--- title: 'Commenting on how people sound and the intermediate theory of consciousness' url: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/intermediate-consciousness' markdown: 'https://rethunk.englishup.me/intermediate-consciousness.md' date: '2026-10-30' description: 'Commenting on how people sound and the intermediate theory of consciousness Some discussion on Twitter of the following quote: "You sound like a native speaker" has revolved around whether this is a compliment or not. (https://twitter.com/SallyHarg99/status/1502933962536198144). The fact the quote …' --- # Commenting on how people sound and the intermediate theory of consciousness Some discussion on Twitter of the following quote: "You sound like a native speaker" has revolved around whether this is a compliment or not. (). The fact the quote uses "sound" is significant in the light of the claim by Ray Jackendoff that out of the possible range of linguistic information it is only the phonological kind which presents itself to awareness. That is, as Prinz (2017) puts it, "we are only conscious of speech sounds" or gestures in the case of sign language, "and the sounds we experience reside at an intermediate level of auditory processing" (Prinz 2017: 262). The intermediate level theory of consciousness is Jackendoff's answer to the question of where is consciousness. Other theories of consciousness (of the sort where consciousness is projected from mental information structures) have been called central-level (one of the most frequent where conceptual structures most directly supports awareness), consciousness as executive and threshold theories of consciousness. Jackendoff (1997) uses various phenomena such as the inner voice, tip of the tongue and nonsense syllables to illustrate his point. Why do we hear our inner voices as words he asks? By contrast we do not hear syntactic categories nor conceptual categories. Jackendoff further proposes that we are not directly aware of our concepts - what we are directly aware of (through auditory images) are sentences expressing concepts. Elaborating on this Jackendoff argues bilinguals often say they think or dream in one of their languages, this would not be possible if conceptual structures (which are language neutral) were the only support of linguistic awareness. Tip of the tongue phenomena where we know the meaning but can't produce the word or where we can picture the face of someone but can't say their name show that conceptual structure can be excluded from awareness. Jackendoff remarks: > "One is aware of having requisite conceptual structure ("I know what I want to say..."), and one can reject incorrect guesses at the desired word, but the content remains inarticulate. (Jackendoff, 1997: 291). Nonsense syllables appear to us as linguistic even if they have no meaning. Similarly when we first hear another language we perceive it is another language even if we cannot understand it. So from this view it is inevitable that people comment on how you sound as this is the only part of the linguistic information people are phenomenally aware of. This is not to excuse racist commentary on how people talk just simply to throw a particular light on such commentary. ### References Jackendoff, R. (1987). *Consciousness and the computational mind*. The MIT Press. Prinz, J. (2017). *The intermediate level theory of consciousness* . In M. Velmans, S. & Schneider (Eds.) The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness (2nd ed, pp. 257- 271). John Wiley & Sons --- ## Navigation - Previous: [Language as a tool](https://rethunk.englishup.me/instrumentalism.md) - Next: [Comments on "A Historic webinar with Chomsky and Krashen: Modern Linguistics" video](https://rethunk.englishup.me/krashen.md)