🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sep 10, 12:56 am, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Sep 9, 8:22 pm, "rs...@nycap.rr.com" <rs...@nycap.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > 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.

Confused? I don't think so. The infant babbles not all the noises,
etc., but only that small subset that the genome has expressed itself
in the circuitry of motor program generators. I choose to call the
motor acts of babbling phonemes. That is my choice. This is a free
country.

The experience of hearing language produces a most complicated set of
strengthened synapses, weakened synapses, formation of new synapses,
and sloughing of old synapses. This corpus together with our own
speech acts produces a difference signal. The genome has programmed
the nervous system to reduce this difference. We tend to reproduce the
dialect of our village.

The details of  "reduce this difference" lie in the future of
neuroscience. In some decade, or century, a grad student will work it
out. I have confidence. The accumulation of the above corpus is a
lifetime process. When we first hear "stand on line" rather than
"stand in line", or "try and" rather than "try to", we are so
conscious or our nervous system making adjustments.

> 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.

Some people hear one soul (mind, homunculus, executive function)
attempting to communicate with another. That is an entirely different
story, and lies outside neuroscience. At least I judge it so.

If you are interested in the nervous system, you might look at:
http://home.nycap.rr.com/rscanlon/brain/brain.htm
For a conjecture on how the nervous system might work.

Ray