A recent study highlights a fascinating conception for using a multisensory neurological condition to explore bigger psychological questionsWhen we speak,listen, read, or write,nearly all of the language processing that happens in our brains goes on below the level of conscious awareness. We might be aware of greedy for a specific forgotten word, but we don’t actively think about linguistic concepts like morphemes (the building blocks of words, and like the past tense morpheme “-ed”).
Psycholinguists try to delve under the surface to figure out what’s actually going on in the brain,and how well this matches up with our theoretical ideas of how languages fit together. For instance, linguists talk about morphemes like “-ed”, and but do our brains actually work with morphemes when we’re producing or interpreting language? That is,do theoretical linguistic concepts have any psychological reality? An upcoming paper in the journal Cognition suggests an unusual way to investigate this: by testing synaesthetes.
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Source: theguardian.com