures, extensive use of calligraphy, geometric, and abstract patterns. Although it is based on the Persian seal-carving tradition, the Īl-Khānids seals and coins exhibit various elements from the Chinese seals (印章), and also similar in their style to the Mongolian writing systems. While the Silk Road, the central path for trade and economic purposes, brought together China and Persia, the two nations had strong influences regarding culture, tradition, and religion, and Persian art has applied many Chinese artistic elements, particularly in the art of seal making. Indeed, the historical evidence suggests that the Mongolian Empire employed the Chinese seals (印章) throughout their territory, stretching from China to Persia. The intercultural influences through the Silk Road seem to be well-rooted in Central Asia, and for the first time, Chinese culture is seen abundantly in the Īl-Khānids seal history, as well as the Rectangular style of Kufic script on the seals and coins, influenced by the Uighur script. This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to analyse the Chinese and the Īl-Khānids seals and coins to survey transmission of the Chinese tradition through Silk Road cultural exchanges. The results show that there exists a strong possibility that the manner in which the writing of Arabic characters in the Rectangular Kufic writing system was inserted at the top to the bottom unexpectedly followed the style of Mongolian words.

Word reading includes a series of cognitive processes that convert low-level visual characteristics to neural representations. However, the consistency of the neural mechanisms for processing these cognitive components across different writing systems in bilinguals remains inconclusive. Here, we explored this question by employing representational similarity analysis with a semantic access task involving Chinese words, English words and Chinese pinyin. Divergent spatial distribution patterns were detected for each type of brain representation across ideographic and alphabetic languages, resulting in 100% classification accuracy. Meanwhile, convergent cognitive components processing was found in the core language-related regions in left hemisphere, including the inferior frontal gyrus, temporal pole, superior and middle temporal gyrus, precentral gyrus and supplementary motor areas. Broadly, our findings indicated that the neural basis for word recognition of different writing systems in bilinguals was divergent in spatial locations of neural representations but convergent in functions, which supported and enriched the assimilation-accommodation hypothesis.

When people make lexical decisions to words referring to the past or the future, they are faster when their manual responses are compatible with the mental timeline (MTL). That is, future words are responded to faster on the right than the left, while past words are responded to faster on the left than the right. This space-time congruency effect is interpreted to suggest that time words are represented along a spatial continuum that goes from left to right (past to future), at least in Western cultures that use reading-writing systems operating from left to right. All previous experiments used lateralized hand movements to register responses, which would evoke the directionality of writing. To evoke the directionality of reading, we investigated whether the space-time congruency effect would be replicated in a language task when responses were given using the eyes rather than the hand. Thus, participants were asked to make lateralized eye movements to indicate whether letter stimuli were real words or not (lexical decision). Eye movements were perturbed for responses incompatible with the direction of the MTL, both in terms of decision time and motor amplitude. These results confirm that time-related words are embodied through spatial movement in effector-independent motor networks and suggests that the spatial representation of time operates in a body-centered reference frame.