Sublime

publicly visible.

He could repeat a novel word by word, but the greater meaning would be lost on him.

while the grammar and sounds of language freeze, other functions such as the capacity to learn new words and their meanings remain open throughout life.

This classic effect (which is even more striking when the words are printed in color) reflects the intervention of your executive control system. When the words and colors conflict, the central executive must inhibit word reading to remain focused on the task of naming the ink color.

Likewise, people who single out salient concepts from the less important information they encounter in new material and who link these key ideas into a mental structure are more successful learners than those who cannot separate wheat from chaff and understand how the wheat is made into flour.

My view, which is different from Chomsky’s, is that language is fundamentally a social phenomenon. Its structure does not derive from an internal blueprint, but from the general cognitive abilities of a social species, and external factors which include principles of interaction, the vagaries of history, and certain patterns that tend to emerge in