Towards a Model of Language Understanding

The paper is an attempt to outline a hierarchical model of language apprehension based on an extension of Language of Thought Hypothesis (LOTH). Several arguments are presented which show that language being incomplete has limitations in representing both the reality and the mental states. Therefore, postulating LOTH similar with a conventional language is fallacious. Nonetheless, if language is related with thought, language properties would have to have a causal root in the functioning of the mind. This controversial issue is discussed in relation with the possibility of using Zipf’s law for identifying a deeper causal law at the level of cognition. Zipf’s law may be related with language redundancy necessary for the language understanding process. This process can be modeled based on information compression performed by a self-organizing neuralcomputation structure at two levels. At the first level, a feature extraction is done in a parsing process of a natural conventional language, and the result is a linguistic map which acts as input for the second level of compression. There, a purely semantic map is formed which is independent of any conventional language, accounting in this way the universality of thinking and reasoning process.