Language is a form of human communication which is learned over years. The ability to use language is more than just understanding and using words. Language is structured, which means that people learn how to arrange words into phrases and sentences using grammatical rules. Once learned, using language seems effortless. But can such a complex system as language also be forgotten?
Some writers are ahead of their time. When Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, not many of his readers (perhaps not even Verne himself) thought the journey to the moon would ever become reality. But it did. Similar stories can be found in science. The gist of an idea may be born as a metaphor, a way to better understand the object of study itself, a crazy hypothesis about how things could be. This blog tells one such story. The basic idea is that the concepts we have in our minds form a space, a conceptual space. And not just in an abstract theoretical way, but quite literally so. But let’s start with the basic question: What is a concept?
Dr. Eirini Zormpa was a PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. She defended her thesis entitled ‘Memory for speaking and listening’ on December 18 2020.
