Noam Chomsky proposed his ■Language Acquisition Device to explain human learning of language. People are most flexible until some 14 years old. As nobody can merely memorize it, there has to be a logical capacity in the process.
Chomsky named it a device. Dictionaries have a device for something devised, or a faculty that devises.
The 20th century mostly insisted on specialization. Researchers had to work the particular or were rejected as unscientific. Psychology went apart from linguistics, and neurology was held for distinct from endocrine lore. Human speech was stated to belong with two brain areas, ■Broca and ■Wernicke.
Let us view the Wernicke and Broca along with brain secondary or gnostic areas. ■Henry Gray had the tissue for “psychic”.
Why have “gnostic” or “psychic” brain areas? The brain uses the primary sensory tissues when receiving sense data. These work very similar in people. It is with the secondary cortex that differences may occur. They would be ontogenetic, that is, come with the living experience.
The names, “psychic” or “gnostic”, are to tell — the sensory knowledge is the way a particular person has developed it. The Greek gnosis means knowledge.
A baker view to bread is different from the look a buyer gives it. A painter may appreciate a landscape in tint, and a farmer in crops. Two bakers, artists, or farmers are likely to have two individual pictures.
■→Broca area
Polygon Data, Wikimedia Creative Commons BY-SA JP
Broca belongs with brain gnostic matter for bodily movement.
■→Wernicke area
Polygon Data, Wikimedia Creative Commons BY-SA JP
Wernicke belongs with parietal associative tissue to neighbor on personal gnosis for hearing and eyesight.
Broca and Wernicke do not work in isolation. They work with brain broader cytostructure. We derive the word shape “cyto-” from Greek, for a bodily cell. Wernicke works with parietal, occipital, and temporal types of gray matter.
■→Parietal cytostructure
Polygon Data, Wikimedia Creative Commons BY-SA 2.1 JP
Damage to parietal function may cause dysphasia/aphasia, dyslexia, apraxia, and agnosia. All these are speech and language or related disorders, read more over ■→Wikipedia.
■→Occipital cytostructure
Polygon Data, Wikimedia Creative Commons BY-SA 2.1 JP
Occipital cytostructure has the primary and gnostic visual tissue for reading and writing. In language form recognition, humans can be highly individual. About the lobe, read more over ■→Wikipedia.
■→Temporal cytostructure
Polygon Data, Wikimedia Creative Commons BY-SA 2.1 JP
Temporal gray cells have the primary and gnostic ability for hearing to include spoken language. ■→Wikipedia makes reference for visual processing as well, but for language it would result from Wernicke function.
Frontal lobes generally, not only motor secondary areas, are going to matter in our picture for brain language capability. We would not be able to say or write even one A or B, without goal-oriented thinking.
■→Frontal cytostructure
Polygon Data, Wikimedia ■→Creative Commons BY-SA JP
The convention is to recognize four major regions of gray.
Image based on ■→Gray, Wikimedia Commons.
These major brain areas do not work as standalone “units” either, and humans have evolved language in earthly reality. Without any thought to time and space, human languages would become so different that maybe we would not have them for human anymore.
The limbic system is part in human orienting responses of psychological components, as in the decision making when we look around, pick up a text, choose to abandon it or to read on. Limbic feedback with the frontal lobes is part our awareness of ourselves.
■→The limbic system
Blausen, Wikimedia ■→Creative Commons license BY 3.0.
The brainstem relays for the gray tissue, as well as the autonomic nervous system. It is very important in cognitive mapping. The mapping is part in our building own egos and language skills.
■→The brainstem
Blausen, Wikimedia ■→Creative Commons license BY 3.0.
I prefer the notion of a human language faculty, over the Language Acquisition Device. Language skill needs the brain entire, and that regardless of age.
Feel welcome to read,
■→1. Neurophysiology of feedback
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Notes for Emily Dickinson’s poetry
Fascicles and print, the poetic correlative with Webster 1828, Latin and Greek inspiration, and an Aristotelian motif, Things perpetual — these are not in time, but in eternity. ■More
We are well into the 21st century now. Language and psychology have gotten along together well, as psycholinguistics. The discipline emerged in the second half of the 20th century, heart and reason against behaviorism. Even if our knowledge on human brains and languages is very general, we can comprehend this simple argument.
The brain does not have a singular superior structure we could call “the boss”. Brains make inner networks. One time, one network or its part is more active. Another time, it is another network or part of a network.
Whether to invoke a soul, a personality, or brain ■→epiphenomenon (when extremely tired), the human person orients and re-orients for own activity without a permanently dominant gyrus or sulcus. To entertain a political metaphor, brain structures would be more of a democracy. There is no king or queen tissue to preside.
The above is neither to ■→refute, nor to ■→aver on spirituality. As a broken leg is no proof the human never could walk, brain injury is no evidence there is nothing more to human heads than tissue. The other way round, runner or dancer legs are no evidence the person could walk just anywhere. As a vista is not the true landscape, human thought is not an immortal or eternal mind.
Brains make inner networks within human individual experience, also for purely intellectual experience. There is no universal way to see, hear, feel, or think, and behaviorist methods, that is, stimulation, may provide fragmentary features — yet unable to explain proficient language skill. Quality would be too much to give up on.
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Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry
The epsilon, predicate structure, vowel contour, phonemics, person reference in abstract thought, and altogether stylistic coherence, for manuscripts and print, piece-by-piece. ■More
This is why I do not see sense in recognizing “devices” in the brain and scanning them for parameters. Proficiency can be attained only via learning, never via a physiological or physical mend. Infant brain scans for example, cannot tell anything about the very same person’s language skill in just a few years. Feel welcome to read:
■→Apples on noses.
There is yet sense to make logic that human brains can use. Here is some grammar tactics for American English,
■→Grammar Weblog, Travel in Grammar.
■→This text is also avaialble in Polish.
Poems by Emily Dickinson prepared for print by Teresa Pelka: thematic stanzas, notes on the Greek and Latin inspiration, the correlative with Webster 1828, and the Aristotelian motif, Things perpetual — these are not in time, but in eternity.
■PDF Free Access, Internet Archive
