MIT research finds the brain’s language-processing network also responds to artificial languages such as Esperanto and languages made for TV, such as Klingon on “Star Trek” and High Valyrian and Dothraki on “Game of Thrones.”
I suspect their ultimate goal is to confirm or refute the common theory that there’s a general mental faculty for recursion that that’s used both for natural language and for other recursive tasks (implying that language and recursive thought evolved together).
If that’s their goal then it was a really dumb idea to pick these conlangs. It simply won’t show any surprising data, since all of those languages implement recursion in one or another way.
all of those languages implement recursion in one or another way
Yeah—Python and English are both recursive, so that doesn’t account for why the brain processes them differently. But they need to figure out what other feature does account for it—ideally by finding a pair of (probably artificial) languages that differ only in the exact feature which triggers the language network. Then they can figure out how that feature relates to recursion or any other mental abilities that might have co-evolved with language.
I suspect their ultimate goal is to confirm or refute the common theory that there’s a general mental faculty for recursion that that’s used both for natural language and for other recursive tasks (implying that language and recursive thought evolved together).
If that’s their goal then it was a really dumb idea to pick these conlangs. It simply won’t show any surprising data, since all of those languages implement recursion in one or another way.
Yeah—Python and English are both recursive, so that doesn’t account for why the brain processes them differently. But they need to figure out what other feature does account for it—ideally by finding a pair of (probably artificial) languages that differ only in the exact feature which triggers the language network. Then they can figure out how that feature relates to recursion or any other mental abilities that might have co-evolved with language.