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The Science of Words (Scientific American Library, No 35)
The Science of Words - Scientific American Library, No 35 Author:George A. Miller Words are the building blocks of language and the foundation of human culture. The ability to use words distinguishes Homo sapiens from all other animals. Indeed, nothing else is so uniquely human about human beings. — The scientific study of words, so important to our knowledge of the human mind, has gained momentum in recent decades, and George... more » A. Miller has been central to that growth as one of the founders of cognitive science. In this book he brings to bear not only his expertise but also his graceful style and humor, offering us a lucid synthesis of what linguistic science has discovered about words-and about the power they hold over the mind.
Miller focuses our attention on the three-sided character of words: Each is the synthesis of an utterance, a concept, and a syntactic role. These three facets-articulation (or, analogously, orthography), meaning, and usage-are often studied separately. Miller's elegant account highlights all three, together with the theoretical and technological bases for their investigation-from the decipherment of the ancient syllabary known as Linear B to the earliest word association tests; from Noam Chomsky's generative grammar to the use of positron emission tomography (PET) scans to discover lexical processes in the the brain.
The author's ultimate aim is to illuminate the fascinating nature of the word as a universal design feature of human communication: the role of the word as a basic structural unit of all languages. Pulling together many lines of research, Miller addresses both word forms and word meanings, with special attention to the cognitive mechanisms of storage and retrieval within the mental lexicon. The mind, we will discover, not only organizes the separate syntactic families of nouns, modifiers, and verbs in quite different ways, but departs radically from the familiar conventions we associate with the dictionary.
As he examines evidence-whether from comparative anatomy, linguistic anthropology, or computer averages of EEG records -- Miller complements his clarity of exposition with numerous illustrations. He offers both historical perspective and future prospects for psycholinguistics, while deepening our understanding of the relations among words, language, thought, and the human brain.« less