Aurreko ekintzak: Marieke Longcamp. Cognitive and neural correlates of writing acquisition and practice

What: Cognitive and neural correlates of writing acquisition and practice

Where: BCBL Auditorium and  zoom Room # 2 (If you would like to attend to this meeting reserve at info@bcbl.eu)

Who: Marieke Longcamp. PhD, Full Professor, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitive, Aix-Marseille Université, Marseille, France

When:  Thursday,  Apr 27th at 12:00 PM noon.

Writing is a complex linguistic and motor skill that requires years of training to be fully mastered. I will present the results of two recent projects where we investigated the cognitive and neural correlates of writing acquisition and practice. In the first project, we studied the development of handwriting through fMRI and digitizing tablet recordings in children aged 8-11 years and in adults, focusing on the relationship between orthographic and graphomotor processes. The results highlight a shift in control mechanisms with age allowing progressive integration of orthographic information during writing. In the second project, we studied Latin-Arabic biscriptuality, a specific case of writing practice. Biscriptuals are trained to write at an early age in two different scripts. Compared to monoscriptual training, biscriptual training imposes stronger constraints on motor and executive functions. I will describe two experiments suggesting that these constraints have long-term consequences on graphomotor control. Altogether, these data contribute to our understanding of how writing skills become grounded in the brain.