24/09/2008 by admin.

A Sciencedaily article, Scientists Watch As Listener’s Brain Predicts Speaker’s Words, is about the prediction of the next word to be uttered by a listener. This has a bearing on the question about how much of our language is conscious; it appears that it is probably similar to any other perception or motor aspect of our lives.

“Previous theories have proposed that listeners can only keep pace with the rapid rate of spoken language—up to 5 syllables per second—by anticipating a small subset of all words known by the listener, much like Google search anticipates words and phrases as you type. This subset consists of all words that begin with the same sounds, such as “candle”, “candy,” and “cantaloupe,” and makes the task of understanding the specific word more efficient than waiting until all the sounds of the word have been presented. But until now, researchers had no way to know if the brain also considers the meanings of these possible words…

‘We had to figure out a way to catch the brain doing something so fast that it happens literally between spoken syllables,’ says Michael Tanenhaus, the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor…

‘Frankly, we’re amazed we could detect something so subtle,” says Aslin. “But it just makes sense that your brain would do it this way. Why wait until the end of the word to try to figure out what its meaning is? Choosing from a little subset is much faster than trying to match a finished word against every word in your vocabulary.’…

It seems that although language is most often present in our consciousness - that the cognitive work that is behind the use of language is not revealed in consciousness. The meaning of words is available without being made conscious. Meaning does not rely of consciousness.

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07/08/2008 by admin.

What is the connection between consciousness and language? Some would say that they are two aspects of the same thing. Not me. I have conscious thoughts that I cannot express in language. I have had conscious thoughts that were difficult to put into words and when I did, I was disappointed that the words seemed to change the thought and somehow degraded the feel of it.

The whole sight and sound world is modeled in my consciousness without any need for language. My awareness of my emotions is not verbal. Of course I very often think a category or proper name word for something I recognize, but I don’t exactly need the word to do the recognition.

Fairly often in conversation (interesting, heated or complicated conversation), I say something and it is not in my consciousness until I hear it. So it seems that there is a lot of consciousness without language and some language without consciousness. They cannot be two aspects of the same thing.

On the other hand, I do have an inner voice that seems to narrate my life. And this narration seems very important to the nature of my conscious experience. Language seems to supply a majority of concepts and symbols to the thoughts I am conscious of. It seems to help tie together the stream of consciousness.

I feel four levels of speaking. One level is saying something out loud. How this is done is not in my consciousness. All that is conscious is knowledge of the intent and knowledge that the intent is being carried out. Occasionally, as mentioned above, I do not even have knowledge of the intent to say something. It is also rare for me to completely form the verbal string before speaking. I do not have knowledge of the intent to say a particular sentence, but rather the intent is to say some semi-verbal idea. How it gets to be a fully verbal idea is a bit of a mystery as it does not enter my consciousness.

A second level is that I can speak to myself. This is just the same as speaking out loud including the knowledge that the intent is being carried out. Everything is the same as saying something out loud except that there is no sound and no outward movement of the mouth. This seems to be a motor act but with the ‘volume’ turned down to next to nothing. So a normal linguistic string can be included in my consciousness by speaking to myself. Reading is similar; it produces a sort of speaking to myself.

A third level is what I would call a semi-verbal inner voice. There is no feeling of intent or of the intent being carried out. It does not seem a motor act. It does not seem a linguistic string. It is more like a mixture of words and other symbols and relationships between them. It does seem to be an early part of speaking because when I do speak, it is a bit of this semi-verbal inner voice stream that is picked out to become the object of the intent to speak and so ends up as a normal linguistic string being spoken. The bulk of that inner voice is never spoken out loud or to myself but remains semi-verbal.

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