3 ms·

This also reveals thinking in a pre-verbal way and remembering it! Impressive.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
I don't think that's quite the right frame, it makes non-verbal people seem like automatons. Language and cognition are closely linked, but people who are non-verbal for reasons other than damage to that part of their brain still have the physical and mental structures in concrete ways. Their "language" may be completely unique to their mind, but they can still think and reason and remember.
- sillystuff 4y ago
  There was a girl who'd been kept in a room tied to a chair, and never spoken to / forbidden from making any sound, by her parents, since she was a toddler. She had virtually no language when she was discovered at age 13. She eventually learned additional vocabulary referring to physical objects, but she never grasped grammar. Yes, she had a lot of other psychological damage, but there appears to be critical periods in the acquisition of language. Keller's brilliance might never have been given voice if the attempt at teaching her language had occurred later. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-child-los-angeles-researchers https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-...
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yes that's very insightful on some of the mechanics of language acquisition and the later impact on language fluency of missing that window. It does not show that thinking or memory are absent before language acquisition or in people who never acquire it, which was implied by the comment I was responding to. Keller's ability to communicate to others would certainly have been limited or absent if she hadn't had the opportunities in youth she had. But she still would have been able to form and recall memories, and engage with her own mind in some totally-opaque-to-us way.
    - sillystuff 4y ago
      Yes, I wasn't commenting on thinking and memory in non-verbal humans or non-human animals, for that matter; it seems obvious, to me, that these are present. I'm just not sure thinking in images and other sensations without words can be called language? While writing this, I was reminded of some children (ages 6 to 23), I used to interact with at a job (many years ago), who could hear but were non-verbal and communicated with fingerboards. They would string images together to form "sentences", and overload images on their fingerboards to use as names for people around them (and these image names often made semantic sense, describing an attribute of the person being named e.g., the person who drove their school bus referred to by a picture of a bus). They did understand varying amounts of spoken English which makes it ambiguous if this is really support of language without words, though. The concept of a language of images and other sensations without words as we know them is intriguing. Thanks for inspiring me take a few minutes to think about this more deeply.
Ancapistani 4y ago
Is it uncommon to remember pre-verbal cognition? I have a handful of vague memories of how I thought about the world before I could speak. It was very different from how I think today. I don't know how much of that difference is due to language versus physical development; I was probably around a year old at the time. These memories are difficult to describe. For instance - my concept of "door" was sort of a combination of the idea of a flat, vertical plane that pivoted from the right side, the idea of grabbing something (like a knob or handle), the idea of pulling toward myself, and a kind of parallax motion where my perspective moved left and the door moved toward me and to the right. Basically it was a partial mental image combined with an action. A noun and a verb. It wasn't a full image, though - I didn't picture a door, but rather was aware that the door existed. I didn't open the door in my mind's eye - I was too young to walk, so I'd obviously never opened a door myself - but awareness that a door was a thing that could be opened. As an adult (I'm 38), I still have brief flashes of non-verbal concepts. I can sorta/kinda "feel" the door concept I described above somehow underlying the thought when I think of a door. The closest parallel I can draw to this kind of cognition is how I understand logic systems today (programming, puzzles, etc.) I have a mental map. It's almost - but not quite - a flow chart. When I'm thinking about how things fit together, I'm moving those things around in my head and even changing their shape to see how they "fit against each other". It all sounds weird when I write it out like this, actually. But it's the best way I can think of to describe it. Is this way of thinking about things unique? Is it some variant of synesthesia that I've not heard of before?

I don't think that's quite the right frame, it makes non-verbal people seem like automatons. Language and cognition are closely linked, but people who are non-verbal for reasons other than damage to that part of their brain still have the physical and mental structures in concrete ways. Their "language" may be completely unique to their mind, but they can still think and reason and remember.

sillystuff 4y ago
There was a girl who'd been kept in a room tied to a chair, and never spoken to / forbidden from making any sound, by her parents, since she was a toddler. She had virtually no language when she was discovered at age 13. She eventually learned additional vocabulary referring to physical objects, but she never grasped grammar. Yes, she had a lot of other psychological damage, but there appears to be critical periods in the acquisition of language. Keller's brilliance might never have been given voice if the attempt at teaching her language had occurred later. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-child-los-angeles-researchers https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/14/genie-feral-...
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Yes that's very insightful on some of the mechanics of language acquisition and the later impact on language fluency of missing that window. It does not show that thinking or memory are absent before language acquisition or in people who never acquire it, which was implied by the comment I was responding to. Keller's ability to communicate to others would certainly have been limited or absent if she hadn't had the opportunities in youth she had. But she still would have been able to form and recall memories, and engage with her own mind in some totally-opaque-to-us way.
  - sillystuff 4y ago
    Yes, I wasn't commenting on thinking and memory in non-verbal humans or non-human animals, for that matter; it seems obvious, to me, that these are present. I'm just not sure thinking in images and other sensations without words can be called language? While writing this, I was reminded of some children (ages 6 to 23), I used to interact with at a job (many years ago), who could hear but were non-verbal and communicated with fingerboards. They would string images together to form "sentences", and overload images on their fingerboards to use as names for people around them (and these image names often made semantic sense, describing an attribute of the person being named e.g., the person who drove their school bus referred to by a picture of a bus). They did understand varying amounts of spoken English which makes it ambiguous if this is really support of language without words, though. The concept of a language of images and other sensations without words as we know them is intriguing. Thanks for inspiring me take a few minutes to think about this more deeply.

Ancapistani 4y ago

Is it uncommon to remember pre-verbal cognition? I have a handful of vague memories of how I thought about the world before I could speak. It was very different from how I think today. I don't know how much of that difference is due to language versus physical development; I was probably around a year old at the time. These memories are difficult to describe. For instance - my concept of "door" was sort of a combination of the idea of a flat, vertical plane that pivoted from the right side, the idea of grabbing something (like a knob or handle), the idea of pulling toward myself, and a kind of parallax motion where my perspective moved left and the door moved toward me and to the right. Basically it was a partial mental image combined with an action. A noun and a verb. It wasn't a full image, though - I didn't picture a door, but rather was aware that the door existed. I didn't open the door in my mind's eye - I was too young to walk, so I'd obviously never opened a door myself - but awareness that a door was a thing that could be opened. As an adult (I'm 38), I still have brief flashes of non-verbal concepts. I can sorta/kinda "feel" the door concept I described above somehow underlying the thought when I think of a door. The closest parallel I can draw to this kind of cognition is how I understand logic systems today (programming, puzzles, etc.) I have a mental map. It's almost - but not quite - a flow chart. When I'm thinking about how things fit together, I'm moving those things around in my head and even changing their shape to see how they "fit against each other". It all sounds weird when I write it out like this, actually. But it's the best way I can think of to describe it. Is this way of thinking about things unique? Is it some variant of synesthesia that I've not heard of before?