**2. Literacy effect on the processing of linguistic and non-linguistic materials**

According to the neural recycling hypothesis, literacy acquisition reshapes the processing of linguistic and non-linguistic materials (e.g., faces). Without a doubt literacy acquisition impacts the linguistic materials owing to that the brain structures of faces and objects are engaged in the representation of words.

#### **2.1 Literacy effect on the processing of linguistic materials**

Literacy acquisition is a milestone for human civilization. It is well-documented that literacy acquisition modulates our ability to deal with linguistic information [7], such as word repetition, speech segmentation, and character identification. For example, using an auditory-verbal repetition paradigm, Petersson et al. revealed that literates performed better than their illiterate counterparts in the pseudo-word repetition task [8]. Also, Morais et al. showed that ex-illiterates, who attended classes of elementary instruction during adulthood, were superior to the illiterate in multiple speech segmentation tasks [9]. Besides, Duñabeitia et al. found that, in two perceptual matching tasks, literates showed great sensitivity to changes in the letter position (i.e., transposed-characters) and identity (i.e., replaced-characters) of a character, whereas illiterates were less sensitive to these changes [10]. These findings suggested that literacy acquisition has a profound influence on processing different linguistic aspects, and the supportive evidence mostly is obtained in the monolingual context.
