The article by Carota and Sirigu addresses a fundamental issue, namely the domain specificity of people's ability to learn and implement sequential structures of events. The authors review theoretical positions and empirical findings related to this issue, providing a useful summary of representative models of sequential event structures, and a…

I advance the hypothesis that the earliest phases of language acquisition--the developmental transition from an initial universal state of language processing to one that is language-specific--requires social interaction. Relating human language learning to a broader set of neurobiological cases of communicative development, I argue that the…

It has been commonly agreed that developmental dyslexia in different languages has a common biological origin: a dysfunction of left posterior temporal brain regions dealing with phonological processes. Siok, Perfetti, Jin, and Tan (2004, "Nature," 431, 71-76) challenge this biological unity theory of dyslexia: Chinese dyslexics show no deficits…

There are two significant problems in using functional neuroimaging methods to study language. Improving the state of functional brain imaging will depend on understanding how the dependent measure of brain imaging differs from behavioral dependent measures (the ''dependent measure problem'') and how the activation of the motor system may be…

Cognitive neuropsychological studies of bilingual patients with aphasia have contributed to our understanding of how the brain processes different languages. The question we asked is whether differences in script have any impact on language processing in bilingual aphasic patients who speak languages with different writing systems: Chinese and…

Some researchers believe that phonics is the more natural way to teach reading because, instead of requiring the learner to memorize whole words, phonics shows the learner the process by which alphabetic writing is converted into speech. The human baby babbles more than enough phonemes for any language. Before there was an alphabet, humans drew…

Based on a prior model on modularity of the brain, a new modular model of intrapersonal communication was developed which focuses on brain processing, encompassing both the structures and the functions of those structures in the creation of messages. The modular mind is a bio-social model of communication which presupposes a relationship between…