Abstract
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.
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Notes
It is interesting to note that the authors report on the number of dots per second as a measure of speed in Braille reading, since this number is not essential to the overall process of reading Braille meaningfully. What is essential is the pattern of raised dots in Braille cells.
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Goldberg, L.J., Swan, L.S. A Biosemiotic Analysis of Braille. Biosemiotics 4, 25–38 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9092-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-010-9092-y