🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sep 9, 8:22 pm, "rs...@nycap.rr.com" <rs...@nycap.rr.com> wrote:
> On Sep 2, 6:06 am, Doug Morse <mo...@edoug.org> wrote:
>
> > What is the difference between language and concept, or are they the
> > same thing?  Does language build on a conceptual system?  Or perhaps
> > concepts emerge from or are a byproduct of linguistic representation
> > and processing?  Most of all, what is a good definition of "concept"
> > or "conceptual representation and processing", especially from a
> > psychological, neuroscience, and linguistic point of view?  I find
> > that these research areas routinely invoke the notion of concepts and
> > conceptual processing, but a decent definition of them -- let alone a
> > solid one -- seems terribly elusive.  So, thoughts and sources on this
> > would be great to hear about.
>
> Since you cross-posted this to bionet.neuroscience perhaps we can talk
> a little about how language comes to be before we chatter about
> concepts. Of course, we can only speculate, since practically nothing
> is known.
>
> I speculate that the motor program generators that produce phonemes
> are centered in the parvicellular reticular nucleus (dorsolateral
> hindbrain) with vocalization in general. The circuitry is constructed
> by the genome. As the circuitry matures, the infant produces baby
> talk. I am told, by those who study such things, that all the phonemes
> that appear in adult language appear in baby talk. Is this not so? In
> any event, I speculate that there is no "learning" of baby talk; the
> neural circuitry just matures.

You're confusing "speech sound" with phoneme. Infants, it is said,
initially babble all the noises it's possible for a vocal tract to
make, but in a very short time they home in on just the particular
speech sounds heard in their environment. Eventually, as they acquire
their first langauge(s), they organize the speech sounds into the
sound system of their native language(s), and that sound system is
made up of its phonemes.

> I say we talk by genomic inheritance; we learn a language.
>
> I speculate that the phonemes are sequenced by circuitry that starts
> in Broca's and Wernicke's areas of the neocortex. The sequenced motor
> program(s) proceed via the thalamus to the motor area of the cortex
> and a motor act (spoken language) ensues.
>
> Those who would speak of "concepts" should ask themselves whether this
> is important, or is it just part of the "learning" of language, a
> process in which the neurons adjust themselves to the sounds that come
> in. A process that is terribly, terribly difficult in detail, but
> simple in "concept".

Language is more than sounds. Language is "duality of
patterning" (whereby a limited set of meaningless things -- phonemes
-- combine into an indefinitely large set of meaningful things --
morphemes -- that combine into communicative utterances).