This is fascinating because in the 1980s when there was nearly a trade war between the US & Japan, part of the rhetoric from Japan was that their symbol-based system was superior to Western alphabets in that it used a different part of the brain and therefore somehow enhanced intelligence.
My own testimony is that my English-based handwriting (my native and only language) has gotten progressively worse due to using a keyboard daily for years instead of using pen & paper. It's also frustrating, because it's slower. It feels like labor now.
While language does not limit or boost what is expressible, conceivable or knowable it does impose a default in how we structure the world and what details we take in as important. There was a fairly interesting article in the NYT recently that goes over this. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...
What I found interesting were the accounts on a particular tribe of Australian aborigines who had an amazing sense of cardinal direction - instantly knowing north from south regardless of orientation due to a language based on geographic instead of egocentric directions and the Matses people whose precision in relaying past events would make a Vulcan logician proud.
Intrigued I researched this concept to be evidentiality and epistemic modality. Enforcing such reporting precision into the grammar seems like it would combat sloppy thinking. I wonder if someone raised in such a language would have an easier time creating proofs, programming or studying subjects like bayesian probability or philosophy. I wonder how marketing would work in such a default. I bet statistics would not be a form of lying in that culture.
"Kana are read phonetically and kanji are read visually, with a dissociation between the processes involved, according to Morton & Sasanuma and popular Japanese belief. (This must be a little awkward in reading pages of mixed text, surely?) Nomura found that meaning was extracted faster from kanji than kana words, and thought that kana pronunciation was data-driven and that kanji pronunciation was conceptually-driven. Morton & Sasanuma (1982) also claimed that evidence supports the intuitive belief that kanji can give direct access to the meaning of words, but that kana always require translation into a phonological code when they are being read, and there is no development of automatic visual recognition of the kana symbols. One of the most intriguing ways of studying what differences there may really be in processing is in observing brain-damaged patients - following certain lesions some patients can still read kana but not kanji, while other insults to the brain leave the ability to read kanji but not kana."
My own testimony is that my English-based handwriting (my native and only language) has gotten progressively worse due to using a keyboard daily for years instead of using pen & paper. It's also frustrating, because it's slower. It feels like labor now.