Previous studies found altered brain function in deaf individuals reading alphabetic orthographies. However, it is not known whether similar alterations of brain function are characteristic of non-alphabetic writing systems and whether alterations are specific to certain kinds of lexical tasks. Here we examined differences in brain activation between Chinese congenitally deaf individuals (CD) a...

Biological sequences are composed of long strings of alphabetic letters rather than arrays of numerical values. Lack of a natural underlying metric for comparing such alphabetic data significantly inhibits sophisticated statistical analyses of sequences, modeling structural and functional aspects of proteins, and related problems. Herein, we use multivariate statistical analyses on almost 500 a...

Developmental dyslexia is a neurobiologically based disorder that affects approximately 5-17% of school children and is characterized by a severe impairment in reading skill acquisition. For readers of alphabetic (e.g., English) languages, recent neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that dyslexia is associated with weak reading-related activity in left temporoparietal and occipitotemporal reg...

The finding that word length plays a fundamental role in determining where and for how long readers fixate within a line of text has been central to the development of sophisticated models of eye movement control. However, research in this area is dominated by the use of Latinate languages (e.g., English, French, German), and little is known about eye movement control for alphabetic languages w...

PURPOSE To investigate phonological awareness and working memory skills as well as their influence on the literacy process in a group of intellectually normal children. METHODS Forty intellectually normal children (7.6-8.0 years) from the second and third grades of elementary school participated. Children were organized in two groups (20 children each): one with and another without literacy d...

We show that optimal alphabetic binary trees can be constructed in O(n) time if the elements of the initial sequence are drawn from a domain that can be sorted in linear time. We describe a hybrid algorithm that combines the bottom-up approach of the original Hu-Tucker algorithm with the top-down approach of Larmore and Przytycka’s Cartesian tree algorithms. The hybrid algorithm demonstrates th...

The Letter Spirit project explores the creative act of artistic letter-design. The aim is to mode] how the 26 lowercase letters of the roman alphabet can be rendered in many different but internally coherent styles. Viewed from a distance, the behavior of the program can be seen to result from the interaction of four emergent agents working together to form a coherent style sad to design s comp...

A classical result (often credited to Y. Medvedev) states that every language recognized by a finite automaton is the homomorphic image of a local language, over a much larger so-called local alphabet, namely the alphabet of the edges of the transition graph. Local languages are characterized by the value k = 2 of the sliding window width in the McNaughton and Papert’s infinite hierarchy of str...

Word reading in alphabetic language involves a cortical system with multiple components whose division of labor depends on the transparency of the writing system. To gain insight about the neural division of labor between phonology and semantics subserving word reading in Chinese, a deep non-alphabetic writing system, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the effe...

In English and other alphabetic languages read from left to right, useful information acquired during each fixational pause is generally reported to extend much further to the right of each fixation than to the left. However, the asymmetry of the perceptual span for alphabetic languages read in the opposite direction (i.e., from right to left) has received very little attention in empirical res...