When we look at a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing to be processed. That’s the finding from a Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, which shows the brain learns words quickly by tuning neurons to respond to a complete word, not parts of it.
– Georgetown University Medical Center
Source: After learning new words, brain sees them as pictures I Medical Xpress
So if someone speaks a non-letter based language like Japanese, Chinese, or Korean… does this same area respond to the character/image which corresponds to a word… say “house” or “horse”?