My name is Antero Johansson. I am a retired Finnish-Swedish bilingual psychologist. I grew up in Southern Finland in a small town where most people spoke Swedish, but I went to a Finnish school because Finnish is my official mother tongue. At the age of six when I started school, I had become very Swedish and trying to learn to read and write Finnish was quite hard. Anyhow, I made it well until high school where my Finnish teacher became very dissatisfied with me when I wrote essays. She told me “Antero, you are writing Swedish using Finnish words”, but she could not help me improve my Finnish. My other high school exam grades were excellent, but the grade for Finnish was not that good.
After high school I started my university career studying English philology, but soon changed to psychology. In mid-1970’s I attended a lecture by a Norwegian born lecturer Frode J Strømnes who told about his difficulties learning Finnish and how he had overcome the problem. After the lecture I went to talk to him, and a bit later I became his research assistant for two years. Our co-operation lasted sporadically after that until his death in December 2012.
Strømnes wrote a book of his life’s work in 2006 (The fall of the word and the rise of the mental model. A reinterpretation of the research on spatial cognition and language, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Berlin: Peter Lang). That book summarizes his research in the area of verbal learning and imagery. Sad to say but neither that book nor his other articles have been widely read. As a result, his work has made no impact on the research in the area. The intention of this blog is to try to correct that situation.
This site presents in short form the main ideas of Strømnes’ theory and some of the research based on that theory as well as some earlier unpublished material by him and myself.
If you are new to the ideas presented in this blog, start from the oldest article. That will give you the basics of the theory on which the reseach of Strømnes is based on.
-Antero Johansson, the author
