Recently listened to this brain science podcast interviewing cognitive linguist Ben Bergen (UCSD,COG SCI). Basically how we retrieve word meaning is a puzzle. Before, people have proposed the dictionary like approach and the mental language kind of approach, both have some internal logical problems. Now Bergen's point about embodied cognition is simple: when we interpret the semantic value of a sentence, our brain try to re-create a virtual experience that the language has coded. This idea is not new: we know from other areas of neurocognition that the brain parts responsible for, for example, imagining something and actually seeing it are the same. This comes from what is known as the Perky effect, where seeing an actual banana interferes with imagining seeing the same banana on the wall. (alternatively, you can get priming effect when the timing of one precedes another). One evidence that this is the case with language processing is that, people with lesions in the visual cortex will have impaired processing of visual words as well. Another point he brought up is that, syntactic structures also have meaning: the two ways of saying the same thing usually are not exactly identical semantically and pragmatically. That is the effect
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
NEWSLOG
|