Visual perception and the construction of semantic space

As linguistics and the study of human language become more of an integral part of contemporary cognitive science, it is clear that advancements in defining how the human brain encodes, retrieves and decodes sensory information will overlap to some degree with new discoveries and modeling principles of language. One important aspect of current neuroscience that may be very pertinent to linguistics is a more profound understanding of how visual perception occurs and its relationship to imagery and memory. IN the following paper, I will review briefly some of the more salient discoveries concerning the visual cortex (Area 17 or V1), and research on both visual encoding and visual imagery. Data from the Slavic languages will provide the test case. The goal of this analysis is to apply these findings in order to define more robust mechanisms of semantic construction in human language, in particular the construction of semantic fields (or space) in lexical categories.