cognitive abilities |
Working Definition:
The physiological operations that enable the performance of a mental task.
Disciplinary Definitions:
"Omniscience about psychological processes is fortunately not prerequisite to initiating a cognitively grounded investigation of language (helpful though it would be). In particular, linguistic entities generally pertain to higher levels of cognitive organization: the functional and phenomenological characterization of mental experience is consequently more directly relevant to linguistic analysis than descriptions that refer to the firing of specific neurons. For linguistic purposes it is often sufficient merely to establish the existence of a high-order cognitive entity, regardless of how it might arise from more basic processes ... I should emphasize that the following discussion of cognitive abilities derives from linguistic concerns, and is not tied to any particular psychological theory. The phenomena I call attention to are mostly self =evident, and must somehow be accommodated in any comprehensive model of cognitive processing" (Foundations, 99)
See the appendix, "Langacker on Cognitive Abilities."
Comments:
Langacker's list of cognitive abilities (see Notes) is by no means exhaustive. In C-CS, many cognitive abilities not mentioned by him are cited: e.g., recalling, narrating, inferring.
Notes
Langacker lists the following cognitive abilities:
- comparing
- selecting
- recognizing
- imaging
- using figurative language (metaphor)
- imagining
- designating
- attending
- focal adjusting
- selecting
- taking perspectives (figure/ground—foregrounding/backgrounding)
- abstracting
- transforming
- construing alternatives
- summary scanning
- sequential scanning
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last revised:
September 2, 2007
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