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.