On 12/10/2012 5:03 AM, Mike Tintner wrote:
The real lesson here, Jim is the end:
"We suggest that iconicity provides scaffolding – a middle-ground – to
bridge the "great divide" between linguistic form and bodily
experience for both sign language and spoken language learners," says
Thompson.
I would put my own take on this:
Language IS “sign language”/ “iconic” - words are, in a qualified
sense, irrelevant – a linguistic/conceptual system is basically a
system of iconic signs – “outlines” of objects and groups of objects.
“Analog” not digital. To grasp that involves a massive cultural leap
which is happening and unstoppable.
I should add that I am just getting into reading about the argument
for the origins of language in sign language which is a strong one and
very extensively argued and debated – and I suspect like much other
crucial science, largely unknown to AGI-ers.
That's right, Mike. We do not think in terms of language. We think in
terms of concepts, which are referred by language.
*From:* Jim Bromer <mailto:[email protected]>
*Sent:* Monday, December 10, 2012 3:52 AM
*To:* AGI <mailto:[email protected]>
*Subject:* Re: [agi] The road to language learning is iconic
Blind children can learn language too.
Jim Bromer
On Sun, Dec 9, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Mike Tintner
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
The road to language learning is iconic
November 13th, 2012 in Psychology & Psychiatry
*Languages are highly complex systems and yet most children seem
to acquire language easily, even in the absence of formal
instruction. New research on young children's use of British Sign
Language (BSL) sheds light on one of the mechanisms -iconicity-
that may endow children with this amazing ability.*
For spoken and written language, the arbitrary relationship
between a word's form – how it sounds or how it looks on paper –
and its meaning is a particularly challenging feature of language
acquisition. But one of the first things people notice about sign
languages is that signs often represent aspects of meaning in
their form. For example, in BSL the sign EAT involves bringing the
hand to the mouth just as you would if you were bringing food to
the mouth to eat it.
In fact, a high proportion of signs across the world's sign
languages are similarly iconic, connecting human experience to
linguistic form.
Robin Thompson and colleagues David Vison, Bencie Woll, and
Gabriella Vigliocco at the Deafness, Cognition and Language
Research Centre (DCAL) at University College London in the United
Kingdom wanted to examine whether this kind of iconicity might
provide a key to understanding how children come to link words to
their meaning.
Their findings are published in/Psychological Science/, a journal
of the Association for Psychological Science.
The researchers looked at data from 31 deaf children who were
being raised in deaf BSL signing families in the United Kingdom.
Parents indicated the number of words understood and produced by
their children between the ages of 8 and 30 months. The
researchers decided to focus on 89 specific signs, examining
children's familiarity with the signs as well as the iconicity and
complexity of the signs.
The findings reveal that younger (11-20 months) and older (21-30
months) children comprehended and produced more BSL signs that
were iconic than those that were less iconic. And the benefit of
iconicity seemed to be greater for the older children.
Importantly, this relationship did not seem to depend on how
familiar, complex or concrete the words were.
Together, these findings suggest that iconicity could play an
important role in language acquisition.
Thompson and colleagues hypothesize that iconic links between our
perceptual-motor experience of the world and the form of a sign
may provide an imitation-based mechanism that supports early sign
acquisition. These iconic links highlight motor and perceptual
similarity between actions and signs such as DRINK, which is
produced by tipping a curved hand to the mouth and represents the
action of holding a cup and drinking from it.
The researchers emphasize that these results can also be applied
to spoken languages, in which gestures, tone of voice, inflection,
and face-to-face communication can help make the link between
words and their meanings less arbitrary.
"We suggest that iconicity provides scaffolding – a middle-ground
– to bridge the "great divide" between linguistic form and bodily
experience for both sign language and spoken language learners,"
says Thompson.
Provided by Association forPsychological Science
"The road to language learning is iconic." November 13th,
2012.http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-11-road-language-iconic.html
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