EGAUGNAL or LANGUAGE: Production v. Comprehension

In Stephens and Hasson’s article Speaker-listener neural coupling underlies successful communication, the essential distinction between language production and language comprehension is drawn. From a fundamental linguistic perspective, an individual is almost always capable of comprehending more language than he or she can produce. This poses an interesting and curious dichotomy of neurological language use, as it seems to suggest that the human mind has two receptacles, if you will, in which language is stored. It seems as though the first receptacle, where language is initially stored, houses the words and phrases merely recognized, though not established well enough to duplicate in usage. The second receptacle, then, houses words and phrases that are familiar enough to recycle in one’s own language. Theoretically, words that have been heard in proper use with sufficient repetition will eventually transfer from the first to the second receptacle, allowing an individual to both comprehend as well as produce that particular element of language.

            This notion seems to apply, although in a perplexingly reverse manner, to Dean Young’s poem Handy Guide. Throughout the piece, Young expresses a series of seemingly bizarre and unrelated thoughts, all of which containing relatively basic language that ought to be familiar to most adult users of language. The reversal from the underlying linguistic notion, that comprehension precedes production, can be observed when considering the readily accessible nature of most all of Young’s language in the poem compared to the apparent inane and inexplicable nature of his statements. The poem begins, for example, with the stupefying couplet, “Avoid adjectives of scale. / Dandelion broth instead of duck soup.” The poem continues in this manner and leaves the poor reader with a complete lack of any coherent or cohesive understanding. It this unusual case, the reader’s ability to duplicate or produce this language for himself is not at all difficult, but the same reader’s ability to comprehend anything that he has just read or reproduced is virtually impossible (besides, of course, applying a series of arbitrary interpretations to the poem).

            This anomaly of a poem begs the question, is it not possible, then, to say many, many things that we can almost never truly understand?