A Biosemiotic Analysis of Braille

作者：Goldberg Louis J^*; Swan Liz Stillwaggon

来源：Biosemiotics, 2011, 4(1): 25-38.

DOI：10.1007/s12304-010-9092-y

• Braille
• Encoding
• Biosemiotic systems
• Neuronal groups
• Somatosensory system

A unique aspect of human communication is the utilization of sets of well-delineated entities, the morphology of which is used to encode the letters of the alphabet. In this paper, we focus on Braille as an exemplar of this phenomenon. We take a Braille cell to be a physical artifact of the human environment, into the structure of which is encoded a representation of a letter of the alphabet. The specific issue we address in this paper concerns an examination of how the code that is embedded in the structure of a Braille cell is transferred with fidelity from the environment through the body and into the Braille reader's brain. We describe four distinct encoding steps that enable this transfer to occur.

• 出版日期2011-4