4 ms·

From the article: > Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read... or when we use words while thinking — in technical t

From the article: > Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read... or when we use words while thinking — in technical terms, when we engage in endophasic activity. > This simple fact immediately raises the following crucial question: What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound? "Endophasic activity" is our "inner speech". A charitable interpretation of Andrea Moro's 16 person experiment is that they only included people with typical hearing. Experiments that target the atypical hearing cases may be crucial in understanding how the mind processes language. Indeed, the article goes on to state: > Among the questions this discovery raises: What kind of electrical activity is elaborated in a language network (one that includes the Broca’s area) by persons who have never been able to hear any sound from birth?

henearkr 6y ago
I think you misinterpreted the use of "endophasic activity" here, it just means that the speech is not real, that it is inner, or the brain not producing any real efferent output, just internal-bounded output. So, the study considers what happens when using linguistic thought without uttering words (aka inner speech), but it does not investigate the properties of the mind of people who do not experience inner speech. For the second quote, it is maybe closer to the subject I raised, but there can be an homologous of "inner speech" for mute or deaf people (e.g. visualizing linguistic cues), so there is still the possibility of a category of people with and another without these cues. Afaik, all these questions have been ignored by the study. Not that it's bad, I mean, they have to restrict to some narrower question at first if they want to publish without spending decades on it.
- sradman 6y ago
  It was the first time that I encountered the word "endophasic" so I looked it up before my first reply. It isn't included in my local dictionary but the first Google search result defines it as: > Being or pertaining to endophasia (internal, unvocalized speech). I only mentioned it so people didn't have to look it up like I had to; I don't think our interpretation differs. I quoted the first couple of sentences from the last three paragraphs of the article. Those paragraphs emphasize the exciting questions raised by this small study, including the important question you raised. To be fair I only read the article and I didn't search for the study but I look forward to reading the book: > This article is adapted from Andrea Moro’s book “Impossible Languages.”

henearkr 6y ago

I think you misinterpreted the use of "endophasic activity" here, it just means that the speech is not real, that it is inner, or the brain not producing any real efferent output, just internal-bounded output. So, the study considers what happens when using linguistic thought without uttering words (aka inner speech), but it does not investigate the properties of the mind of people who do not experience inner speech. For the second quote, it is maybe closer to the subject I raised, but there can be an homologous of "inner speech" for mute or deaf people (e.g. visualizing linguistic cues), so there is still the possibility of a category of people with and another without these cues. Afaik, all these questions have been ignored by the study. Not that it's bad, I mean, they have to restrict to some narrower question at first if they want to publish without spending decades on it.

sradman 6y ago
It was the first time that I encountered the word "endophasic" so I looked it up before my first reply. It isn't included in my local dictionary but the first Google search result defines it as: > Being or pertaining to endophasia (internal, unvocalized speech). I only mentioned it so people didn't have to look it up like I had to; I don't think our interpretation differs. I quoted the first couple of sentences from the last three paragraphs of the article. Those paragraphs emphasize the exciting questions raised by this small study, including the important question you raised. To be fair I only read the article and I didn't search for the study but I look forward to reading the book: > This article is adapted from Andrea Moro’s book “Impossible Languages.”