What do you 'picture' when you perceive a word?

Question

Hi guys,I'm actually a native English speaker but I'm just trying to verify this.When you are given a word (ie. code), what happens? Presumably you intake it though the senses (ie. if it's written you absorb it through sight, if spoken then through hearing etc.) and then into your mental system, but what happens then? You don't necessarily picture an 'image,' do you? For instance if someone were to say 'event,' would your mind automatically construct an image closest to what it associates with this word's meaning? Because I am certainly not conscious of this happening.If someone were to present to you the abstract idea of "using," what does the listener experience? What happens in his mind?

Clive · Accepted Answer

Hi,

I don't think anyone is able to give you a truly clear answer to this question.

Yet, somehow, I have managed to read and respond to your query. Strange, isn't it?

Clive

Anonymous · Answer

Indeed it is strange.

Thanks for your response.

Kooyeen · Answer

I believe no one knows for sure what happens, although I'm sure there are a lot of theories around. You would have to do a lot of research in the linguistics field. I think every word is connected with some other elements represented in the brain (pictures, situations, feelings, sounds, etc.). However, how your brain decides to use those connections in each case is something mysterious. I think it probably has to do with "statistical relevance" anyway. If you think of a dog, what kind of dog do you picture? If you have always had dogs as pets, maybe you'll picture one similar to one you have or have had. However, it's hard to know how all the other mental connections are made, for example: when you picture a dog, what does the background look like? What is the dog doing and what's its position in the scene? And so on. As you can see, it's not simple to understand how the brain works, and there's still a lot of research to do. I think this issue is very relevant to second language acquisition as well.

Grammarwannabe · Answer

Interesting question-

I am inclined to agree with my collegues below (above?)

but wanted to add that it seems to be a more personal thing. This kind of thing has been studied with math and science and often some people can visualize concepts even if the visualization seems to be irrelevant of what the concept is (i.e. trying to multiply large numbers and their head visualizes colored shapes). I would venture that a simmilar thing happens with language.

CalifJim · Answer

AnonymousPresumably you intake it though the senses ... and then into your mental system, but what happens then?

Several million cells in your brain do a lot of extremely complex operations, none of which you are conscious of, and the result is some sort of subjective feeling which is a little different for each stimulus word.

AnonymousYou don't necessarily picture an 'image,' do you?

Not necessarily, though you could if there is an image normally associated with the word. tree is easy that way; fortuitous, not so much. The image can be static (tree) or dynamic (jump). And the image can be very vague (thanks) or ambiguous (bank -- money or river?) or, for the functional words, hardly compatible with an image at all (not, of, and).

Anonymouswould your mind automatically construct an image closest to what it associates with this word's meaning?

Only if you expand the concept of image to include the (sometimes vague) feelings I mentioned above.

AnonymousI am certainly not conscious of this happening.

Not surprising. There is no perceptive machinery that taps into every cell in your brain and reports on its activity through some other sense you have. If there were, then each of the cells that makes up that machinery would in turn need more machinery to report on those cells, and so on ad infinitum. When you get down to mental operations that are as basic as those that associate words with their meanings, they have to be unconscious. A "fully conscious system" in that sense is physically impossible.

AnonymousIf someone were to present to you the abstract idea of "using," what does the listener experience? What happens in his mind?

I covered the basics of this above, but let me add that the more abstract the word, the vaguer the "feeling" and the more open it is to change as soon as that word is combined with another word. using a chain saw and using a dictionary result in two very different images, but both of them are much more focused images than the image formed by the word using alone. Consider the fact that adding more words does not necessarily add more images; more often it simply brings another image into sharper focus. Images such as those corresponding to abstractions almost need to be defined negatively: they are the image of what's left over when you subtract out all the more focused images that result from adding more words to the abstract word.

I suspect we don't have much of an image at all when we hear the beginning of a sentence. Each successive word we hear adds more to the vague image we start with. Only at the end of the sentence do we have the full image. On an increasingly larger scale, this also applies to paragraphs, chapters, and entire books. In addition, each combination of a word with another word (throughout an entire life) adds to our understanding of the kinds of images that can be brought up by the word, so the image conjured up by a given word (which by now you can see is more like a probability cloud of associations) can change during a person's life.

CJ

Kooyeen · Answer

I agree with Jim, but I would like to add that it isn't only images that are important when we think of a word. We don't only have visual memory: there's also auditory memory, olfactory memory, etc., and even emotional memory. I believe words like "cloud" are likely to be more "visual" than, say, words like "pain" or "bitter".

What do you 'picture' when you perceive a word?

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