Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Chomskyan Top-Down and Bottom-Up Processing (Deep Structure and Surface Structure)

In any conversation or discourse,  there normally is a lingual sender and a receiver. How does the lingual sender convey ideas/messages to the receiver? How does the receiver decode the message initiated by the sender and in turn send reciprocating messages? Chomsky's answer appears to be or have been top-down and bottom-up processing. When producing speech, the sender engages in top-down processing: he or she gradually moves from abstract and regulative meaning (deep structure) to lingual structures like phrases, sentences, morphemes (words, prefixes, and suffixes) and phonemes (minimal units of sound). In essence, the speaker glides from the abstract underlying representation of a sentence to the surface structure when producing speech. Conversely, when decoding the message of the sender, the receiver decodes the phonemes and deciphers the morphemes of the sender (and so forth). Only after decoding the basic sounds and words of a sentence can the receiver unravel sentential meaning. While this process sounds complex, it remarkably happens in a matter of seconds (Morris 236-240). What is responsible for this remarkable procedure? What are the mechanics of this process?

Ever since the nineteenth century, psychologists have been aware of two significant cerebral areas that could potentially explain Chomskyan transformations via top-down and bottom-up processing. These two areas respectively are Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Wernicke's area is located in "the left posterior superior temporal gyrus." and seems to be responsible for understanding speech. Broca's area is located in the left frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex and could be vital for the utilization of language. Some describe the location of Broca's area as "a cortical region in the posterior inferior frontal gyrus" and note that the area "is still considered to be critically involved in speech production." See  https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1414491112?doi=10.1073%2Fpnas.1414491112 and https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/brocas-and-wernickes-areas#:~:text=Broca%27s%20and%20Wernicke%27s%20areas%20are%20cortical%20areas%20specialized%20for%20production,left%20posterior%20superior%20temporal%20gyrus.

Some psycholinguists have likewise posited that entities labeled images, concepts, and prototypes are the building blocks of thought. For instance, seeing a cat generates the image of a cat; nevertheless, the mind does not merely catalog the cat as a single instance or token, but the human intellect conceptually places specific animals or events into ontological categories. Eleanor Rosch states that we construct mental prototypes, which help us to distinguish one animal from another. For example, we know the difference prototypically between a mouse and rat. But although these prototypes evidently originate from our somatic experiences and may be derived by dint of induction, they still remain ever "fuzzy."

The processes hitherto described seem complex, yet George Yule insists that the description given here is a "massively oversimplified version of what may actually take place" (164). Language largely remains mysterious to linguists and there is not a "logical, internally consistent theory that neatly ties up brain, language, and mind" (Restak 230231).

See https://corpling.hypotheses.org/252

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