JM: To get back to business . . . can we talk about the place of language in the mind?

NC: OK.

JM: It's not a peripheral system; you've mentioned that it has some of the characteristics of a central system. What do you mean by that?

NC: Well, peripheral systems are systems that are input systems and output systems. So, the visual system receives data from the outside and transmits some information to the inside. And the articulatory system takes some information from the inside and does some things, and has an effect on the outside world. That's what input and output systems are. Language makes use of those systems, obviously; I'm hearing what you say and I'm producing something. But that's just something being done with language. There's some internal system that you and I pretty much share that enables the noises that I make to get into your auditory system and the internal system that you have is doing something with those noises and understanding them pretty much the way my own internal system is creating them. And those are systems of knowledge; those are fixed capacities. If that's not an internal system, I don't know what the word means.

JM: OK; there are other systems, such as facial recognition. That also is not a peripheral system. It gets information from the visual system.

NC: Well, the facial recognition system is an input system, but of course it makes use of internal knowledge that you have about how to interpret faces. People interpret faces very differently from other objects. Show a person a face upside down; he or she can't recognize it.