Undercurrent

Details

Hits: 4879

IJmuiden, 360° today. Structure [ team ]

Above: With Nico (the boss behind the desk) and mechanics Cees and Mike at TCY. Nico and his self-taught team are excellent car mechanics and pleasant people to deal with, located in the dunes, near the sea.

Min/max temperature: 6°C/11°C; humidity: 70%; precipitation: 0 mm; sea level pressure: 1016.14 hPa; wind: W 24.1 km/h; visibility: 10.0 kilometres; Clouds: Few 731 m., Scattered Clouds 1341 m.; Moon: Waxing Gibbous 95% illuminated

"[C]hilderen all over the world acquire languages with the same basic characteristics, in about the same sequence, at about the same age, almost regardless of their intelligence and almost regardless of their environment. [ This ] suggest that the basic forms of language -- the duality between phonemic and morphemic levels, the organisation of utterances into phrases, the transformation of phrase structure -- are somehow genetically inevitable. They are a model which experience can clothe, but cannot reshape. Just this was also the nativism of the Gestalt psychologists. They never argued that experience had no effects, but only that its effects were organised and determined by the deeper requirements of structure."

Ulric Neisser in 'Cognitive Psychology', page 247, first published in 1967 by Pretice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey