Perception and Linguistic Interpretation

Abstract

Perception is based on a whole chain of physiological events, from the peripheric organ which registers the stimulus to the centre in the brain where it is identified and interpreted as this or that sensation (of heat, of taste, of sight, or of audition). Although we take into consideration only auditory stimuli in this context and, in principle, limit our interest to such auditory stimuli as are connected in some way or other with organized human communication, or more precisely with linguistically formed messages, we can formulate a generally valid statement about perception by saying that in no case is this activity a purely physiological one, nor even neurophysiological. Any act of perception is intimately tied up with the perceiver’s background, i.e. his anterior experiences, his memory, and his attitudes. “Perception involves an act of categorization. Put in terms of the antecedent and subsequent conditions from which we make our inference, we stimulate an organism with some appropriate input and he responds by inferring the input to some class of things or events” (Bruner). What we want to stress here first of all is the concept of categorization.

This chapter is only intended as a brief survey and summary of the problems in question. The essential facts have already been treated in the preceding chapters (particularly Chap.III).