Attention and Language

The most important thing I have learned in working on this blog has been the relationship between language and attention. Language, I have concluded, works by sharing and directing attention to a topic. It is really that simple, yet it is rich in implications.EvolvabilityAttention is widespread in the animal world and all primates, certainly all apes, are well endowed with the ability to direct their attention to different points in their environment and stay focused on a task for an undefined length of time. Thus, any special human attention tasks such as joint-attention, interactive attention, etc. that language might demand only call for tweaks of the system, not wholly new mechanisms. Anybody interested in language origins should find this approach to language simplifies the evolutionary puzzles.Demystify meaningMeaning has always been a mysterious concept, rather like that of the soul, only meaning is the soul of the word rather than the body. How does meaning get into a word or sentence in the first place. Is it in the speaker ’s head? Does the sound carry meaning to the listener’s head? Or is the meaning outside the body altogether?These questions, which come up when considering thought experiments like theChinese Room, carry their own alarm bells. Where is the meaning? That question can only make sense if meaning is a thing. We can get rid of the confusion if we say meaning is not a thing but a response. Words pilot attention. All the many mysteries about where me...

Source: Babel's Dawn - June 11, 2017 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Authors: Blair Source Type: blogs