Lashley ’ S Serial Order Problem and the Acquisition / Evolution of Speech
نویسنده
چکیده
The serial order problem is the problem of how any animal controls action sequences. Lashley maintained that in the case of speech the order of sounds was externally imposed on units that had, in themselves, no temporal valences. Speech errors reveal that the external source of control is a syllable structure (or frame) constraint on the placement of consonants and vowels (content elements) whereby these two segmental forms cannot occupy each others’ positions in syllable structure. According to the author’s frame/content theory of evolution of speech, the frame constraint evolved because the original form of speech was a consonant-vowel (CV) syllabic cyclicity involving a close (consonant) open (vowel) mouth alternation produced by mandibular oscillation. As the requisite mandibular elevation and depression involve antagonistic movements, there was no opportunity in the evolution of speech for control signals related to these two phases to get mixed up with each other. The central contention of this paper is that babbling, which is a rhythmic series of CV alternations powered by mandibular oscillation, is an innate 49 lashley’s Problem and the acquisition of sPeech fixed action pattern which evolved as an ontogenetic affordance of the original frames for speech, and for their subsequent programmability with content elements in both phylogeny and ontogeny.
منابع مشابه
The Role of Private Speech Produced by Intermediate EFL Learners in Lexical Language Related Episodes
Private speech utilization is accepted to have a critical role in the continuum of language acquisition. As a valuable device in studying learners’ talk during interaction, a language related episode (LRE) is any part of a dialogue where a student speaks about a language problem s/he comes across while completing a task. The present study investigated the role of private speech produced by Inte...
متن کاملWord Order Acquisition in Persian Speaking Children
Objectives: Persian is a pro-drop language with canonical Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. This study investigates the acquisition of word order in Persian-speaking children. Methods: In the present study, participants were 60 Persian-speaking children (30 girls and 30 boys) with typically developing language skills, and aged between 30-47 months. The 30-minute language samples were audio...
متن کاملInvestigation of sequence processing: A cognitive and computational neuroscience perspective
Serial order processing or sequence processing underlies many human activities such as speech, language, skill learning, planning, problem-solving, etc. Investigating the neural bases of sequence processing enables us to understand serial order in cognition and also helps in building intelligent devices. In this article, we review various cognitive issues related to sequence processing with exa...
متن کاملNeural Representations and Mechanisms for the Performance of Simple Speech Sequences
Speakers plan the phonological content of their utterances before their release as speech motor acts. Using a finite alphabet of learned phonemes and a relatively small number of syllable structures, speakers are able to rapidly plan and produce arbitrary syllable sequences that fall within the rules of their language. The class of computational models of sequence planning and performance terme...
متن کامل