ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical review of both the clinical and the normative literature on script variations and cerebral lateralization, with particular reference to the Japanese and Chinese literature. In a similar vein, the report of Chinese-English bilingual who, following a left parieto-occipital injury, showed greater impairment in the recognition of written Chinese than English was also taken to support the notion of script-related differences in the brain organization of language in bilinguals. In this respect, the studies of Sasanuma and colleagues with Japanese bi-scriptual readers may provide the most definitive evidence on the issue of script effects on cerebral lateralization, since patients in these studies used two types of scripts, but spoke only one language. The chapter provides an overview of clinical and normative studies with Japanese and Chinese subjects. However, the clinical data clearly point to the left hemisphere as the site for processing language, regardless of whether it is the spoken language or the written script.
