Sunday, May 28, 2006

Fast Thinking, Cognition After a long time ago being confronted over posting on a book I'd just started I resolved to hold my posts until I'd finished my reading of any book. I'm going to break that rule though for a snippet from Words and Rules: Children begin to learn words before their first birthday, and by their second they hoover them up at a rate of one every two hours. By the time they enter school children command 13,000 words, and then the pace picks up, because new words rain down on them from both speech and print. A typical high-school gradudate knows about 60,000 words; a literate adult, perhaps twice that number. People recognize words switfly. The meaning of a spoken word is accessed by a listener's brain in about a fifth of a second, before the speaker has finished pronouncing it. The meaning of a printed word is registered even more quickly, in about an eighth of a second. People produce words almost as rapidly: It takes the brain about a quarter of a second to find a word to name an object, and about another quarter of a second to program the mouth and tongue to pronounce it. The wonder that is cognition - research like the above leaves me spellbound.  I've always been interested in language and have had this book for a while now. It makes for captivating reading and I'm sure I'll find myself resisting the urge to copy more and more of it into the blog as I make my way through. posted in [home], [books] 10:52:51 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2006 David Seruyange. Last update: 5/28/2006; 10:52:57 PM.