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Sample translations submitted: 1
English to Serbian: BRAIN AND LANGUAGE General field: Science Detailed field: Medical (general)
Source text - English SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
September 1992, Special issue
Antonio R. Demasao, Hanna Demasao:
BRAIN AND LANGUAGE
p.p.63-71
Brain and Language
What do neuroscientists talk about when they talk about language? We talk, it seems, about the ability to use words (or signs, if our language is one of the sign languages of the deaf) and to combine them in sentences so that concepts in our minds can be transmitted to other people. We also consider the converse: how we apprehend words spoken by others and turn them into concepts in our own minds.
Language arose and persisted because it serves as a supremely efficient means of communication, especially for abstract concepts. Try to explain the rise and fall of the communist republics without using a single word. But language also performs what Patricia S. Churchland of the University of California at San Diego aptly calls “cognitive compression”. It helps to categorize the world and to reduce the complexity of conceptual structures to a manageable scale.
The word “screwdriver”, for example, stands for many representations of such an instrument, including visual descriptions of its operation and purpose, specific instances of its use, the feel of the tool or the hand movement that pertains to it. Or there is the immense variety of conceptual representations denoted by a word such as “democracy”. The cognitive economies of language – its facility for pulling together many concepts under one symbol – make it possible for people to establish ever more complex concepts and use them to think at levels that would otherwise be impossible.
In the beginning, however, there were no words. Language seems to have appeared in evolution only after humans and species before them had become adept at generating and categorizing actions and at creating and categorizing mental representations of objects, events and relations. Similarly, infants’ brains are busy representing and evoking concepts and generating myriad actions long before they utter their first well-selected word and even longer before they form sentences and truly use language. However, the maturation of language processes may not always depend on the maturation of conceptual processes, since some children with defective conceptual system have nonetheless acquired grammar. The neural machinery necessary for some syntactic operations seems capable of developing autonomously.
Language exists both as an artifact in the external world –a collection of symbols in admissible combinations – and as the embodiment in the brain of those symbols and the principles that determine their combinations. The brain uses the same machinery to represent language that it uses to represent any other entity. As neuroscientists come to understand the neural basis for the brain’s representation of external objects, events and their relations, they will simultaneously gain insight into the brain’s representation of language and into the mechanisms that connect the two.
We believe that the brain processes language by means of three interacting sets of structures. First, a large collection of neural systems in both the right and left cerebral hemispheres represents nonlanguage interactions between the body and its environment, as mediated by varied sensory and motor systems – that is to say, anything that a person does, perceives, thinks or feels while acting in the world.
The brain not only categorizes these nonlanguage representations (along lines such as shape, color, sequence or emotional state) , it also creates another level of representation for the results of its classifications. In this way, people organize objects, events and relationships. Successive layers of categories and symbolic representations for the basis for abstraction and metaphore.
Second, a smaller number of neural systems, generally located in the left cerebra hemisphere, represent phonemes, phoneme combinations and syntactic rules for combining words.
When stimulated from within the brain, these systems assemble word-forms and generate sentences to be spoken or written. When stimulated externally by speech or text, they perform the initial processing of auditory or visual language signals.
A third set of structure, also located largely in the left hemisphere, mediates between the first two. It can take a concept and stimulate the production of word-forms, or it can receive words and cause the brain to evoke the corresponding concepts.
Such mediation structures have also been hypothesized from a purely psycholinguistic perspective. Willem J.K. levelt of the Max Plan Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen has suggested that word-forms and sentences are generated from concepts by means of a component he calls “ lemma“, and Merrill F. Garret of the University of Arizona holds a similar view.
The concepts and words for colors serve as a particularly good example of this tripartite organization. Even those afflicted by congenital color blindness know that certain ranges of hue (chroma) band together and are different from other ranges, independent of their brightness and saturation. As Brent Berlin and Eleanor H. Rosch of the University of California at Berkeley have shown, these color concepts are fairly universal and develop whether or not a given culture actually has names to denote them.
Translation - Serbian MOZAK I JEZIK
O čemu govore naučnici-neurolozi kada govore o jeziku? Govorimo, izgleda, o sposobnosti da koristimo reči (ili znakove ako je naš jezik jezik znakova gluvih) i da ih kombinujemo u rečenice tako da se koncepti u našem mozgu mogu preneti drugim ljudima. Razmatramo i ono suprotno: kako razumemo reči koje drugi izgovaraju i pretvaramo ih u koncept u svom vlastitom umu.
Jezik nastaje i opstaje jer služi kao vrhunsko efikasno sredstvo komunikacije, naročito za apstraktne koncepte. Pokušajte da objasnite uspon i pad komunističkih republika a da ne koristite ni jednu jedinu reč. Ali, jezik vrši i ono što Patricija Čerčlend sa Univerziteta u Kaliforniji u San Dijegu naziva „spoznajnom kompresijom“. Ona pomaže da se svet kategorizuje i da se složenost konceptualnih struktura svede na savladiv obim.
Reč „šrafciger“, na primer, označava mnogo predstava o nekom takvom instrumentu, uključujući vizuelne opise onog što on radi i njegove svrhe, specifične primere njegove upotrebe, osećanje koje alatka proizvodi u ruci i za njega vezane pokrete. Ili, postoji ogromna raznovrsnost konceptualnih predstava koje označava reč kao što je „demokratija“. Spoznajna štedljivost jezika - njegova sposobnost da spoji mnoge koncepte u jedan simbol - omogućava ljudima da stvaraju još složenije koncepte i koriste ih za razmišljanje na nivoima koji bi inače bili nemogući.
Medjutim, u početku nije bilo reči. Izgleda da se jezik pojavio tokom evolucije tek kada su ljudi i vrste pre njih postali vešti u generisanju i kategorisanju delovanja i u stvaranju i kategorisanju mentalnih predstava o predmetima, zbivanjima i odnosima. Slično tome, mozak malog deteta je veoma angažovan reprezentovanjem i prizivanjem koncepata i pravljenjem bezbroj postupaka mnogo pre nego što izgovori svoje prve, dobro odabrane reči, čak i mnogo pre nego što oblikuje rečenice i uistinu koristi jezik. Međutim, sazrevanje jezičkih procesa možda ne zavisi uvek od sazrevanja konceptualnih procesa, jer su neka deca sa defektnim konceptualnim sistemima ipak usvojila gramatiku. Izgleda da je neuronska mašinerija neophodna za neke sintaktičke operacije u stanju da se autonomno razvije.
Jezik postoji kao artefakt u spoljnjem svetu – skup simbola u dopuštenim kombinacijama – kao otelovljenje onih simbola i principa u mozgu koji odredjuju nihove kombinacije. Mozak koristi istu mašineriju za reprezentovanje jezika kao i za reprezentovanje bilo kojeg drugog entiteta. Kada naučnici-neourolozi budu shvatili neuronsku osnovu toga kako mozak reprezentuje spoljne objekte, događaje i njihove odnose, istovremeno će dobiti uvid u to kako mozak reprezentuje jezik i u mehanizme koji povezuju to dvoje.
Verujemo da mozak obradjuje jezik pomoću tri interaktivna niza struktura. Prvo, velika broj neuronskih sistema i u desnoj i u levoj cerebralnoj hemisferi predstavlja nejezičke interakcije izmedju tela i njegove okoline onako kako ih prenose senzorni i motorni sistemi – to znači sve ono što osoba čini, opaža, misli ili oseća dok deluje u svetu.
Ne samo da mozak kategorizuje ove nejezičke predstave (zajedno sa stvarima kao što su oblik, boja, tok dogadjaja ili emocionalne stanje), on stvara i drugi nivo reprezentovanja za rezultate svoje klasifikacije. Uspešni nivoi kategorija i simboličkih predstava čine osnovu apstrakcije i metafore.
Drugo, mali broj neuronskih sistema, uglavnom smeštenih u levoj cerebralnoj hemisferi, predstavlja foneme, kombinacije fonema i sintaktička pravila za kombinovanje reči. Kada se u mozgu stimulišu iznutra, ovi sistemi sakupljaju oblike reči i generišu rečenice koje će biti iskazane ili napisane. Kada ih izvana stimuliše govor ili tekst, oni vrše inicijalnu obradu auditornih ili vizuelnih signala.
Treći niz struktura, takođe uglavnom smešten u levoj hemisferi, posreduje izmedju prve dve. On može da preuzme koncept i stimuliše proizvodnju oblika reči ili može da primi reči i učini da mozak prizove odgovarajuće koncepte.
Hipoteza o takvim posredničkim strukturama postavljena je i iz čisto priholingvističke perspektive. Viljem J.K. Levelt sa Maks Plankovog instituta za psiholingvistiku u Nijmegenu kaže da oblici reči i rečenice nastaju iz koncepata pomoću jedne komponente, koju on naziva „lema“, i Meril F. Garet sa Univerziteta u Arizoni ima slično stanovište.
Koncepti i reči za boje služe kao posebno dobar primer ove trodelne organizacije. Čak i oni koji pate od urođenog slepila za boje znaju da se izvesni opsezi boje (hrome) stapaju i da se razlikuju od drugih opsega , nezavisno od sjajnosti i zasićenosti. Ko što su pokazali Brent Berlin i i Elinor H. Roš sa Kalifornijskog univerziteta u Berkliju, ovi koncepti boje su prilično univerzalni i nastaju bez obzira da li data kultura ima ili nema imena da ih označi.
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Master's degree - University of Belgrade
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Years of experience: 45. Registered at ProZ.com: Mar 2011.
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