When you hear a word...?

Question

Let me try to set this up correctly. Stay with me...

When someone speaks, how do you process what they have said? If someone, for example, says the word "chair" to you, do you see a chair in your "mind" or do you see the word "chair?"

Answer 1

It's difficult to separate now that we live in a word-dominated culture, but when you consider that before literacy became widespread people had probably never even seen the word 'chair' written down, you're left with the ideas that they inagined a chair, imagined the sound of the word chair, or 'heard' the word chair which conjured up the image (however fleeting or fragmentary) in their mind.

Personally I'm with Wittgenstein and his insistence that language is image based.

Edit: I think Aradia B's point illuminates this, people tend to picture a chair (or whatever object) they've seen, rather than a universal chair.

Answer 2

It depends.

If some says just the one word, "chair", then my mind visually drifts through different sketch styles of chair because my first question would be, "which chair?". Or, if chairs are present when this word is spoken I may just sit down.

If someone includes the word chair in a longer sentence I may simply check the concept as acceptable in the context of their sentence and focus more on something else they are trying to communicate ie : "The lion swatted the chair aside and ate the animal trainer right in front of us at the circus last night!".

Answer 3

Neither, I hear the word "chair" and my mind automatically understands what she is refering to. There is no need to visualize it. If that person told me that they saw a chair yesterday. I would not picture them looking at a chair. Instead, I would simply acknowledge the fact as information. The brain seems to have it's own method of understanding that is not based on visual aspects (like picturing the object or the world).

Answer 4

I don't see the word, but I do see a chair. Not any one type of chair but more like an outline of a chair. Usually a wooden kitchen chair.

Answer 5

i spell out the word "chair" in my mind while simultaneously [probably a fraction of a second later] i see a wooden chair...but by then, i'm so far off to even rememebr what the person says. so that's why u just understand the word before u go on about visualizing it to keep conscious of the convo

Answer 6

I'm afraid that if I tried to picture how I see each and every word spoken to me by another during a conversation, I'd lose the general jist of the conversation in a hurry. What I try to do is to form some type of overall picture as the conversation moves along. I then try to speak to the other person in a way that they will be able to conjure up their own vision of whatever it is we're talking about...

Answer 7

I'm a medical transcriptionist and I don't know if this is a quirk of my occupation or not, but I simultaneously visualize the chair in my mind and also imagine typing the word "chair"....but just now...I visualized the word "chair" in big red letters....oh my, I think I'm losing my mind....sensory overload....

Answer 8

Personally, I find myself, for the most part, see the object. But, other times I find myself imagining how to spell a word.
My husband, who had a stroke, has to actually go through the process of trying to figure out what each word means, before he can process it. He has a hard time with any question.

Answer 9

Now that you mention it, I think I usually visualize what a person is talking about in my mind. If someone is talking about something that is hard for me to visualize, like how a building is laid out, I just sort of tell myself, "Oh well, I might as well go with it and let them keep talking and hope the description isn't too vital to the story."

Answer 10

i see a chair