ERIC Number: EJ838600
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2008-Dec
Pages: 5
Abstractor: ERIC
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0023-8333
EISSN: N/A
Sequential Event Processing: Domain Specificity or Task Specificity? Commentary on Carota and Sirigu
Toni, Ivan
Language Learning, v58 ns1 p201-205 Dec 2008
The article by Carota and Sirigu addresses a fundamental issue, namely the domain specificity of people's ability to learn and implement sequential structures of events. The authors review theoretical positions and empirical findings related to this issue, providing a useful summary of representative models of sequential event structures, and a reappraisal of some of their previous neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies. The review by Carota and Sirigu offers an interesting outline of the domain modularity of sequential behavior. In this commentary the author has suggested that future work could consider a broader space of possible correspondences between linguistic and motor behavior (Dominey & Hoen, 2006). This space should consider the spatiotemporal constraints inherent in the production of real actions/utterances (i.e., dynamical aspects of linguistic utterances or action sequences). In addition, the cognitive control of people's actions and utterances is also influenced by the social scenario in which they occur, such that voluntary actions might be driven by predictions of the intentions attributed by others to their (linguistic and nonlinguistic) actions (De Ruiter, Noordzij, Newman-Norlund, Hagoort, & Toni, 2007). It also appears important to define an adequate metric for characterizing correspondences between cognitive and neuronal operations, given that the space of cortical lobes, cytoarchitectonic areas, or anatomical modules, is likely to be an oversimplification arising from projecting high-dimensional sensory-motor spaces into the two-dimensional cortical sheet (Graziano & Aflalo, 2007).
Descriptors: Linguistics, Prediction, Models, Behavior, Language Processing, Spatial Ability, Influences, Correlation, Brain, Language Acquisition, Cognitive Processes, Learning Processes
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers; Reports - Descriptive
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A