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"Words are the natural evolutionary product of the functioning of the brain. The forms of individual words are not arbitrary but directly derived from and related to the meaning of the words."
"Speech is the result of an evolutionary exaptation: the establishment in humans of a direct connection between the cortical motor control system and the articulatory apparatus(see Jürgens)"
"In the evolution of language, shapes or objects seen, sounds heard, and actions perceived or performed, generated neural motor programs which, on transfer to the vocal apparatus, produced words structurally correlated with the perceived shapes, objects, sounds and actions."
"The motor program generating the word, an articulatory gesture, also generates an equivalent bodily gesture. Gesture mediates between word-structure and word-meaning. In the case of a different word in a different language for the same meaning, a similar final gesture is generated by a different intermediate trajectory associated with different speech-sound elements going to form the different word."
"The gesture associated with the meaning of any word can be observed by mentally transferring the sound-structure of the word (the articulatory gesture) to the musculature of the arms."
"Children are able to acquire words effortlessly, that is to link a word to an object or action, because, when the motor control system has sufficiently matured, the neural motor program generated by the perception of the particular object or action is matched instantaneously with the equivalent motor program generated on hearing the word which, in the particular language community, is structurally derived from the perceived object or action."
Words for butterfly in different languages derive from the characteristic
flight pattern. The words generate a bodily gesture mirroring the action. For
swan, elephant and giraffe, the words and gestures derive from distinctive visual
features.
POWERPOINT PRESENTATIONS [transcriptions]:
LOS: Motor Theory ESSCS: Motor Control and Language Function Motor control references "Language allows us to analyse (decompose, mirror) the structure of our actions, to identify
the neural sub-actions constituting the total action."
"There is a Lexicon of Actions from which the lexicon of words is derived"
Anatomizing mind
CHAMELEON THEORY OF PERCEPTION All bodily movements are changes in posture - and posture is body-image. We visualise any movement (of arm, leg, head, hand, mouth) as a change in body-image, a change in posture - the movement brings our actual posture into coincidence with our visualised new body-image, visualised posture. ... Perception appears to be a process similar to that by which the chameleon changes its bodily state to match its background. Perception (on the chameleon theory) is internal ordering guided by external ordering. The perception of speech and the perception of gesture are aspects of this chameleon-process. Ideomotor action is the reverse process. Both stem from the integration of the motor system and perception.
[Extract from R. Allott 1994. Gestural Equivalence of Language LOS UCAL Berkeley]
cf. Merleau-Ponty, M. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception(Trans). "Every external perception is immediately synonymous with a certain perception of my body... The theory of the body schema is, implicitly, a theory of perception".
Also cf. "embodied simulation" in Gallese, V. 2003. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. (1431):517-28.
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REFLECTION: Language for Good or Evil text
