--- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "Gerry" <waluk@...> wrote:

> --- In Nostratica@yahoogroups.com, "ehlsmith" <ehlsmith@...> wrote:
> >
>
>
> www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/ query.fcgi?
> cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=10402199
>
> or
>
> privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~vcook/neurolinguisticsla.htm
>
> Both links clearly states the "written" and not spoken word ...

they

> deal with processing visually presented sentences in Mandarin. What

I

> had originally stated was the written language which differs in

that

> Mandarin presents a pictograph while other alphabets consist of

lines

> and circles (more computer oriented).

Gerry,

I couldn't get the first link to work, but in the second link I
interpret the researchers' abstract to say they *did not* find
differences in how the written selections were processed. The
original posting to this list which reported differences in
processing of spoken Mandarin vs. English proposed that the
differences were because Mandarin was a tonal language and English
was not. The shape of the written characters in which the languages
are customarily written had nothing to do with it.

In case you are not familiar with the concept of a tonal language, it
is one in which the tone with which a word is spoken is directly
connected to its meaning. As a hypothetical illustration, suppose
that in English instead of saying "can", "cap", "car", or "cat" we
just said "ca" for all four, and depended on the tone to convey
whether we meant "is able" "small hat", "automobile" or "feline".
Then English would be a tonal language too.

If the findings of differences in how English and Mandarin are
processed in the brain are indeed accurate, it is more likely due to
their difference in this feature, than to any difference in how their
scripts are shaped.

regards,
Ned Smith