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Feldman 185
Conceptual Systems
…We discovered how children learn to talk about their experience of spatial relations and motor actions. For perception, action, emotions, and so on, human experience and the social relations shared by all people provide the basis for learning words. We explored how children around the world learned their first words for colours, for naming things, for spatial relations, and for their own actions. The same basic labelling processes apply to many other aspects of direct experience, including the properties of objects and actions, personal desires, and family relations. The depth and breadth of the child's experience is remarkably rich and provides the source for all advanced concepts.
This universal shared experience of children is still only a small part of what comprises adult conceptual systems and language. The three chapters of this section outline a theory of how abstract, cultural, and technical words and concepts arise from the substrate of direct experience. Neural embodiment remains central to the story - people, as neural systems, understand abstract ideas because these concepts are mapped to and activate brain circuits involved in embodied experience.
…Even the most fundamental embodied concepts fall into three distinct types. Our examples so far have focused on only one of these - the basic level categories. Concepts at the basic level include car, green, cow, walk, screwdriver - categories of things that you know how to picture and interact with. Children learn these words first, but they soon move on to words that denote both more and less general types of categories. The more general superordinate categories corresponding to these examples would be vehicule, animal, colours, locomotion, and tool. Some more specific examples of each category at the subordinate level might be Camry car, turquoise, Guernsey cow, saunter, Phillips1 screwdriver.
Cognitive scientist, starting in the 1960s, have shown that concepts at the three levels are treated rather differently language and thought. Eleanor Rosch, among others, demonstrated that basic level categories have cognitive properties quite dissimilar from those of superordinate categories. The basic categories are defined by our capacities of a motor movement, mental imagery, and Gestalt perception (seeing things as meaningful wholes). Compared chair and furniture. You can get a mental image of a chair, but not of a general piece of furniture. You have motor schemas for interacting with chairs, but none for interacting with general pieces of furniture.
Our concept of a chair has to do, after all, with our ability to sit, which has everything to do with our bodies. It is a fundamentally embodied concept. In short, the basic level is the highest level that which shared mental imagery, motor schemas, and Gestalt perception characterise the entire category. Higher, superordinate, categories such as furniture had to have some commonality, but that is more abstract.
The basic category level is associated with human interactions, but not all individuals or cultures experience the world the same way. For many city dwellers, tree is a basic level category - we interact the same way with all trees. But for a professional gardener, tree is definitely a superordinate category.
Of the many findings on levels of categories, the one that most interests us is that children, apparently everywhwere, first learned words were concepts at the basic level. This makes sense because the basic level concepts are those that the rise in direct experience. There is no mystery about how children move on to learn names for more specific (subordinate) concepts as these become important to them. Caregivers point out and name specific instances that are important to the group and culture. What is not so obvious is how children can go beyond direct experience and learn the words was such superordinate concepts as furniture, vehicule, tool, and animal.
From the information processing perspective, there are very good reasons for working with concepts, like animal, at the superordinate level. We know a lot about the properties of animals in general, and it is inefficient to restore each of these features separately for each class of animals. Even worse, there would be no way to know that some new animal you just learnt about shares these general animal properties.
In the case of superordinate concepts, there is therefore considerable evidence that people do go beyond direct experience, organising their knowledge into more general categories and relationships. A few special superordinate category distinctions, for example, things that can and cannot act on their own, seem to be part of our biological heritage, but children still learn the words for them rather late.
From our embodied perspective, predicting that children will also find it natural to learn labels for this kind of superordinate knowledge is no problem. Children tend to assume a new word is not just a synonym for words they already know. On hearing a superordinate category name such as animal associated with different specific animals, the child could make a good guess that the new word refers to some class that includes these specific cases. In fact, the process works in both directions - learning superordinate words also helps children organise their knowledge. The particular superordinate category names presented to children will be a function of their physical and social environment. Hearing all sorts of different looking animals referred to as dogs definitely helps the child structure his her world.
This interplay between direct experience and language-driven learning is the primary basis for the transmission of culture to children. As a child learns to deal with the world, family and community point out and label features of the physical and social environment they consider important. This inevitably controls the way the child perceives the world and organises knowledge and behaviour - it determines the child's conceptual system. One of the most heated controversies involving the brain and language is whether the language a person speaks limits what he or she can think about - often called linguistic determinism.
Feldman
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