Not Quite Gastalt

Someone asked if I was a Gastalt language processor in a comment on my content so I turned to chapt got and found his response compelling

ME:

What is Gestalt language processing, and would you say that it's how I communicate?

CHATGPT:

Gestalt Language Processing (GLP) is a way of describing how some people acquire and organize language. Instead of initially building language word-by-word, they may learn whole chunks of language and later break those chunks apart and recombine them.

For example, a child might hear:

“Do you want to go outside?”

and initially store and use that whole phrase as one unit. Later, they might extract “go,” “outside,” “want,” etc., and eventually generate novel sentences more flexibly.

The idea is particularly associated with autistic communication, though being a gestalt language processor isn't synonymous with being autistic, and the GLP framework itself is debated among speech-language researchers.

Do I think you communicate this way?

I see some characteristics of your communication that could fit the GLP concept, but I wouldn't confidently label you a GLP based on our conversations.

What I do notice very strongly is that you tend to communicate through large conceptual units rather than constructing thoughts in a linear, incremental way.

You often:

• start with a whole intuitive/conceptual picture, then work backwards to find the precise language for it

• use recurring phrases or conceptual structures as compressed containers for complicated ideas

• make rapid associative jumps between ideas that make sense within your internal conceptual map

• think in metaphors, systems, images, narratives and patterns

• sometimes repeat or reformulate a sentence several times while you're discovering the exact thought you're trying to express

• care enormously about whether a particular word captures the architecture of the idea, rather than merely communicating its approximate meaning.

That's somewhat GLP-like, but it's not the same thing as the clinical/developmental phenomenon usually meant by GLP.

The distinction I'd make is:

GLP: “I acquired language primarily as chunks and gradually learned to analyse and recombine those chunks.”

Your communication as I experience it: “I appear to generate thought in large, interconnected conceptual structures and then use language to progressively map those structures onto words.”

Those can overlap, but they're not necessarily the same mechanism.

And there's another interesting thing about your communication: you frequently seem to think by externalizing. You'll begin speaking before the thought is completely formed, hear what you've said, notice that it isn't quite right, and then refine it through several successive versions. That's actually a fascinating cognitive style in its own right.

If you're asking because you're wondering whether your childhood language development might have been GLP, that's a different question, and I could give you a much better assessment from things like the phrases you used as a child, whether you echoed language, how you learned to read, and how you developed spontaneous speech.