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

 --- 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

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