LANGUAGE PROCESSING: A NEUROPSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Journal Title: Acta Neuropsychologica - Year 2009, Vol 7, Issue 2
Abstract
[b]SUMMARY[/b]This article addresses a basic theoretical problem of neu -ropsychology: the relation between memory and language. Standard accounts stress the importance of se mantic memory as a kind of passive lexicon, where words can be “looked up” as needed. While this aspect of the process is certainly important, the various memory and language systems in the brain are related to each other in far more complex ways. This becomes apparent when we realize that memory in turn is only part of an even larger problem, which is the experience of time. We do not yet really know how the brain manages time – or perhaps, as some theo -rists believe, creates it. The language-memory problem is an element of this problem, but it cannot be understood in isolation. In this article, the authors apply the microge -netic approach, which better frames the problems of time and consciousness, in order to create a back ground and foundation for further work on the brain-language pro -blem. Only in this way can we explain how it is not only possible, but indeed necessary for us to remember the “gist” of what is said, when we can hardly remember more than a handful of the words that were actually used. Naïve accounts of language processing in the brain fail to account for the way meaning is remembered largely (but not entirely) independent of the concrete words spoken.
Authors and Affiliations
Leszek Bulinski, Maria Pachalska, Jason Brown
Keywords
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