AbstractBehavioral studies showed that AS, an English-Japanese bilingual, was a skilled reader in Japanese but was a phonological dyslexic in English. This behavioral dissociation was accounted for by the Hypothesis of Transparency and Granularity postulated by Wydell and Butterworth. However, a neuroimaging study using magnetoencephalography (MEG) revealed that AS has the same functional deficit in the left superior temporal gyrus (STG). This paper therefore offers an answer to this intriguing discrepancy between the behavioral dissociation
and the neural unityin AS by reviewing existing behav-ioral and neuroimaging studies in alphabetic languages such as English, Finnish, French, and Italian, and nonal-phabetic languages such as Japanese and Chinese. KeywordsLanguage universality, specificity.Reading processes.Behavioral dissociation.Neural unity.
English-Japanese bilingual.Magnetoencephalography. Dyslexia