Disaffiliation from Jewish Ultra-Orthodox Communities: Life Trajectories Shaped by the Axes of Rigidity-Fluidity and Alterity-Inclusion.

Increasing numbers of young Israelis annually leave the enclave of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. Relying on 16 in-depth interviews, we examine the effects of this disaffiliation on life trajectories and identity reconstruction of individuals who left their society of origin two decades ago. This unveiled a multistep longitudinal process, characterized by moving in and out of various structural stages, coupled with disaffiliates' agency to highlight specific sociocultural characteristics or the more universal nature of the human condition. The life course of disaffiliates begins with a phase of early struggle with the immediate tolls of disaffiliation, followed by a formative period marked by two steps: military service and acquisition of higher education. Here disaffiliates practice adoption of increasingly inclusive identities, in which the past and present are enmeshed. The formative period is followed by three alternative trajectories: (a) adherence to restrictive Israeli conformity, (b) ongoing search for singularity, and (c) integration of ultra-Orthodox heritage with contemporary Israeli realities. The disaffiliation trajectory from the ultra-Orthodox society is embedded in particular sociocultural, political, and historical contexts. However, narratives of disaffiliates adhere to frameworks of cultural Jewish-Israeli particularism, as much as to those of human universalism, plugging in to certain universal themes of the human condition, namely rigidity, fluidity, alterity, and inclusion.

Simultaneous Normalization and Compensatory Changes in Right Hemisphere Connectivity during Aphasia Therapy.

Changes in brain connectivity during language therapy were examined among participants with aphasia (PWA), aiming to shed light on neural reorganization in the language network. Four PWA with anomia following left hemisphere stroke and eight healthy controls (HC) participated in the study. Two fMRI scans were administered to all participants with a 3.5-month interval. The fMRI scans included phonological and semantic tasks, each consisting of linguistic and perceptual matching conditions. Between the two fMRI scans, PWA underwent Phonological Components Analysis treatment. Changes in effective connectivity during the treatment were examined within right hemisphere (RH) architecture. The results illustrate that following the treatment, the averaged connectivity of PWA across all perceptual and linguistic conditions in both tasks increased resemblance to HC, reflecting the normalization of neural processes associated with silent object name retrieval. In contrast, connections that were specifically enhanced by the phonological condition in PWA decreased in their resemblance to HC, reflecting emerging compensatory reorganization in RH connectivity to support phonological processing. These findings suggest that both normalization and compensation play a role in neural language reorganization at the chronic stage, occurring simultaneously in the same brain.

Morphological decomposition compensates for imperfections in phonological decoding. Neural evidence from typical and dyslexic readers of an opaque orthography.

The current study examined the widely held, but un-tested, assumption that morphological decomposition can compensate for missing phonological information in reading opaque orthographies. In addition, we tested whether morphological decomposition can compensate for the phonological decoding deficits in readers with dyslexia. Hebrew provides a unique opportunity to test these questions as it has a rich Semitic morphology, and two versions of script: a transparent orthography (with diacritic marks, 'pointed') and an opaque orthography (without diacritic marks, 'un-pointed'). In two experiments, one behavioral and one fMRI, skilled and dyslexic readers read aloud Hebrew nouns: half bi-morphemic (root + pattern) and half mono-morphemic (non-decomposable). Each word was presented both in the transparent orthography (pointed), and in the opaque orthography (un-pointed). While skilled readers were faster, and showed no effects of diacritics or morphology, dyslexic readers read pointed words more slowly than un-pointed words and bi-morphemic words faster than mono-morphemic words. The imaging results showed: 1) In both groups a morphological effect was found in un-pointed words, in left inferior and middle frontal gyri, associated with morpho-phonological decomposition. 2) Only readers with dyslexia showed a morphological effect in pointed words in the left occipito-temporal cortex, associated with orthographic processing. 3) Dyslexic readers also showed a positive association between morphological awareness and activation in the left occipito-temporal cortex during reading of all words, and activation in inferior frontal cortex during reading of un-pointed bi-morphemic words. Altogether, these findings suggest that in both typical and dyslexic readers morphological decomposition can compensate for the missing phonological information in an opaque orthography. The results also show that readers with dyslexia can rely on morphological decomposition to compensate for their deficits in phonological decoding. Finally, these results highlight the way in which unique language specific properties shape the neural mechanisms underlying typical and atypical reading.