Hi Michael, John and Carmen, Thanks for a thought-provoking topic Michael, and for your earlier challenge to the relevance of "science" to NLP, which made me consider my motives for trying to link the two. (Short answer is, I'm just a natural synthesiser of different models/concepts, I can't help it, it helps me to learn, and I enjoy it! In other words, it has value to me, but I can quite understand that it has less/different value to others  :-) To illustrate the point, I came across an article on the Evolution of Language, which seems to have relevance to the part of your thread dealing with the relative importance of language and other representations in F2 transforms - http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=fa/evolution-language3 - takes you straight to the relevant section, though I think the whole piece is worth reading (there's some discussion of mirror neurons/cells later in the article). A couple of excerpts that seemed relevant - "But there is no evidence that language is essential to any particular cognitive operation. Damage to the brain has for some patients resulted in a complete loss of speech, both external and internal, but researchers have been unable to correlate cognitive deficits with this loss." and "Language is thought to be a mechanism for transmitting the information within thoughts. One experiment used to demonstrate this idea requires subjects to listen to a short passage of several sentences. The subjects are then asked to repeat the passage. Most subjects accurately convey the gist of the passage in the sentences they produce, but they do not come close to repeating the sentences verbatim. It appears as if two transformations have occurred. Upon hearing the passage, the subjects convert the language of the passage into a more abstract representation of its meaning, which is more easily stored within memory. In order to recreate the passage, the subject recalls this representation and converts its meaning back into language." I'm not suggesting that the model quoted in the article is more "correct" than John and Carmen's because it is "scientific". But I wonder if the synthesis of the two helps both fields (and at the same time helps to make NLP more accessible to the scientific community)? (BTW, there's lots of other good articles on that site, I'll try to piece together a summary of points that I believe contribute to the subject-matter of WITW ...time allowing!) Hope that's useful! Cheers, Jon