Fascinating book on the OP’s topic specifically: Seeing Voices by Oliver Sacks. It’s an extremely well researched and written analysis of the neurolinguistics of sign language.
I’ve read it 2-3 times: so many insights into the processes of perception, thought, and communication.
It’s probably most accessible if you have some familiarity with ASL and Deaf culture–not to mention linguistics; nonetheless, it offers much to the lay reader.
No, I haven’t been reading much of anything, that link was one of the first I read and the strength of my objection was due to the fact that the statement, as written appeared to contradict my own experience.
I think that helps. Without the word “easily” it appeared to me he was stating it wasn’t possible at all, but I can certainly see how he could be making the claim it’s just not as easy, which seems much less broad and absolute.
Having said that, I think he’s making a claim that still may not even be true. A quick test of short words written vs in my head and I find the following:
1 - Mental imagery requires a slow load up (probably into some working storage) and then rapid retrieval
2 - Reading letters backwards that seems to be faster to get started but each letter needs to be processed and the brain needs to be managed to not try to read the word forward constantly which ends up being suprisingly not as fast as I was expecting
I wonder, has anyone tested this exact thing ever?
Emphasis mine. It’s perhaps worth a reminder that njtt and I have both pointed out that anyone’s subjective perception of their own cognitive processes is pretty close to worthless. It may (or may not) have some connection to the underlying processes but it’s very misleading to assume that it’s telling you anything useful about how those processes work. This is a really fundamental point.
The way I learned it in special ed classes is that there are 3 types of learners.
So for example in learning numbers a visual learner can learn them by looking at them, an auditory learner by saying them out loud, and a tactile by doing things like finger-tracing numbers or using counting beads to work out problems.
Its like language. In western languages we spell everything out. In Asian languages its all symbolic. We westerners when learning to read go from sounding the words out, to just reading them as a whole, not even thinking about the individual sounds each letter makes.
Now going bask to the deaf, they have a tough time learning to write in standard english because ASL and in fact, their whole communication structure, is different. Look at a writing sample from a deaf person and you can really see it. It’s also why books are not written is ASL.
However on the plus side many deaf people can communicate with the deaf in other countries because many times they use the same signs for the same words. Its not a universal language but its close.
No, all 138 deaf sign languages are quite different. Are there some signs that are used for the same concept in some of those languages? Yes, but that doesn’t make two languages that share one particular sign mutually intelligible anymore than the fact that two spoken languages share one word makes them mutually intelligible.
http://www.ethnologue.com/subgroups/deaf-sign-language
There is a way of writing out ASL. Linguists have created writing systems for ASL and other deaf sign languages. They aren’t used among deaf people themselves though:
The distinction you make between “Asian” and “Western” languages isn’t accurate. There are alphabetic languages, like English, and logographic ones, like Chinese, but this is not a Asian/Western divide. There are plenty of Asian alphabetic languages. Being alphabetic or logographic has nothing to do with the spoken language itself in any case. It’s just that the standard way of writing out a language is alphabetic, logographic, or some other way like syllabic:
You are correct when you say that ASL is a completely different language than English. It is not English converted into signs. It would be better to think of it as an unrelated language:
Wendell, I know all that is true but at the same time I’ve “talked” to deaf people who have traveled abroad and they were able to communicate with other deaf people at least somewhat and the learning curve is easier being that not each and every word is different like if say we had to learn Italian and Russian. Plus like spoken languages, some signs are becoming worldwide. I remember on one mission trip to Mexico a girl in our group who was an interpreter was able to communicate quite easily with a deaf Mexican woman. No I dont know if it was perhaps the close proximity between the US and Mexico might have been a factor.
On the Asian/Western language thing, my point was more that some learners learn to read by looking at the whole word instead of sounding it out phonetically and those learners would find an iconoclastic language like Chinese perhaps easier to learn. Until I worked with kids with learning disabilities like Autism it wasnt something I was even aware of.
“Iconoclastic” doesn’t mean what you think that it means:
I presume that the word that you’re trying to use is “iconic” or some such, but that’s not right either. Perhaps you heard someone somewhere refer to Chinese characters as “icons,” but that’s not the standard term for them. Rather, they are called “logograms.” The word for a writing system like Chinese, for instance, is “logographic”:
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~jfon/ling201/writing_system.pdf
Most things I’ve read say that the various sign languages are not mutually intelligible, although frequently there is some resemblance. The closeness between sign languages has nothing to do with the language spoken in the region where the sign language is used. For instance, American Sign Language is completely unrelated to British Sign Language, but it is close enough to French Sign Language for there to be some resemblance. This is because American Sign Language was created with some consultation with speakers of French Sign Language, while there was no consultation with speakers of British Sign Language.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/dcal/faqs/questions/bsl/question6
http://allsignlanguage.blogspot.com/2013/02/being-mutually-intelligible.html
Incidentally, there is much debate whether it’s a good idea to teach reading by whole word methods rather than phonics methods:
I would say yes I fully understand, it’s entirely possible (as previously stated) that the imagery is just along for the ride, that it’s just an illusion that it’s not helping at all.
It seems like there are possibly a couple points here:
1 - To what extent is mental imagery part of computation vs a depiction of computation that already happened (or something else entirely)
2 - What clues from our subjective perception can be used as a starting point to help figure out #1 (if any)
You seem to be focusing more on #1 and arguing that I shouldn’t object to Pylyshyn’s statement because my data could be completely useless.
But Pylyshyn is doing the exact same thing, using his subjective perception as an argument to constrain the possibilities for #1.
So, if we are going to use subjective perception as verbal arguments, I think it’s valid to challenge something that doesn’t match my own experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I make no claim to understand how the brain actually performs the reading word backward task, and I would be very interested in any data that seems to support or counter my perceptions (I don’t really care whether my perception is correct or not, the most interesting thing is to understand how the brain really works).
See my post #12 (in this thread). This theory ws once popular, but is now largely discredited (although it may well be that some schoolteachers have not got teh news yet).
I can spell words backwards in two ways. Most commonly I visualize the word and read it out right to left. But sometimes I do something more auditory, I’ll read off the word in forward order, then recite the letters in reverse. If I were doing numbers it would always be the latter method. We know words as a whole to make a visual image from (those of us with sight), but in most cases with numbers I retain them as an ordered list, I assume most others do as well.
I can’t agree. Your original reading strikes me as perverse, and something that would never have occurred to me, although it is, I suppose, not completely indefensible as a reading of that passage taken out of context. As I know the wider context of this literature very well, I am quite confident that my reading is correct, but, even for someone who does not know that context, and even taking your quoted passage in complete isolation, your reading strikes me as, at the very least, idiosyncratic and extreme. That may have been how the words first struck you, but you were wrong, and frankly, you ought to have been able to figure that out without having me to tell you so. There is a general principle of charity that should be used in reading all serious argumentative material: if different interpretations of the words are possible, you should assume (absent clear evidence to the contrary) that the interpretation that seems most coherent, and most likely to make any claims being made true, is the right one. That is, if at all possible, when you read something that initially seems to you to be, on the face of it, to be obviously wrong, you should assume the author is neither a fool, nor a liar, nor delusional, but, rather, that you may have misunderstood, and need to try harder. This is a basic principle of intellectual honesty and hygiene that should be applied especially (though not exclusively) to arguments supporting views you disagree with. You do not seem to be following it.
As wolfpup says, your introspective impressions here, without actual timing of your responses, are virtually worthless. People are frequently found to be systematically wrong about such things.
I do not, I am afraid, have a cite, off the top of my head, for a specific experiment on backward spelling that would prove the point directly, although I think it is very likely that such experiments have been done (though probably several decades ago). I do, however, know of numerous experiments that support the underlying point: that it is difficult (and often impossible) to extract information from a mental image with the same amount of freedom and ease that you can extract it from an actual scene or picture. Unfortunately, most of the work is going to be paywalled, the literature is complex, fractious, and its details are much argued over (often obscuring the key issues), and its direct relevance to your specific claims may not always be immediately obvious. I will give this cite however (abstract only, unfortunately, unless you have university library access) to a particularly clear experimental result whose relevance you can probably figure out. There is also a slightly longer, and, hopefully, clearer, account of that experiment (and its significance and place in the wider literature) here (about ¾ of the way down the page, around where Figure 3 appears).
There is also a case-study article here (also paywalled) about an individual who was particularly good at the reverse spelling task (as you may be). The point, however, is that this person’s abilities were extremely unusual. The whole reason that she merited having an article devoted to her abilities is that she was recognized to be an extreme, outlying case. The article may well include citations to studies showing how poor most people are at the task, but I do not currently have access, so I cannot be sure.
That said, though, even the fact (that you have repeatedly conceded) that the backwards spelling from an image task gets much more difficult as the words in question become longer, proves the underlying point, the point that Pylyshyn was trying to make succinctly, with a simple (and, so he assumed, uncontroversial and intuitive) example: the possibilities of information retrieval from mental images are subject to powerful constraints that do not apply to information retrieval from actual visual scenes or pictures. If a word, or even an arbitrary string of letters, is written out on a board in front of you, it is not only just as easy to read off the letters backwards as forwards, but the length of the word makes absolutely no difference to the ease and speed with which one can to it. That is the point that matters here. The fact (if true) that you personally have very little trouble in doing the task when the words are relatively short, is of little significance.
No, in an article where he was, no doubt, under tight wordage constraints, he is using a fact that is well known amongst cognitive psychologists, and that he assumes (though apparently wrongly in your specific case) will jibe with most people’s introspective experience.
The grammatical structure (word order) of ASL always reminded me of Mandarin Chinese. That’s just incidental of course. ASL structure is mostly a result of the 3-dimensional nature of the propositional and discursive structure.
(Are we still talking about this?)
Classic question. Just loitering here, for now. njtt, especially, and wendell, good cites.
[/absolute hijack, only because it came up here]
Capital and lower-case D/d in “deaf” is a big semantic/political topic. It is my understanding, or perhaps only my opinion–told’ja it was a hot button topic–that, unlike the case of “being” a Jew by Jewish tradition, one is born deaf.
njtt, I just read Pylyshyn’s paper from 1971 and it seemed pretty logical and generally not over-reaching in his arguments that support his position, and I understand the distinction you were making about his position.
His summary is basically that the mental image is a retrieval of information that has already been processed as opposed to input to a perceptual stage.
A couple thoughts about what I read:
1 - Early on he argues that: “An explanatory account must ultimately appeal to universal mechanistic principles”
This point is unrelated to the backward words thing and is triggered by reading that setup in his paper:
It seems like this is part of his argument about a propositional storage mechanism of perceived/processed information, but couldn’t it be a mish-mash of separately evolved functions that combine together to create a frankenstein of processing capability? Maybe he’s mostly right about the type of storage but it could be combined with non-propositional compressed sensory info. I certainly have no information on this, just an opinion that things in nature are rarely elegant or with such clear cut boundaries as to say “it’s always X”.
2 - Back to the imagery: The retrieval part seems generally valid in my non-expert opinion (meaning his arguments about why it’s not raw data seem generally valid), but it does seem like, once the mental image is constructed, the information (which is not anything like raw pixels or low level image constructs) could be fed back through a perceptual stage. Meaning that if the image is really a representation of a chunk of working memory that can be processed further, it seems entirely possible that the further processing could include processing of “image-ish” attributes from the mental image, like positional relationships etc.
In the case of reading the letters backwards, my impression is that the imagery acts as an assistant to the focusing mechanism, as if it’s some form of indexing into a set “move to the letter at that end of the set” kind of a thing.
I will claim this as my defense for being uncharitable:
1 - Overexposure to internet debate (e.g. Slashdot and SDMB) where people frequently make overly broad claims of absolute knowledge and or logic (as opposed to scholarly types that must have different rules per your description)
2 - Being one of those internet types of people myself, thinking I can just figure anything out
Having said that, he does state in his paper that mental imagery has “no inputs to the perceptual process” which seems to tie directly into his statement about the word/letter processing. Unless he views post-processing of a mental image to be non-perceptual (which would lead me to ask what the accepted definition of “perceptual” is, because I am imagining a mental image as a retrieved set of information rearranged in some arbitrary manner that can get fed back through some processing infrastructure which includes “perceptual” activities based on the arbitrary rearrangement of the retrieved info).
Quietly. I thought that was obvious.
Ah, but not at all true. Many deaf people make lots of noises that they don’t realize they’re making. Making some sound and muted gestures while working out something in your mind is not unusual when you’re deaf.
Well said. An excellent example would be the writings of Stephen Hawking, who frequently expresses profound and difficult ideas in simple language. If I were so inclined, I could probably find a dozen statements that I could extract out of the original context, put a ridiculously simplistic literal interpretation on them, and thereby “prove” that the man is an idiot. 
But, again, your “impression” that you’re working with an image is of no help whatsoever in understanding the underlying mental functions or any evidence at all that the functions are in any way related to visual ones. A blind person could perform the same letter-rearranging task with probably no greater or lesser efficiency but would have an entirely different subjective impression. When we remember or construct something visual we imagine it as an “image” because that’s the only way we can imagine it, but that doesn’t mean the associated cognitive processes work the same way as they do on a perceived image. Here’s a more recent paper on the subject by the same author.