MOGUL project research takes as its premise that the mind is modular in character, i.e. composed of functionally specialised systems.
However, despite its declared processing perspective, the framework used in this research allows issues surrounding real-time mental activity to be integrated with accounts of the representations that make up an individual’s current linguistic knowledge.
The two linguistic systems form a linear chain so that phonological structures can be directly associated and hence coactivate each other via the interface between them.
A single word like jump, for example, is actually a composite structure arising from an association between several different types of representation.
https://online.bankofscotland.co.uk/personal/logon/login.jsp Linguists may note that what is conventionally thought of as the scope of phonetics is expressed here as the domain of auditory structure.
An important portion of the MOGUL account is devoted to the claim that the acquired (and atrophied, or lost) linguistic structures are natural by-products of online processing.
APT is a hypothesis put forward by Sharwood Smith and Truscott as an integral part of the MCF and is applicable not only to language but to all kinds of cognitive development (for a similar approach to acquisition which is framed within an emergentist perspective, see O'Grady 2005).
In this way, high-frequency events in the environment may still not impact development because the relevant parts of our mind are incapable of processing them.
Structural chains are formed incrementally; as more CS is built so more SS and PS are constructed with more context, earlier options that were provisionally selected are dropped as the representation develops and becomes more complex.
Each type of structure (AS, PS, SS, CS and so on) is constructed in its own particular module and by its own unique integrative processor, following its own particular set of principles.
Comprehension is a similar process, with the general direction going in reverse; auditory structures are formed in response to acoustic stimuli in the environment.
One feature of this approach is an attempt to spell out in coherent terms the role of perception and affect in issues of language development in the individual.
This coordinating function of the POpS system may be related to the role of the global workspace in Baars' theory.
[4] The rich interconnections between POpS permit very high levels of activation to be achieved, the condition for awareness to occur.
It also helps to explain the condition known as synaesthesia: here the connection between two POpS reaches levels that result in an awareness whereby the two senses appear to merge; for example, a particular sound takes on the quality of a particular taste.
The main point is that awareness (whether it can be classified as an illusion or not) is generated indirectly via POpS; we do not have direct access to the contents of any module or processing unit.
A representation in another system, if it is associated with a very high value AfS undergoes a boost in its activation levels and this can have wide ranging consequences for the behaviour that ensues.
Two bilinguals speaking Mandarin, for instance, when approached by a monolingual English-speaking colleague may well switch to English because all the perceptual and conceptual representations associated with the connected conceptual structures ENGLISH + LANGUAGE, formerly undervalued, have now undergone a rapid change in their current value and have inherited their consequent activation boost to which the linguistic systems must automatically respond by providing different chains of PS and SS (Truscott & Sharwood Smith, 2016.
[8] Sharwood Smith, 2017a [9]) Language is a vague term in its widest sense involving a host of different cognitive systems.
These concepts are required for any analytic thinking about language and may vary widely in degree and complexity, depending on an individual's metalinguistic sophistication.
Or, like many native speakers, we can make metalinguistic assertions about the rules of our language which are not at all borne out by the way we actually speak and comprehend our mother tongue.
By way of contrast, the system operated subconsciously within our language module can never be right or wrong: it is just the way it is, the way it as has developed in us over time.
An essential part of education in many cultures is acquiring such consciously-accessible knowledge about language, and especially about the mother tongue.