RE: RT list: question to D Wilson

Hi Alessandro,

I think it's generally assumed that there are specific parts of the mind which deal with writing and reading. Your email reminds me of cases of 'word blindness' and 'word deafness'. In the former case, subjects looked at written symbols and reported that they couldn't make sense of them but when asked to read them aloud were able to do this quite easily. In the latter case, subjects reported that speech made no sense to them but were able to write down what they were 'hearing' when asked. Sorry I don't know primary references on this but I remember reading about these in Gerry Altmann's 'The Ascent of Babel'.

Hope you don't mind me commenting on the question addressed to Deirdre. There are fairly straightforward cases like this in other areas, aren't there? e.g. I can measure two lines and 'work out' that they're roughly the same length (or different lengths) or I can 'see' this via my vision module. Mismatches between these provide evidence for the existence of a vision module. Arguably, similar mismatches exist between the output of 'spontaneous' pragmatic processes and more careful reasoning (e.g. questions which trip us up such as 'How many animals of each type did Moses take into the ark?')

Hope this helps.

Best wishes,

Billy
 

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk on behalf of Alessandro Capone
Sent: Tue 6/2/2009 11:41 AM
To: relevance@linguistics.ucl.ac.uk
Cc:
Subject: RT list: question to D Wilson

I have been reading

New directions for research on pragmatics and modularity.

A propos of dedicated modules, a friend of mine has had a stroke and
received damage in the brain:

as a result (among other things), she can no longer read or write written
texts - yet we can speak fluently and understand as any other normal human
being (with the difference that she gets tired ).

So, should we deduce there is a module or submodule for written symbols?

Now a question to D Wilson:

suppose that interrpetation e of utterance U in context C can be obtained
through two different strategies:

Inference through central systems: we call e'

Inference through a dedicated inferential module : we call e''

In order to avoid having two different processes for the same inference,
we need to say that e' is slower than e'' and that once e'' is ready, the
mechanims resulting in e' is blocked.

Presumably cognitive effort is involved in this.

But can we exclude cases when the two processes converge and one process
checks what the other has done?

Also we need to specify when the central system processes prevail - that
is when conscious inferential mechanisms are activated.

alessandro
Received on Tue Jun 2 12:10:11 2009