>Reading's a somewhat artificial activity that demands concentration -- i.e. excluding other sense information. Whereas conversation about daily life can engage all the senses. //
This I find strange. Reading demands concentration, sure, but we're talking about being read to as the comparison for conversation. So instead of having a story read to you, and the ensuing imagination of any aspect of anything you can imagine - the smell of a dragon's lair, the feeling of riding on a giant frog, the taste of snozcumbers, ... - you're stuck with concentrating on someone talking and being limited to the domain of real world interactions.
Imagination is no more artificial than conversation - both seem able to engage all the senses but immersion in a fantastical tale seems more likely to do so to me than talking to some one (unless the conversation is specifically tailored to multi-sensory awareness, which is certainly a facet of some conversation I have in my parenting).
The article is about infants. The idea that the images on the page even describe anything is a more advanced and abstract concept that comes later, developmentally. Think of pointer indirection.
Mimicry comes first, so an infant can learn that when they see Dora they should say "Dora". When they put something down or finish eating, everyone seems to say "all done" and clap, so they start saying "all done" and clapping. There's a whole range of sophisticated seeming behaviours that can be trained easily by simple mimicry.
So, wrt. to reading. Things that infants can learn easily are picking up / putting down / fetching books. The nice feel of sitting with a parent and a book (which will hopefully lead to favourable thoughts towards reading, later). Also, mimicking sounds that parents make on specific pages. E.g. "BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, Mister Brown makes thunder" might trigger "BOOO BOOO BOOO".
Think about it this way -- imagine reading with an infant. You could substitute / make up all of the words but go through the motions and they would imitate your words instead of what's in the book. I.e. mimic conversation in context. They really have no idea of the content of the book, or even that it's significant, compared to all the actions / conversation around the activity of reading a book.
The article is about babies. They aren't really at the point where they are even able to imagine abstract ideas, they are mostly associating words with objects.
I know I'm being nit-picky, but words are associated with experiences, not objects. (E.g., "red" is not an object. "circle" is not an object.)
This is especially important when you consider the fact that most people treat their language to be operating on some intricate notion of _reference_, when in fact it is based upon correlations of states of experience that may be very noisy. This kind of misunderstanding often leads people into a position where they do not know why things are true or why their words have meaning.
You're partially correct. Words we learn are linked to experience of their usage but they're also linked to other words and to tangible things in our experiences such as things like books or teachers or places which are objects. Objects have use-cases ie. Expected purposes and these are linked to the type of experiences you've personally had, imagined, or which seem to you likely or possible to have with a given object. When you go to a restaurant you have expectations in mind based on the restaurant object being linked to other restaurants.
>Words we learn are linked to experience of their usage but they're also linked to other words and to tangible things in our experiences such as things like books or teachers or places which are objects.
You and I are on the same page, but you're using the word 'experience' in a more narrow sense than I am. You can experience words and things that are (roughly) objects and my point still stands. Things that are objects are still better thought of generally as experiences. It's just more consistent.
Another way of putting this is that language learning is mostly about encoding the appropriateness of linguistic constructs in varying contexts. So it is appropriate to act like you are in a restaurant when you are in what looks to be a restaurant. It is appropriate to run with the pack. It is appropriate to run from a lion and chase down a gazelle. This is basically the whole point of a nervous system, if you want to go wild with it. We just evolved a specialized adaptation for using our 'appropriateness-engines' on words and symbols rather than general feelings of what is going on around us.
At least, that's a rough draft of what I'm getting at.
Would you recommend any references on this topic (words as reference vs. experience correlation)? Are there benefits to people who use permalinks and other citation-like references in online conversation? These may differentiate a static reference (e.g. a paper) vs. a dynamic one (Wikipedia or web search).
This I find strange. Reading demands concentration, sure, but we're talking about being read to as the comparison for conversation. So instead of having a story read to you, and the ensuing imagination of any aspect of anything you can imagine - the smell of a dragon's lair, the feeling of riding on a giant frog, the taste of snozcumbers, ... - you're stuck with concentrating on someone talking and being limited to the domain of real world interactions.
Imagination is no more artificial than conversation - both seem able to engage all the senses but immersion in a fantastical tale seems more likely to do so to me than talking to some one (unless the conversation is specifically tailored to multi-sensory awareness, which is certainly a facet of some conversation I have in my parenting).