暗微幽光

Like the color of hairs or the allergy to special substance, language is suggested to be a genetic mechanism created by a long evoluation process. This concept is the agreement for many scientific disciplines that explore human nature being able to communicate with language. As Marc Hauser and Thomas Bever emphasize, human neural system make us learn and use our knowledge of language seperated from the other abilities to communicate. This biological aspect of language surrounds the rules and constraints constituenting a mature individual’s knolwedge of language. All paricipanted scientific disciplines have the tasks to understand the acquisition and the mediation mechanism of these rules and constraints, to isolate the parts sharing with other animals, to trace their evolucation process, and to ask the usage of the knowledge in communicative expression. Hauser and Bever listed some study cases towarding these goals, but there is a far distance because each discipline has to break its boundary before connect with each other.

Take the issue of lexical processing I participant in as an example, there are many interesting topics waiting our investigations. Our goal is to illustrate the temporal relation between the lexical property of words and the reading performance. A pressumption under this goal is that our knowledge of language underlying the processing decides the temporal relation. The known temporal relations just cover parts of rules and constraints identified by linguistists. One reason restricting us to look at a few temporal relation is the structure of exerpimental design. An observed effect on the performance needs an appropriate fit among variables, and the serach of such an effect usually costs a series of experiments. We have broad image to connect our findings and other disciplines, but we have a extraordinary patient to accumulate the knowledge till the break of boundry. After all, the undating of scientific knolwedge is a slow process which most people are hard to understand in their daily life.