marten at xs4all.hacktic.nl (marten) writes:
>interpretation directly follow out of the stimulus. What interests me
>most in this case is language. Do we more easily process -and
>understand/interpreter- spoken or written text. Is there a (maybe very)
>different way in how eventually a text got understood depending on how
>it's offered to us.
Spoken language is more easily comprehended by most people; reading is
tacked on later, in both ontogeny and phylogeny. Indeed, since no one
read before about 5,000 years ago (when writing was invented), the
existance of reading areas in the brain is a nice demonstration of how
the brain during development can organized "new" areas around some
feature of the environment.
There's a lot more on brain organization for language in our new
book, CONVERSATIONS WITH NEIL'S BRAIN: The Neural Nature of Thought and
Language (Addison-Wesley, 1994). You can browse it via gopher at
gopher.well.com
in the Science heading. My Dutch publisher, Bert Bakker, may eventually
get around to translating it; De Cerebrale Symfonie doesn't have enough
on language in it to answer your question.
William H. Calvin WCalvin at U.Washington.edu
University of Washington NJ-15
Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Seattle WA 98195 USA fax +1(206)720-1989
