Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Ray Jackendoff (2007) claims that most work on consciousness deals “almost exclusively with visualexperience” and suggests to focus more on linguistic awareness. Jackendoff proposes that phonologicalability – to divide utterances into words and syllables – is at the core of linguistic consciousness. Thisaccount can be supplemented by empirical research on language acquisition. Focusing on the step-by-stepemergence of linguistic consciousness in infancy can offer new and potentially fruitful angles forinvestigating states of consciousness. In addition computational models of word segmentation andpossible implications for linguistic consciousness are discussed.