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Re: English syllable structure (was, for some reason: Re: Llirine: How to creat a language)

From:Cheng Zhong Su <suchengzhong@...>
Date:Thursday, December 6, 2001, 21:51
 --- Almaran Dungeonmaster wrote: >
> Why does word length has anything to do with > thinking speed? > > Maarten
Answer:I think this paragraph from linguistic encyclopedia will help you understand what is thinking speed. P4612FgCodability is a concept that has appealed to many experimental psychologists working on short-term memory: the quantity of material individuals are capable of retaining accurately in short-term memory is limited, and different encodings of the same information can differ in how readily they can be esqueezed in.f An early demonstration of this was by S.Smith (cited in Miller 1956), who trained subjects to recode a list of binary digits (0s and 1s) into octal (the 0 to 7), so 000 is record as 1, 010 as 2, etc. Subjects so trained were able to recall accurately much longer sequences of binary digits than subjects who had not received this training. Such a result points to one important general function of language in thought: recording material in a compact form enables us to retain more of it in short-term memory, and any thought processes that depend on manipulation of such material should benefit. The details of this idea have been worked out more fully recently: eworking memoryf is the preferred term for manipulations of material on a short-term basis, and it has been established that immediate recall of verbal material is heavily dependent on the operations of an earticulatory loopf in working memory, whose capacity is limited by how much the subject can say in 1.5-2seconds. If the material takes longer than 2 seconds to say (because it contains many syllables or because the subject is not an agile articulator) then it will not always be accurately recalled (for a good review, see Baddeley 1986). Su Cheng Zhong http://shopping.yahoo.com.au - Yahoo! Shopping - Free CDs for thousands of Priority Shoppers!

Replies

Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>
Almaran Dungeonmaster <dungeonmaster@...>
Fabian <fabian@...>