Literacy Studies: Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences, Linguistics, Psychology and Education Hye K. Pae Script E ects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind, Cognition, and Culture With a Foreword by Charles A. Perfetti Literacy Studies Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences, Linguistics, Psychology and Education Volume 21 Series Editor R. Malatesha Joshi , Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA Editorial Board Rui Alves, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal Linnea Ehri, CUNY Graduate School, New York, USA Usha Goswami, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Catherine McBride Chang, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China Jane Oakhill, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Rebecca Treiman, Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, USA While language defines humanity, literacy defines civilization. Understandably, illiteracy or difficulties in acquiring literacy skills have become a major concern of our technological society. A conservative estimate of the prevalence of literacy problems would put the figure at more than a billion people in the world. Because of the seriousness of the problem, research in literacy acquisition and its breakdown is pursued with enormous vigor and persistence by experts from diverse backgrounds such as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics and education. This, of course, has resulted in a plethora of data, and consequently it has become difficult to integrate this abundance of information into a coherent body because of the artificial barriers that exist among different professional specialties. The purpose of this series is to bring together the available research studies into a coherent body of knowledge. Publications in this series are of interest to educators, clinicians and research scientists in the above-mentioned specialties. Some of the titles suitable for the Series are: fMRI, brain imaging techniques and reading skills, orthography and literacy; and research based techniques for improving decoding, vocabulary, spelling, and comprehension skills. Book proposals for this series may be submitted to the Publishing Editor: Natalie Rieborn; Springer; Van Godewijckstraat 30;3300 AA Dordrecht; The Netherlands; e-mail: [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7206 Hye K. Pae Script Effects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind, Cognition, and Culture With a Foreword by Charles A. Perfetti Hye K. Pae School of Education University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH, USA ISSN 2214-000X ISSN 2214-0018 (electronic) Literacy Studies ISBN 978-3-030-55151-3 ISBN 978-3-030-55152-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55152-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 . This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland In Memory of my Paternal Grandmother, Maternal Grandmother, and Mother who shaped who I am with wisdom and courage. Foreword Do the form and function of writing systems influence the way we think? Writing systems around the world vary both in how they look and how they work—which are not the same thing. Linear European-based alphabets spread out a handful of letters in a line, each corresponding to one or more basic sound (pho- nemes) of the language. In contrast, Chinese is written in a character system that places spaces between meaning bearing syllables. Differing from both, Korean is written in an alphabet—a handful of letters that correspond to basic sounds—but the letters are arrayed in squares separated by spaces, thus resembling the spatial layout of Chinese while giving the reader information about phonemes. Japanese borrowed the Chinese system, using the characters to correspond to meanings in a language unrelated to Chinese. But Japanese also uses a complementary system of syllable units, in which each graph corresponds to a spoken Japanese syllable. And these examples are just a handful of the world’s written languages. Such variety has the potential to lead to corresponding variety in cognition. This potential prompts Hye Pae’s treatment of the complex set of inter-related issues that surround it. By focusing on the European alphabetic and East Asian writing systems (largely ignoring the abjads of Arabic and Hebrew and the multitude of alphasylla- baries of South Asia), she is able to explore much of the world’s writing variety in just a few languages. The idea that writing influences thinking can be considered a corollary of the hypothesis that language influences thinking. The long history of linguistic relativ- ity, instantiated as the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, and the conflicting conclusions from research, is a warning that a hypothesis of script relativity will prove resistant to conclusive confirmation. The question for script relativity is how to demonstrate causality, the same question that proved so challenging for linguistic relativity. Language and writing are deeply embedded in culture. Finding differences in pat- terns of thought that are correlated with writing system may be due to broader cul- tural factors that have influenced the development and survival of a writing system. In the face of such obstacles, the strength of Hye Pae’s treatment is the breadth of relevant research and scholarship she reviews, providing perspectives from writ- ing scholarship, linguistics, behavioral reading research, neuroscience of reading, vii viii Foreword sociology, and cross-cultural cognition. Finding convincing evidence for script rela- tivity is a challenge. Hye Pae has provided a well-researched beginning for this quest. Learning Research and Development Center Charles A. Perfetti University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA December, 2019 Acknowledgements I am indebted to many individuals for this endeavor. At the very onset, I revealed my idea several years ago over lunch with Dr. Kwangoh Yi and Dr. Sungbong Bae from Yeungnam University in Korea when we met at a fine restaurant overlooking Haeundae ocean in Busan (Thank you for coming to Busan from Daegu to meet with me and for supporting the idea). It was the first time I specifically outlined my idea on this book. Verbalizing the idea had power, which allowed it to gradually grow into a solid project. Above all, I am very honored and grateful for having a Foreword from Dr. Charles A. Perfetti. His astute feedback on the book and gener- osity to write a Foreword humble me. His endorsement of a “beginning for [the] quest” is a big encouragement because it was one of my objectives for proposing the new hypothesis of script relativity. I am also grateful for the guidance provided by Dr. R. Malatesha Joshi, the General Editor of the series of Literacy Studies: Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences, Linguistics, Psychology and Education and by Helen van der Stelt and Natalie Rieborn from Springer. I greatly appreciate two reviewers’ invaluable comments, one of which graciously enlightened me as to how some readers would react to the hypothesis, especially those readers with an opposing view of linguistic relativity. I appreciate the TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) publication award grant provided by the Provost Office of the University of Cincinnati and the University of Cincinnati Press, which makes this book available to everybody in the world who is interested in reading on an open access platform. I appreciate Dr. Keisha Love, Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs and Special Initiatives, for her support in the course of ironing out the jurisprudence of the copyright issue between Springer and the University’s Office of General Counsel. There were many colleagues who were kind enough to share their expertise by reading chapters to check for accuracy. My appreciation goes to Dr. Say Young Kim at Hangyang University in South Korea who read the chapter of neurolinguistic evidence, Dr. Sujin Kim at