Does the brain process the characters of one language faster than the other?

Question

Disregard the fact that some languages may use more characters or words to portray the same item/thing.

Answer 1

Because it is used to it

Familiarity induces rich connections between visual cortex, memory, spatial interpretation and language centres. This enables us to process written word characteristics with rapidity such that when you read you no longer read "c" "a" "t" "cat" but see the word as a whole. People very fluent can read sentences at a time and some people are reported to read paragraphs at a time.

Lack of familiarity with a language or character set means that it has to go through different connections which are not as well entrenched in the brain, particularly different sections of the memory.

This is applicable with oriental character language, middle eastern characters, greek, cyrillic etc.

It is also seen in music. If you give a musician a piece written in a clef with which (s)he is unfamiliar (give a pianist something in alto clef for instance) they can understand it, but with some added difficulty. Their interpretation of it would usually be slower than their interpretation of something with which they are familiar.