A Cognitive Account of the Puzzle of Ideography

One could argue that this is not only about learning or memory, but underlies the core cognitive mechanism for generating flexible higher-order conceptualizations (see also Arsiwalla et al., 2023). Why is this so important vis-a-vis the specialization hypothesis? The answer is that ideographs and other graphic codes that are not languages, allow for very limited abstraction and higher-order representation via compositionality of symbols. In language, compositions based on merely a limited set of letters, allows for creating an astoundingly large number of new concepts and higher-order representations. The same is not true for graphic codes (where base symbols already represent a specific concept).