ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses phonological and reading profiles along with neural reading circuitry in children provided simultaneous biliterate instruction, and highlights the role of orthographic depth and the hippocampus in such biliterate acquisition. The writing system that a language uses affects acquisition of literacy because each system is based on a different set of symbolic relations and requires different cognitive skills. Brain activity was recorded while children read aloud words and non-words in English and Hindi that appeared on a screen, and while they fixated on the symbol strings displayed in between without any oral response. Diffusion tensor magnetic resonance imaging (DTI) image analysis was performed using FSL toolbox. The tensors were fitted onto the raw diffusion data and the Brain Extraction Tool (BET) was used to extract images after removing noise. Individual Fractional Anisotrophy (FA) maps were created and fitted into standard MNI space using affine transformation and nonlinear registration and then averaged to create a mean FA map.
