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September 26, 2005
A Recipe for Sentence Formation
When a normal functioning person forms a sentence, he or she usually does not even have to think about what they are saying and how they need to piece together the elements of the sentence in order to make it logical and coherent, so it is weird to sit here and actually take the time to think about how exactly the brain assembles sentences.
In order to form the sentence "My patient had brain damage" the brain would first need to focus on the message that is trying to be conveyed. A person, who happens to be a patient, experienced damage to a part of his body, his brain, at some point in the past, and this person happens to be my patient. Those are all of the meanings found in that sentence. Once the brain has determined those meanings, it instantly finds the words in its vocabulary to represent those meanings. The next step is putting together the words to form a correct sentence. The brain focuses on the subject of the sentence, the patient, and molds the sentence around it. The brain makes an effort to convey this message as succinctly as possible so instead of saying "A patient, who happens to by my own..." it simply uses the possesive "my." Once the subject has been established the brain would then convey the next message concerning what happened to the patient, or the term "brain damage." So thus far the sentence is "My patient brain damage," but because the brain has had years and years of experience is speaking grammatically correct, it knows that these words alone are not enough. It then adds the correct verb to denote that the brain damage was experienced by the patient, and this verb is automatically conjugated according to when the experience happened.
Sometimes the brain makes mistakes though. If the same sentence were to come out as "My patient had dain bramage," that would mean that at some point in the formation of this sentence something went wrong. All of the meanings that need to be conveyed are present, and the sentence is grammatically correct as well, but it is the formation of the words to represent that meanings that is incorrect. When the brain decided which words to use to convey each message it did so almost simultaneously so that all the words were chosen at basically the same time. Since the brain was focussing on all 5 words at the same time, it confused some of them, causing several letters on one to be switched with a letter on another, resulting in "dain bramage." Since the process of sentence formation is so rapid, the brain sent out the sentence to be spoken before even realizing that it was incorrect.
Posted by lcissullivan at September 26, 2005 08:59 AM