How Language Began (Approaches to the Evolution of Language) by David McNeill

Author:David McNeill [McNeill, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781139553452
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.7 Decline and return of energy in gesture size and complexity as a speaker momentarily loses the narrative thread and then recovers.

4.1.9 Memory

How did language and its role in shaping consciousness affect memory, and vice versa? Consciousness and memory are closely linked (cf. Baars 1988), and memory, like consciousness, would have been affected by Mead's Loop. A GP with an L-center imposes a kind of rhythmical pulse on memory. There is focal awareness followed by a change of state every one or two seconds or so. The state change is a change from immediate “working” memory to some other kind of information state. Without this quick-to-change system, thinking in terms of language could not itself have evolved with Mead's Loop; the action orchestration it provides would have clogged into unusability and never been naturally selected. The state change at the end of the cycle is an active step, part of the continuation of the discourse. The GP then loses cohesion and identity. The pieces do not disappear and may be swept up into the next GP, e.g., as part of the next field of oppositions. Metapragmatic indicators guide the process, such as the sense of direction the storyline provides. Such GP → field of meaningful oppositions continuity was shown in the outside–inside the pipe examples in Chapter 2. The outside GP was fragmented (or fragmented itself) and the pipe-climbing feature from the “outside” event became part of the next field of oppositions (i.e. outside: WAYS TO USE A PIPE: CLIMB IT; then inside: WAYS TO CLIMB IT: ON THE INSIDE).

The question is not whether a short-term memory exists without language (for which the evidence is clear – it does exist in much the same form in monkeys, e.g., Paule et al. 1998) but whether the 1∼2 s rhythmic pulse interval followed by a change of memory state has adapted to memory, and possibly altered it.

A provocative approach in this domain that helps to understand these questions was launched by Cowan (2001) and continued by Oberauer (2005). The essence of their approach is that there is but one memory, a long-term storehouse, which is functionally differentiated into working memory and within working memory into a focus of awareness. It is a view that contrasts to the modular separations proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974), for whom working memory is a product of separate processors, an executive, a phonological loop, and so forth. I see no natural mapping of memory so described onto the dual semiotic of language conceived dynamically. Cowan's non-modular, function-based approach, on the other hand, especially as particularized by Oberauer, adapts well to the GP and L-center. The GP adds functionality to memory and the L-center provides the focus of awareness within it.

Oberauer diagrams his “embedded-component model of working memory” as a net (illustration thanks to Klaus Oberauer):

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