Over the last month, there's been significant overlap between my psychology and linguistics courses. Or, at least I've been considering the material as connected, trying to draw parallels between the different sources of reading for psychology of language and a few of the concepts I'm learning in semantics and cognition.
The manners in which we learn and access words is the most prominent subject of my recent studies. In my current exhausted state, I don't think I'll be able to go into detail, but the gist of what I've been learning is that words are the representations of semantic concepts. Hearing a word primes associated words, a process that does NOT replace understanding of the concepts behind words. Essentially, the words you hear activate frequently associated words because it makes it easier to process information quickly. It does not mean, contrary to what many AI programmers believe, that we define words by the way they relate to other words.
More importantly, this is a fundamental mechanism of how many neural process work. There is association between related concepts and functions, but there is a highly specific form in which information is given meaning--in which information is processed for a purpose.
More of The National, Metals (Feist), and The Haunted Man (Bat For Lashes).
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