More than a scaffold: Language is a neuroenhancement

ABSTRACT

What role does language play in our thoughts? A longstanding proposal that has gained traction among supporters of embodied or grounded cognition suggests that it serves as a cognitive scaffold. This idea turns on the fact that language—with its ability to capture statistical regularities, leverage culturally acquired information, and engage grounded metaphors—is an effective and readily available support for our thinking. In this essay, I argue that language should be viewed as more than this; it should be viewed as a neuroenhancement. The neurologically realized language system is an important subcomponent of a flexible, multimodal, and multilevel conceptual system. It is not merely a source for information about the world but also a computational add-on that extends our conceptual reach. This approach provides a compelling explanation of the course of development, our facility with abstract concepts, and even the scope of language-specific influences on cognition.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognition
• concepts
• embodied
• language
• semantic memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The LENS theory does not require adopting a particular stance with respect to whether the sort of examples that Clark and Chalmers have in mind should count as instances of extended cognition or merely as instances of embedded cognition (Rupert, 2010).

2 It also provides a useful means of highlighting the areas of agreement and perhaps disagreement between Clark’s ideas about the impact of language on cognition (Clark, 1998, 2006, 2011), which tend to be connected to his ideas about extended cognition, and those on offer in this essay.

3 I do not have the space to get into a protracted discussion with respect to the status of specific claims concerning our innate endowment for language (a good place to start is Cowie, 1999). It is worth noting, though, that nativist claims have become progressively weaker and more general over time.

4 Although semantic memory is often associated with word meaning (and investigated through experiments employing linguistic stimuli), it is generally defined in opposition to episodic memory (Tulving, 1972). Episodic memory involves the recall of the specific things that we have done, seen, heard, etc. It is thought to encode the temporal, spatial, and autobiographical aspects of what happened. Semantic memory, by contrast, does not directly encode the contextual details associated with the formation of the memory. Conceptual knowledge for the most part would thus fit within the purview of semantic memory.

5 Unfortunately, he ordered fish – something that he did not like.

6 Discussion of the history of these terms can be found in their respective Oxford English dictionary entries. The details for these entries are given in the reference list (Hussy, n.d.; Peruse, n.d.).

7 After all, the focus of this essay is the role that language plays in our concepts and not the precise nature of abstract concepts. A rough and ready characterization of abstract concepts that enables us to access the extant data should be sufficient for our needs.

8 Interestingly, these sort of concreteness effects are not found with all of the proposed measures. Controlling for age of acquisition, context availability, familiarity, imageability, and other variables, Kousta et al. (2011) found that abstract words have a reaction time advantage (rather than a disadvantage) over concrete words. They suggest that this reverse concreteness effect may be due to the fact that, as a group, abstract concepts rely more on emotion.