Neuronal Recycling Hypothesis: 2. Word Tree
2009/12/27 at 6:47 am | Posted in Cognition, Reading, Thought | Leave a comment
Merry Word X'mas!
How do we organize the words we learned in our mind? Does our mind store the words like a dictionary? You can run an experiment with a dictionary. Read all of the words with initial ‘A’ then go to the bed. Count how many words you can recall after you get up. Undoubtfully you will have an embarrasing correct rate. Now we narrow the number of words you have to memorize and follow this clue: gather the words with the prefix “a-“. For example, you can read “acentric”, “asocial”, “amoral”, “anemia”, and so on for several times. You absolutely will perform bettern than the previous instruction. Why is it so? The key is that the downward stream from word, stems, and to letters organize a tree-like structure.
This trick implies the dictionary in mind, psycholinguists call “mental lexicon”, storing the materials composing the words rather than the word itself. When a letter string inputs our mind, it generates the materials possibly filling in this string. ‘WORD’ could activate the entities of letters (D, O, R, W) and the entities of grams(WO, OR, RD, WOR, ORD). These entities serve the major function of reading, pronunciation and comprehension. This is why our English teachers usually give us the word list organizing in some morphological manner.
The main theme of the neuronal recycling hypothesis was organized by this sense of word tree. Based on Dehaene’s words, our neural system has the potential obtained from the evoluation to acquire the tree-structure of a word. The logic behind his words is simple: the information net linked by neurons fits this tree. Almost all the behavioaral and neuro-image studies of reading alphabetic words appeart to support his idea. But if you are a Chinese reader, you may ask if the mental lexicon of Chinese characer have a structure like the English word? Deheane and many psycholinguists agree this point. However, I agree their perspective only in part of theoretical points. What are the opinions different from their? I have to write the other two topics, “two routes for reading” and “Letterbox”, then I will have the way to figure out the strange parts on the picture of neuronal recycling hypothesis.
Neuronal Recycling Hypothesis: 1. Beginning of the story
2009/12/12 at 9:30 pm | Posted in Cognition, Language, Research, Teaching, Thought | Leave a comment
Almost a decade ago, I nearly engaged in the study of the number sense because of Stanislas Dehaene‘s wonderful introduction. This year he collected his and other reading researchers’ findings into the book “Reading in the Brain“. He attempts to build a theory covering the recent understanding across the behavioral experiments, the computational modeling, and the neuroscience on the reading.
I’d like to say his book is absolutely the best recommendation for the students who are searching the entry to the research of reading. His major claim atop all the topics in this book emphasizes the reading as the crystal of neural systems and cultures during generations of evolution. The core of his “neural recycling hypothesis” directs to that the reading capacities possessed by the modern human have been equipped in human gene pool generations ago. Since the first literature system was created, a variety of perished and alive cultures have developed the potential of these “language genes”. Every language loaded one reading culture in the world have a diverse variation on the spectrum of “phonological transcoding“. Inside the brains of these language users, the accumulated studies have revealed an “universal neural circuit” installed with a small accommodation for the cultural specificity. This is the first branch of evidence supporting the universal basis of the human languages. Dehanas’ second support come from the single cell studies of primate vision. The words that could be encoded by the readers’ brain of a language have the “perceptual advantage” which could easily activate the specific neurons in the human and apes brains.
These are the brief story of the first three chapters of this book and the keystone of the “neuronal recycling”. Realizing this hypothesis is helpful to wave the recent top reading studies together. On the other hand, the first three chapters illustrate Dehanas’ perspectives on the human cognition and culture: nature is priority to nurture; natural constraints decide the development of culture; the neural circuit serving human language have been matured thounds of years ago. You should be familiar with these perspectives if you have routinely recieved the news of the evolutional psychology, which have been criticized from the ontological to the empidemic problems. I will do a series of critical thinking on Dehanas’ perspectives in the following articles.
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