Archive for Cognitive science

The Heisig method for learning sinographs

August 17, 2025 @ 7:17 pm· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Cognitive science, Reading, Writing, Writing systems

I Used to Know How to Write in Japanese:
Somehow, though, I can still read it
Marco Giancotti, Aether Mug (August 14, 2025)

During the last thirty to forty years, two of the most popular dictionaries for mastering sinographs were those of James Heisig and Rick Harbaugh.  I was dubious about the efficacy of both and wished that my students wouldn't use them, but language learners flocked to these extremely popular dictionaries, thinking that they offered a magic trick for remembering the characters.

The latter relied on fallacious etymological "trees" and was written by an economist, and the former was based on brute memorization enhanced by magician's tricks and was written by a philosopher of religion.  Both placed characters on a pedestal of visuality / iconicity without integrating them with spoken language.

I have already done a mini-review of Harbaugh's Chinese Characters and Culture: A Genealogy and Dictionary (New Haven: Yale Far Eastern Publications, 1998) on pp. 25-26 here:  Reviews XI, Sino-Platonic Papers, 145 (August, 2004).  The remainder of this post will consist of extracts of Giancotti's essay and the view of a distinguished Japanologist-linguist on Heisig's lexicographical methods.

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Bionic brains

May 20, 2025 @ 8:15 am· Filed by under Artificial intelligence, Biology of language, Cognitive science

China Develops Robots to Implant Chips into Human Brain

A Chinese technology news website reported that the CyberSense flexible microelectrode implantation robot, developed by the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, has passed the preliminary acceptance stage for Shenzhen’s major scientific infrastructure project on “Brain Mapping and Brain Simulation.” The robot is designed to implant flexible microelectrodes – thinner and softer than a strand of hair – into the cerebral cortex of experimental animals, providing crucial support for brain-computer interface (BCI) and neuroscience research.

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Brain Mechanisms and Constructed Languages vs. Natural Languages

April 17, 2025 @ 7:54 am· Filed by under Bibliography, Cognitive science, Conlanging

"Constructed Languages Are Processed by the Same Brain Mechanisms as Natural Languages." Malik-Moraleda, Saima, et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 12 (March 17, 2025): e2313473122.

Significance

What constitutes a language has been of interest to diverse disciplines—from philosophy and linguistics to psychology, anthropology, and sociology. An empirical approach is to test whether the system in question recruits the brain system that processes natural languages. Despite their similarity to natural languages, math and programming languages recruit a distinct brain system. Using fMRI, we test brain responses to constructed languages (conlangs)—which share features with both natural languages and programming languages—and find that they are processed by the same brain network as natural languages. Thus, an ability for a symbolic system to express diverse meanings about the world—but not the recency, manner, and purpose of its creation, or a large user base—is a defining characteristic of a language.

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The origin of human language: cognition and communication

March 19, 2025 @ 7:02 pm· Filed by under Animal communication, Biology of language, Cognitive science

We touched upon this question recently in "Chicken or egg; grammar or language" (1/15/25), where we examined Daniel Everett's thesis as propounded in How Language Began:  The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention.  In that volume, Everett argues that language is learned / acquired / developed, not hard-wired in the human brain.  He holds that our ancient ancestors, Homo erectus, had the biological and mental equipment for speech 1,500,000 years ago, 10 times earlier than the conventional wisdom that language originated with Homo sapiens 150,000 years ago, and that it was the result of a "language instinct". 

Now we come back to the lower date with this new research as presented in:

Shigeru Miyagawa, Rob DeSalle, Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, Remo Nitschke, Mercedes Okumura, Ian Tattersall. Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago. Frontiers in Psychology, 2025; 16 DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1503900

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Linguistics bibliography roundup

March 9, 2025 @ 6:47 am· Filed by under Accents, Artificial intelligence, Bibliography, Bilingualism, Cognitive science, Communication, Evolution of language, Grammar, Language and animals, Language and archeology, Language and biology, Language and genetics, Language and history, Language and religion, Phonetics and phonology, Prosody, Vocabulary, Words words words

Something for everyone

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