Autonomy of the linguistic production mechanism

The linguistic production mechanism is the mental mechanism responsible for generating the succession of mental patterns associated with linguistic constructs, while the spoken words, the gestures involved in sign languages, or even in the gestures that may accompany a spoken message, are all motor reflections of the mental patters created by this mechanism.

  • note: the "inner voice" that one can "hear" in ones' own mind is also a reflection of the linguistic mental patters produced by the linguistic production mechanism. In the special situations where we may assume that the modality of hearing is biologically unavailable (e.g. persons with prelingual deafness), but where linguistic abilities still exist (manifested e.g. in the use of a sign language), the modality of being aware of a linguistic construct in one's own mind might be different from "hearing an inner voice".

Autonomy
Okay, so in this mental experiment i'll have to think about something. What should i think about... How about roses. So, roses are a kind of flower that... No. I'll think about something else, something very common, something used very often, so that i can talk endlessly about it. A house! Well, a house is something in which one lives, and it [...]

The above is a quote from the words that i was "hearing" in my mind during an experiment meant to determine to what extent the linguistic production mechanism can "operate autonomously" from other cognitive modalities (e.g. mental images). The italic portions in the quote correspond to periods of time when i had no conscious image representation of what my inner voice was saying, while the non-italic portions correspond to periods when some kind of mental image was present in my consciousness (i.e. i was aware that i'm "seeing" a mental image). Also, when an image was starting to emerge in my mind, it was not necessarily a clear image from the beginning, e.g. when my inner voice was saying "rose" the first mental image i had was a rose petal (which is only partially representative for a rose), and only afterwards the image of the flower incrementally evolved.

The experiment described above seems to suggest that language production is an autonomous mechanism that only reflects a deeper-level thread of thought into a specific modality of representation with specific properties (i.e. the modality that we call "language", may it be verbal or of a different kind).

Another example that seems to confirm, from a different angle, the autonomy of language production from the "main thread" of thought is the following:
I am supposed to go out with someone in an hour or so, and when i look out the window i see the weather is rainy and hardly appropriate for a walk.
yeah, right, so how am i supposed to go outdoors on a weather like this

The entire phrase above is a quote of what i was thinking when i saw the weather outside, but the entire phrase represents a thought that "populated" my mind before the phrase was actually articulated in my mind. The articulation of the phrase did not contribute in any way to me becoming aware of the weather problem, nor in reflecting this problem as a thought in my mind; instead, the phrase was constructed as a reflection of what i was already thinking (i.e. the thought that i have a problem with going out because of the weather conditions).

And yet another example: i was watching a TV talkshow featuring a guest who was gesticulating quite a lot while he was doing the talking; this allowed me a rather close look into how his gestures are correlated with his words and, furthermore, i was also able to make some assumptions about how the message he was trying to convey is being serialized into his gestures.
One thing i noticed was that the succession of his gestures could have obviously been performed (and chained) at a much greater speed should they not had to be synchronized with his words. But the really interesting observation is that a gesture that was corresponding to a certain portion of the message he was verbalizing was coming before the verbalization of that portion of his message, and this was happening even if the verbalization was rather long and involved several successive words. For example, while he was saying the sentence: '[...], and the entire political scene is [...]', by the time he was pronouncing 'the' he already had his hands wide open as a gestural correlate of the expression 'the entire political scene' that was just beginning to be verbalized (if we try to reproduce ourselves this scene, it will become obvious that the wide-open-hands gesture is not a correlate of the adjective 'entire', but rather of the complete expression 'the entire political scene').
In other words, because a gesture is an obvious witness that the corresponding concept already exists in one's mind at the time the gesture is made, this example is a rather clear illustration of the linguistic production mechanism's ability to autonomously reflect via serialization the concepts that we mentally operate with.


Cognitive feeder and shuffler
The "inner voice" can, and frequently does, act as an important supply of association elements for the cognitive processes, both in the cases when the attention is, and - to a lesser extent - when it is not, focused on the inner voice. Not only does the inner voice reflect the deeper cognitive processes that take place in one's mind, but because of its serial nature it can also "interrupt" and "re-target" those processes by supplying single words, sequences of words, "sub-concepts" that emerge during the construction of a mental phrase, or even features of the inner voice (such as e.g. pitch), as individual elements that will constitute themselves new vectors of association. Moreover, the relative slowness of mental verbalization may cause a thought to "reverberate" in one's mind: although the thought process might have moved away from the concept that triggers a certain mental phrase, an element of that mental phrase (a word, a pitch, etc) may "reassert" the original thought at the time when it gets mentally verbalized.
In this way, the mechanism of linguistic production is acting as an autonomous "reshuffling" engine for the "deeper level" thought processes, and it can even interfere with the process of memorizing new data when said data is mentally verbalized and thus (partially) reorganized into already-known words (note: such an interference has even been suggested as one possible reason for the inexistence of the "photographic memory" ability in normally developed adults, based on the claim that «adults are much more likely than children to try to both verbally and visually encode a picture into memory»; however, the process might not be strictly related to language, but rather to the more general feature extraction automatism that possibly becomes increasingly prevalent towards adulthood, in which case the "linguistic decomposition" of an image is only a special case of the the feature extraction automatism).
  • for example,...
    When i started to write the sentence 'for example,...' in the line above, i was trying to find an example of how individual mental words can "interrupt" the though process and become themselves vectors of association. My inner voice then stopped at the word "example", not really knowing what to come up with next. In that moment my mind was "empty enough" to be able to re-focus on the word "example", and re-focused it did: instead of continuing to think about finding the example i was looking for, i started to think about 'what's that an example', about examples of 'examples', etc . I then realized that what just happened, i.e. my mental processes being re-targeted by the word "example" that my inner voice just said (and "got stuck" into) is in itself an example for what i was trying to show.

  • another example: i was reading an article about cells, and reached a new chapter:
    Subcellular components
    All cells, whether prokaryotic or eukaryotic, [...]

    As i finished reading the title, my mind started to analyze it: in so doing, i "got a little stuck" in the word 'component', i needed to find a better term for it (i will not address the reason for this here), and the fuzzy mental imagery associated with reading 'subcellular components', together with the other cognitive processes that took place, came up with the word 'parts' as a replacement and verbalized it in my mind. However, while i was going through the mental processes of analyzing the title, my eyes continued to read the beginning of the first phrase 'All cells, whether prokaryotic...' and my inner voice was verbalizing that phrase. The moment when the process of analyzing the title generated the word 'parts' in my mind, my reading of the first phrase was at the word 'cells', and at that moment the word 'parts' came over the word 'cells' and replaced it in what my inner voice was reading; the resulting phrase (that i was mentally verbalizing) became: 'All parts, whether prokaryotic...'.
    As a side-note, it was not at this moment that i realized what happened, but rather a bit later: as i was reading the modified phrase (with the word "cells" replaced with "parts"), i eventually reached a point where the phrase apparently became nonsensical, and it was then that i stopped and re-started reading the phrase all over again trying to understand it. It was only during this second reading of the phrase that i realized that my mind has replaced "cells" with "parts" the first time i read the phrase.

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