Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!orion.cf.uci.edu!uci-ics!venera.isi.edu!smoliar From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: Re: Glossolalia and the Juke Box Model of Speech Acts Keywords: Et tu, Kimosabe? Message-ID: <7767@venera.isi.edu> Date: 12 Mar 89 17:27:08 GMT References: <3312@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <45523@linus.UUCP> Sender: news@venera.isi.edu Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar) Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute Lines: 21 In article <45523@linus.UUCP> bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry Kort) writes: > >I know many lyrics that are burned into my brain that I never bothered >to listen to for their semantic content. Like Mairsy Doats and Toura >Loura Loura, I can utter them on cue with no thought or clue as to >their meaning. > >Could it be that Glossolalia and Frere Jacques are just recitations >of previously engrained auditory material that lodged itself in >the language-deficient Wernicke's Area of the right hemisphere? > Actually, what you have observed in the lyrics is probably just as true of the music itself. I would even go so far as to say that our "appreciation" of music (if that word has not become too devalued by music teachers) arises from our ability to perform similarlity matches on such "previously engrained auditory material." (I have been elaborating on some of this in rec.music.classical.) I recently read a paper in which the author proposed that the mind's ability to listen to music emerged from its ability to process language. I suggested to the author that the process might actually have gone the other way around. Our ancestors were probably doing lots of things with toots and booms before words entered the picture.