ANALOGICAL REPRESENTATION AND LANGUAGE STRUCTURE

Severe impairment of the analogue of mental representation is not comp ensated for by putative language-based cognitive processes in non-dysp hasic brain-damaged patients. This undermines the hypothesis of an ind ependent role for language in the generation of thought. Against this view it may be contended that there seems to be no obvious way in whic h analogical mental representation can decide between alternative synt actical structures available for the expression of thought. We perform ed a visual imagery experiment in which we asked 40 subjects to imagin e visual scenes representing the meanings of simple utterances present ed to them. The subjects then had to indicate the relative position, i n each visual image, of two objects mentioned in each utterance. Serie s of utterances were presented differing syntactically (active or pass ive phrase) and semantically (specifying in different ways the spatial and temporal relations between the objects mentioned). The results of this mental imagery experiment indirectly support the hypothesis that syntactical structures can be represented in a nonlinguistic analogue medium.