This article was well written and is certainly food for thought. One thing that came to my mind is why the brains of people speaking different languages would be otherwise identical. Another philosophical issue to be pondered is what the impact of words are as pertaining to awareness and intelligence. Comments?
You do realize that within the first 2 years of life are the most influential in cognitive development in which the synapses of the brain are still being formed. In these first two years of brain development an individuals personality, ability to learn, memory, etc are literally hardwired. This is another reason why teaching a child to bi or multilinguil is best done in the first 2-3 years of life as their brain is the greatest ability to learn and retain phonetics and other important language skills.
If we could look at the brain of two people speaking different languages let us say with the areas of the brain illuminated when they speak we would probably see that these areas are not exactly the same. If we could peer even deeper to see individual synapses, again the synapse connections in these brains would probably be significantly different in these two individuals (or any two individuals even speaking the same language).
Words are just the sum of phonetic pieces put together. There are a lot of factors that play here. I am not a neurologist or neorosurgeoun however, from my own studies of the brain, I seriously doubt their is a neuron or group of neurons for each individual word in our vocabulary. The brain is very fluid in how language works. There are multiple paths of neurons which is not dissimilar to "cloud computing" (which itself is modeled after the human brain).
Edited by DevilsAdvocate, : No reason given.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.Dr. Carl Sagan