What is Perception & how does it relate to language?

2/18/00


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What is Perception & how does it relate to language?

Draw this figure and then try to color it in.

The perceptual process involves brain structuring, and how it organizes incoming stimuli, determines what we experience.

The Brain is free to create our reality in just about anyway it wants.

There are two influences contributing to perceptual organization: innate brain structure and personal past experiences.

In the final analysis, structure and experience interact to create our reality.

One innate perceptual process that effects our reality, is the creation of the Best Figure (image) Possible.

Another innate perceptual process that effects our reality, is based on the quality of Similarity.

A third innate perceptual process that effects our reality, is the quality of Proximity.

Spaces make words stand out as units.

Continuity is a powerful source of perceptual organization.

The Brain achieves Figure-Ground discrimination by focussing on some stimuli and suppressing others.

The lowest level of perceptual organization is an awareness of the presence of the stimulus.

At the Generic level of perception, we try to identify the figure is across wide ÜgenericS boundaries.

Perception is always a guess--sometimes right and sometimes wrong!

At the Specific Level, the figure is accentuated against the ground and the range of guessing is narrower.

At the Semantic level, we have the ÜI know what it is feeling,S and we are usually right, but it is still a guess.

Masked figures are hidden behind an irrelevant ground.

Embedded figures occur more frequently in daily tasks

Reversible figures demonstrate the power of perception to change what we perceive.

Reality comes from perception, but perception is a sometimes thing!

Closure is a process of reconstructing the figure when pieces are missing, disjointed or distorted.

Filling in the dots involves the simplest kind of closure task.

Filling in larger areas of the figure requires in addition to innate ability, a history of experience with the objects.

Perception is a PROCESS which takes TIME and if it takes too much time, speech and language may be affected.

The perceptual speed of children and older adults is frequently slow enough to cause problems in understanding language.

Perceptual problems in children and adults are typically misdiagnosed as other more common disabilities.

An inability to perceptually organize a figure leads to confusion and/or incorrect recognition.

Sometimes once the figure is organized, it cannot be changed, and sometimes it is organized incorrectly.

Language depends upon perception to develop but then aids perception in object recognition and figure-ground discrimination.

Messages contain information and redundancy

Repetition, concepts and rules, particularly Grammar, are sources of redundancy in a message.

Perception is an internal source of redundancy that reduces the range of guesses the brain must make.

Children with perceptual problems must work harder to get less information from the environment.

Author: Ed Hall

Email: ehall@csun.edu