Script Effects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind, Cognition, and Culture

Front matter

Literacy Studies: Perspectives from Cognitive Neurosciences, Linguistics, Psychology and Education

Hye K. Pae

Script Effects as the Hidden Drive of the Mind, Cognition, and Culture

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 (phonemes) 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 alphasyllabaries 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 relativity, 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 patterns of thought that are correlated with writing system may be due to broader cultural 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 writing scholarship, linguistics, behavioral reading research, neuroscience of reading,

Vili Foreword sociology, and cross-cultural cognition. Finding convincing evidence for script relativity is achallenge. 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 generosity 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 George Mason University for the Korean part, Eriko Sato at SUNY Stony Brook University for the Japanese part, and Dr. Fengyang Ma, Dr. Jing Sun, and Nan Yang at the University of Cincinnati for the Chinese part. I appreciate Dr. Catherine McBride at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for providing overall feedback. Notwithstanding their input, all x Acknowledgements remaining errors in the book are mine. I appreciate the time and effort of Dr. Cheri Williams, Dr. Brian Schanding, and Kara Williams for editorial input. My appreciation also goes to my undergraduate research mentees, Snigdha Desaty and Kalia Cooper, for reading several chapters as a part of their research activity and for crosschecking references. Jerry Chang, whose editorial skill was exceptional, also read many chapters and provided very detailed editorial assistance. With his feedback, I was able to adjust some Korean expressions into American ones. Ria Chang was the one who first introduced to me Dr. Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet versus the Goddess and Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light. The juxtapositions and connecting dots among seemingly irrelevant concepts and subjects in a convincing way that were developed in these two books eventually led to this outcome. This book is written in memory of three wise and beautiful women, my paternal and maternal grandmothers and mother, who had shaped me in the way I am. My warm appreciation goes to my sister, Bae Euikyung, and my brother, Dr. Bae Youngseok, for their sustaining love and support as well as for being a role model while growing up (especially my brother). When I write another book in the future, it will be dedicated to Jerry and Ria. Many thanks to EVERYONE! DBS LIC (native Korean), Rite} LICH (a mixture of Sino-Korean and native Korean)!

Prologue

“We infer the spirit of the nation in great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a stone.”

(Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803—1882))

“The story of reading reflects the sum of a series of cognitive and linguistic breakthroughs occurring alongside powerful cultural changes.”

Maryanne Wolf (2007, p. 25)

“[The] appearances [of scripts] are the first aspect of writing that one notices, and differences in appearances might be relevant for how the brain handles variability in writing.”

Charles A. Perfetti et al. (2007, p. 131).

This book is about how our minds are shaped by the written language in which we read. The thesis of the script'!-mind connection spawned from my long query about idiosyncrasies I have found among cultures over the course of my life. It was developed based on my personal observations made as a layperson, reading experience accumulated as an avid reader, and research conducted as a psycholinguist. Due to its on-going nature, the thrust of this book is a working hypothesis.

Growing up in South Korea, I was discouraged, due to being a girl, to go to college by my father (because he did not want me to be independent). Korean men often recounted one of the key canons of Confucianism (in short, male dominance) and joked about the Chinese character for the husband (3<?), which has one stroke above the character for the sky (K). The views that the husband is higher than the sky and that a woman’s true happiness or haven is in the husband’s arms were

'The term script refers to a visual graphic form of writing. The phrase writing system refers to the mapping principles of how spoken language is encoded in writing. *In fact, this character originated from a pictograph, as shown here Bh. E a a~ However, the character has been interpreted as the husband being higher than the sky in Korea, which is a reflection of the male-dominance ideology influenced by Confucianism.

xi xii Prologue ubiquitous in the Korean culture about 30 or 40 years ago.* To make matters worse, not only did female teachers openly endorse in class the same notion of women’s true happiness to be in their husbands’ arms (alas, I heard it many times by many female teachers and even professors!), but also many mothers reinforced and relayed the ideology onto their daughters.* I wondered why Confucianism flourished more in Korea than in China where it originated.

I grew up and went to a school in the most (proud) conservative region in Korea until the third year of middle school, where Confucianism exerted a massive influence. My parents wanted me to transfer to a school in Busan, and I landed in a Christian mission school through random selection within the district, which was the norm in large cities for school assignment imposed by the government at the time. The mission school offered a Bible class every week and placed the Bible as the first subject in the report card before Moral Education (Moral Education was the first subject that appeared in typical school report cards, followed by the Korean Language, Math, English, and so on). My classmates were required by the homeroom teacher to turn in a Sunday service schedule before class every Monday as evidence of church-attendance the day before. Prior to that school, I had never gone to church, mainly because of no interest and no exposure to it. As punishment for not attending services on Sundays, I got the homeroom teacher’s slap on my face on numerous Mondays in front of about 65 classmates. I wondered why Christianity flourished more in Korea than in any other country in Asia.

While I attended college in the 1980s, students’ political demonstrations against the Korean (military) government were a major part of everyday college life. Many fellow students were arrested and tortured for initiating and participating in the protests. While working as a student reporter for the university press, I had to read Karl Marx’s Capitalism because it was one of the must-read books for student reporters at the time. I still remember a heated discussion that I had with my fellow student reporters on whether the distribution of resources should be based on people’s needs or people’s abilities. This led to a debate on the ideal social system that would be like the family system in which resources would be distributed based on needs, while labor would be provided based on abilities. We were all mystified by a thought as to whether it would ever be possible in reality. I wondered why Communism flourished more in China than in Germany where Karl Marx was born.

When a book entitled There Is No Japan (“UYS 2 GACH’) was published in the 1980s by a Korean female journalist based on her encounters with the Japanese in Japan, it quickly enjoyed runaway success. The explosion in popularity was due mostly to the sensational title, given Korea’s shame for the 36-year Japanese imperial occupancy from 1910 to 1945. Regardless of the author’s intention, I was fascinated with the difference in the mindsets between the Koreans and the Japanese. I

3Thanks to the significant changes in the Korean culture, I have seen that women’s status has been on the upswing in recent decades.

*Full-time home-makers were considered the best, whereas women in the workforce were viewed as having hard lives.

>The author was later accused of plagiarizing some of the contents by one of her acquaintances.

Prologue xiii wondered why the Koreans and the Japanese were so different from each other despite the geographical proximity.

When I first came to the U.S., I was enthralled by the architecture, which I had previously only seen in books, TV, or movies. Architecture expresses its own tale and history. It reveals the thought and aim of the builder, materials that were available at the time of construction, and the primary functionality of the building. It also reveals aesthetic qualities that the builder embraced and valued in the past. I wondered why architectures in the East and the West were so different from each other.

Despite my father’s discouragement, I managed to pursue higher education in both Korea and the U.S., and became a Full Professor at the University of Cincinnati in the U.S. Despite my indifference to Christianity in my middle school days, I started going to church after marriage in the hope of curing my husband’s alcoholism. Despite not liking the military government, I was grateful for the opportunity of reading Karl Marx’s book in my college days. Despite not having answers to why the Koreans and the Japanese were so different from each other, it became one of seeds that geminated the thesis of this book. Despite not knowing what makes architectures in the East and the West different from each other, the awareness makes me appreciate dominant architectural patterns and their beauty more deeply when I travel other countries in the East and the West.

My questions and thoughts rooted in my upbringing to adulthood were unorganized and jumbled in my head without seeking clear answers. When I read Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet and the Goddess a few years back, a light bulb quickly went off. All the pieces that were scattered as separate fragments suddenly came together in a string of gemstones—the script effect and script relativity!

Converging on Written Language

Trends and movements in any society go through ebbs and flows over time. Almost nothing is permanent. When something is persistent and tested by time in a culture, it must have durable compatibility with the undercurrent or unconsciousness of the members and the psyche of the culture.

Although Confucianism originated more than 2,500 years ago in China, it has not been as popular in China as it had been in Korea. One reason for that phenomenon might be Communism coming to power in China. The ideology of Communism placed more emphasis on equity and might not have been well-matched with the hierarchy of social class that Confucianism upheld. Why did Confucianism permeate into Korea more easily than China and Japan? Korean people might have been more comfortable with the basic tenet of Confucianism than any other philosophies that came from China, such as Taoism. Confucianism is one of many philosophical schools, but it had gotten to the degree that it was admitted as a religion in Korea. Logan (2014) claims in his book The Alphabet Effect that the alphabet promotes linear thinking and hierarchical reasoning, such as Syllogism. The canons of xiv Prologue

Confucianism might have dovetailed nicely with the nature of the written language used in Korea, Hangul, which is the Korean alphabet.

Christianity is based on monotheism. Eastern ideologies and cultures are largely based on Nature and are more geared toward pantheism in which every living thing in Nature has its own sacred spirit which is everywhere. According to the 2015 Census data published by the Statistics Korea (2016), South Korea has Protestants at 19.7% of the population, followed by 15.5% Buddhists, and 7.9% Catholics. This remarkable percentage of the Western religions (Christians comprise 28% of the population in total) in South Korea is incomparable to those of China (2.3%°) and Japan (0.8%; since Japan has never reached 1% of Christians, they call it a “1% ceiling’’).’ Christianity or monotheism might have been more congruent with the written language used in Korea than those used in China and Japan.

Although Karl Max was German, the ideology was more popularized and indoctrinated in China than in Germany or any other country in Europe. The totalitarian ideology might have been more congruent with Chinese characters which are read holistically rather than linearly or analytically as in English.

Architecture, in a sense, manifests who/what we are. It exhibits our philosophy, priority, value, preference, and surroundings. Eastern architecture is generally curved and round, but does not draw pivotal attention to the building per se. It rather focuses on its harmony with the surroundings. In contrast, Western architecture is linear and tends to be the center of the landscape. Especially, temples and churches are architecturally delicate, elaborate, and intricate sanctuaries, which show drastic differences between the East and the West. These differences might have resulted from the difference in scripts in which Easterners and Westerners have read over time. Interestingly, although the writing systems are distinctively different among Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, cultures and old architectural structures are very similar among the three countries.

The Script in Which You Read Makes You What You Are

Writing has immeasurable impact on our lives. As partial evidence, historical recounts tend to focus on literate societies. Although preliterate days constitute 99.9% of the five-million-year history of the human species, history before the emergence of writing around 3,000 B.C. receives only a slice of attention and treatment (Diamond, 1999). Such narrowly focused attention and accounts on the preliterate days in world history by historians, archeologists, and other specialists may suggest that writing has shaped the modern world or that it is impossible to trace back to days in antiquity that had no writing.

° Christianity in China, Wikipedia (2019).

7This phenomenon is consistent with the presence of ethnic churches established by immigrants in the U.S. Korean ethnic churches in the U.S. incomparably outnumber those of Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the U.S.

Prologue Xv

We are not born to read. Unlike oral language that comes naturally through exposure, time, and interaction, reading needs to be explicitly learned. This does not mean that oral speech and reading are binary concepts; rather, they are inextricably linked to each other. Although reading is a complex cognitive process, we tend to take reading for granted and become blind to the consequences of reading once we gain the mastery or automaticity of reading. This does not mean bypassing the important effect of reading. When we look at vanished languages in the world, most of them did not have a written language. Although no one has pointed it out yet, not having corresponding writing systems would be the main source of dead languages and currently disappearing or endangered languages in the world.

Reading is one of the most complicated forms of information processing, although it looks automatic and effortless. Dehaene (2009) summarizes the reading mechanism, which is a complex process, as follows:

[O]ur gaze lands on a word and our brain effortlessly gives us access to its meaning and pronunciation. But in spite of appearances, the process is far from simple. Upon entering the retina, a word is split up into a myriad of fragments, as each part of the visual image is recognized by a distinct photoreceptor. Starting from this input, the real challenge consists in putting the pieces back together in order to decode what letters are present, to figure out the order in which they appear, and finally to identify the word (p. 12).

Hence, the consequences of reading may be greater than we think. It can shape our cognitive structures and neural networks. The “reading brain” works as an engine that drives our minds. It not only regulates our ability to analyze and classify incoming information in tandem with existing memory, but also serves as a springboard for new ideas.

The dietician’s aphorism “you are what you eat” has a poignant truth to it. Can it be transposed to “you are what you read” or “the written language in which you read shapes your mind”? If the former is true for the physical aspect, the latter may be true for the mental aspect of what we are. If we are shaped by what we consume every day, we are to be shaped by the language we speak (linguistic relativity hypothesis or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis*) and the script in which we read everyday (script relativity hypothesis, which is the thesis of this book). Reading becomes essential in our lives more than ever before in the digital era with the availability of many forms of communication, such as emails, text messages, social media, open source digital platforms, and more. The script in which we read is complementary to our mental constructs, and its effect works in concert with cultural matrices in many ways.

8 See Chapter 3 about this hypothesis. Chapter 3 discusses how this hypothesis was mistreated by a certain school of thought with no (systematic) empirical evidence.

xvi Prologue My Indirect Answer to Yali’s Question

Diamond (1999) masterfully explains why human societies in different continents have left such divergent footsteps over the past 13,000 years in his book entitled Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. A New Guinean, Yali, with whom Diamond frequently conversed in New Guinea when he conducted his study as a biologist on bird evolution, once asked him a question: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” (p. 14). This question has nothing to do with race, nor with biological superiority or inferiority. It was about the contrasting lifestyles of New Guineans to those of Europeans. Diamond states that Yali and he “both knew perfectly well that New Guineans are on the average at least as smart as Europeans” (p. 14) and “... in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners” (p. 21). Deeply engrossed in the Yali question, Diamond expounds upon the basic workings of cultural processes covering history, religion, the origins of empires, writing, crops, guns, germs, and steel in order to answer Yali’s question. Diamond’s answer funnels down to three factors, comprising European guns, infectious diseases, and steel tools as a proximate explanation that identifies the immediate cause of the difference between New Guineans and Westerners’ lifestyles and mindsets. Diamond still leaves it as an open question by stating “... a host of issues raised by Yali’s question remain unresolved. At present, we can put forward some partial answers plus a research agenda for the future, rather than a fully developed theory” (p. 408). The question of why human societies have the widely divergent pathways of development is also relevant to the thesis of this book. I would like to answer Yali’s question as follows: It is most likely because Papua New Guineans do not have a unified writing system in the face of 832 living oral languages, whereas Westerners have the alphabet.’ In this book I will explain why the writing system lays a core foundation for the development of our cognition, mentality, attention, and lifestyles, along with culture. Written language is likely to reinforce a certain sense of cultural coding.

There are several books I have heavily relied on for the development of the thesis of this book. These are the books that have helped me to germinate the seed for this book. The first one is Leonard Shlain’s (1998) The Alphabet and the Goddess. The late surgeon Shlain astutely juxtaposes a large variety of subjects in a new way and finds unity between seemingly irrelevant subjects.'° He explains how the alphabet

°In a similar vein, as a Korean native, I believe that the driving engine that propelled South Korea’s phenomenal economic development after the Korean War was the Korean alphabet, Hangul, and Koreans’ high literacy rate. The case of North Korea is different. We do not know North Korean’s literacy rate (or whether it reaches the tipping point or not) because of its being a closed society. '0Shlain’s other books, Art and Physics: Parallel visions in Space, Time, and Light (1991) and Leonardo’s Brain (2014) are also worth reading. Shlain’s books offer a new view of the world through extraordinary connections, juxtapositions, and pairings he makes, although they lack scientific evidence and show, to some extent, loose analogies with few testable hypotheses.

Prologue xvii fundamentally rewired the human brain and changed history, religion, and gender dynamics by covering from ancient Greek mythology to current human relations. In relevance to this book, he particularly articulates the different processes of words and images. The Shlain book led me to Logan’s (2004) The Alphabet Effect. Richard Nisbett’s (2003) book, The Geography of Thought, is profound with his and his colleagues’ research results. He articulates how geography has molded the cultures of the East and the West. Maryanne Wolf’s (2007) Proust and the Squid is another one. She elucidates how the evolution and development of reading have shaped the specialization of our brains (the reading brain) and our intellectual lives. Stanislas Dehaene’s (2009) Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention is another key resource on which I have greatly relied. It offers a full survey of reading and related workings of the brain. Each of these books has its merits with unique views and points. These books are written for the general public as trade books. I have also relied on numerous technical journal articles to support my claim of script relativity.

A myriad of social psychology studies!! have shown that East Asians tend to pay attention to background information and process given information in a holistic manner, whereas European Americans are more likely to zero in on the foreground and process information in an analytical fashion. This is consistent with Hofstede’s (1980) seminal cross-cultural study of collectivistic culture (e.g., Asians) versus individualistic culture (e.g., Americans).'? Given that the three East Asian nations share cultural characteristics and architectural structures, the findings of these studies and these researchers’ interpretations make sense. However, these findings cannot explain the non-monolithic dimensions and the drastic differences among the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans with respect to values, practices, and religious choices. Importantly, the three groups do not have the common language and script. This point of the similar culture yet different languages and scripts among Chinese, Japanese, and Korean has hardly been discussed collectively within a single account. The aim of script relativity is to explain the differences and to address the niche that extant evidence cannot explain.

I have used both emic (i.e., insider’s view) observations and etic (i.e., outsider’s view) empirical research to present the thesis of this book in a fuller, deeper, and richer fashion than a mono-view. In other words, I have relied on my own subjective observations and interpretations as a Korean native for the emic point of view. I have also relied on objective theories, concepts, and research findings as a psycholinguist for the etic view. For example, South Korea has transformed its economy into a developed country within one generation from one of the world’s poorest countries following the Korean War (1950-1953). The rapid economic growth was dubbed the “miracle on the Han river.’ Many economists and specialists of world affairs have identified the contributing factors to be the political will of leadership, Korean people’s mentality based on Confucius ethics and morals, and patriotism or healthy

1! See Chapter 6 for details. '? See Chapter 6 for details.

xviii Prologue nationalism (Siruk, 2015). As a Korean native, I am in agreement on these factors. However, I believe that the powerhouse was more than those factors and that the driving force behind the rapid economic success of South Korea was the Korean writing system, Hangul, which is consistent with Logan’s (2004) claim of the alphabet effect, or the co-use of Hangul and Hanja (traditional Chinese characters that are additionally used in South Korea; see Chapter 12 for the advantage of bi- or multi-script use). This claim becomes reasonable because nothing like the “miracle on the Han river” was materialized in history, even though the Koreans had strong leadership, such as King Sejong, in early years; Confucianism has been around since more than 600 years ago; and patriotism also manifested in earlier years, such as the March Ist Movement in 1919 during the Japanese imperialism (1910-1945). It is conceivable that the success was galvanized particularly by the high literacy rate of the Korean public due to Hangul’s high learnability and the alphabet effect. Using the insider’s emic view, I have developed my personal observation into a scientific discussion of script relativity (etic) so that other researchers can expand on this hypothesis to other languages and cultures.

The impetus for this book is to unpack the fundamental differences between the East and the West with respect to linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cultural dimensions. In essence, I have distilled all my curiosities down into script relativity, thinking that it is the hidden drive of the differences across cultures. Some may find my claim to be grossly exaggerated or oversimplified, especially given the prematurely and inadequately dismissed linguistic relativity hypothesis”? by many psychologists in the 1960s through the 1980s. However, others may think that it makes (perfect) sense in many respects because the fundamental claim of script relativity fulfills a competitive plausibility among other possible assertions.

Another impetus for this book is to be optimistic for the future of the world for two reasons. First, as briefly mentioned earlier, we use digitally mediated texts more than ever before. Digital texts and Internet materials tend to include both words and images with overt and covert subliminal messages and advertisements. As research shows, words (the alphabet in particular) are processed in the left hemisphere, while images are processed in the right hemisphere (Dehaene, 2009). This will make our brains more balanced within the parameter. Second, several writing systems have adopted bi-script or multi-script use, such as Pinyin (Romanized Chinese), Kana and Romaji (Romanized Japanese), Aralish (Romanized Arabic), and Romanagari (Romanized Devangari). This may make us move toward convergence, rather than divergence, of the world because the degree of script effects would be decreased with the commonality that penetrates through written languages available on the globe.