Messages must be tuned to the target language: Some implications of crosslinguistic semantic diversity for neurolinguistic research on speech production

Publication date: November 2019Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics, Volume 52Author(s): David KemmererAbstractThere are nearly 6,500 languages in the world, and they vary greatly with regard to both lexical and grammatical semantics. Hence, an early stage of utterance planning involves "thinking for speaking"—i.e., shaping the thoughts to be expressed so they fit the idiosyncratic meanings of the symbolic units that happen to be available in the target language. This paper has three main sections that cover three distinct types of crosslinguistic semantic diversity. Each type is initially elaborated with examples, and then its implications for the neurobiology of speech production are considered. Type 1: Semantic field partitions. These are exemplified by huge crosslinguistic differences in many domains of meaning, including colors, body parts, household containers, events of cutting and breaking, and topological spatial relations. When such differences are viewed from the perspective of contemporary neurocognitive theories which assume that most concrete concepts are subserved by both modal (i.e., sensory, motor, and affective) and transmodal (i.e., integrative) cortical systems, they imply that speakers must access language-specific semantic structures at multiple levels of representation in the brain. Type 2: Semantic conflation classes. Some languages have whole sets of words that systematically encode two or more components of meaning. For instance, in the roughly 53 A...
Source: Journal of Neurolinguistics - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research