cortical linguistics
 
Kortikale Linguistik                    DEUTSCH

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Günter Kochendörfer

Cortical Linguistics

(internet publication)

Part 2: Foundations
                    

Abstract

The cortex may be viewed as a universal computing system and language may be structured in a manner arbitrarily distant from the hardware (without ever becoming independent from hardware characteristics). Under the assumption of great hardware distance it would be rather irrelevant for a linguist to consider cortical structures. Nevertheless, a scientifically more fruitful hypothesis is that language has developed using principles of cortical structures also found in other domains of performance.

If we adopt the hypothesis of language being structured close to the hardware, we must first face the problem of representation in the cortex of any contents, that is, not only linguistic ones, in a general way. Opinions about this topic differ greatly. If we take the linguistic perspective, we may recognize similarities between the general problem of representation and some central concepts of linguistic semantics, especially prototype theory.

It follows from the characteristics of computing in the cortex, that we always have to treat the representation of contents and the learning processes belonging to them together with processes of production and perception. This means that we must emphasise understanding the production processes (top-down access to representations, formation of imaginations, etc.)

 

Last update 6/15/2003