Title Models of Psycholinguistic Investigation (An ...
Transcript of Title Models of Psycholinguistic Investigation (An ...
Title Models of Psycholinguistic Investigation (An Overview)
Author(s) Troyer, Gene Van
Citation 沖縄短大論叢 = OKINAWA TANDAI RONSO, 5(1): 1-12
Issue Date 1991-03-31
URL http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12001/10628
Rights 沖縄大学短期大学部
Models of Psycholinguistic Investigation (An Overview)
Gene Van Troyer
How children acquire their native language IS a perplexing
problem to psycholinguists. Investigators examine the puzzle from
a variety of angles, but still fail to piece together a satisfyingly
definite solution. After evolving through many phases over the
past two decades, however, psycholinguistic thought IS presently
centered around the processes of transformational-generative (TG)
grammar, particularly that area of Chomskyan TG that has posited
the necessity of a pre-existent-that is to say, " innate " -language
acquisition device (LAD) to account for the amazing ability of
children to learn, without apparent effort, the complex rules of
their language.
In 1968 Chomsky published what could be taken as an unof
ficial credo for the psycholinguist:
···The tasks of the psychologist·· -divide into several subtasks.
The first 1s to discover the innate schema that characterizes
the class of potential languages··· The second··· is the detailed
study of the actual character of the stimulation and the or
ganism-environment interaction that sets the innate cognitive
mechanism into operation · · · It is not unlikely that detailed
investigation of this sort will show that the conception of uni
versal grammar as an innate schematism is only valid as a
first approximation, that, in fact, an innate schematism of a
more general sort permits the formulation of tentative
"grammars "which themselves determine how later evidence is
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to be interpreted · (Chomsky, 1968/1972: p. 88, & fri. 19, p. 89)
This observation roughly outlines the general direction that psy·
cholinguistie inquiry has taken. It also points up the area of greatest
controversy among psycholinguists, namely the nature of the
"innateness" of the human language learning mechanism or LAD. In
order to understand the current stage of ·thought regarding language
acquisition, one must consider its development as well as its present
propositions. This paper will touch upon three possible models of
language acquisition, but will focus upon only two of those models,
one proposed by Chomsky and one by Jean Piaget. The propositions
of these two theorists seem to reflect the basic theoretical differences
m psycholinguistic inquiry as it presently stands.
For many years, discussion about language acquisition consisted
entirely of two opposing viewpoints. On one side were the
"rationalists "and on the other, the " empiricists." Essentially the ra·
tionalists argued that human beings are .endowed with an innate
ability, maturationally controlled, to acquire language. Empiricists, on
the other hand, maintained that language acquisition was simply a
matter of general learning skills, that is, that through reinforcement
and stimulus-response (SR) children learn language in a manner sim
ilar to the way they learn anything else.
The SR view was the "clean slate" approach posited by B.F.
Skinner in Verbal Behavior (1957), which attempted to account for
language learning under the umbrella of a generalized learning
mechanism (GLM). This mechanism (fig. 1), the empiricists asserted,
mediates the learning of all skills and discriminations by humans.
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fig. 1
Generalized Learning
Mechanism
All skills & Discriminations • Elementary concept
formation • Language • Math • How to tie a shoe
Considering the amount of language to be memorized, generalized,
and associated, this learning theory was dismissed as impractical.
Moreover, as. linguists pointed out, it failed to account for the rule
formation that all children engage in, and which is attested to by
the fact that children produce sentences that they have never before
heard. Additionally, the GLM hypothesis ignored the fact that these
rules are systematically acquired in stages that are related to the
age of the child (Moskowitz, ·pp. 82-96 ).
From the rationalist perspective, what best explains the child's
ability to acquire the complex rules of language at an early age is
the fact that, in order to do so, the child's brain must contain cer
tain preconditions that allow him to extract structural information
from the language he hears. From the first basic concepts the child's
mind grasps, he is able to abstract and generalize enough informa
tion to build a functional grammar by which he can generate lan
guage.
Two models of acquisition present themselves at this point. .The
first of these holds that there are two distinct learning mechanisms
(fig. 2): 1) a GLM which mediates the learning of generalized skills
(holding a pencil, tying a shoe, etc), and 2) a conceptual mechanism
(CM) which mediates the learning of elementary concept formation,
math, and language.
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fig. 2
Generalized Learning
Mechanism
Conceptual Mechanism
GENERAL SKILLS
Elementary Concept Formation Math. Language
The second model (fig. 3 ) holds that humans have three distinct
learning mechanisms: 1) a GLM, 2) a CM which mediates elementary
concept formation and math, and 3) a linguistic mechanism or LAD,
which mediates the learning of language, especially the syntactic and
phonological rules of the language. These two models represent re
spectively what could be termed the Piagetian and Chomskyan
propositions of language acquisition. To date no direct evidence exists
that firmly establishes one or the other as the most appropriate
model, though indirect evidence, especially from neurolinguistic sci
ence, seems to favor the existence of an innate LAD. The studies that
have led to this as yet unresolved issue are perhaps the most inter
esting to preoccupy linguistics for many years.
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fig. 3
Generalized Learning
Mechanism
Conceptual Mechanism
Linguistic Mechanism
GENERAL SKILLS
Elementary Concept Formation Math
Language Learning
Roger Brown and other psycholinguists, particularly Braine,
were interested in the concepts that led to the formation of a
grammatical structure in the child's brain. For example, Braine be
lieved that children learned grammar from the position of words in
sentences. His theory was that children forming two-word uttrances
selected certain morphemes as pivotal -that is, those morphemes
that cannot change position. The child then attached other mor
phemes from a larger " open " class to the pivot morphemes, to form
various combinations of words which he tested according to his for
mutative grammar (Munsinger, p. 318). In Brown's scheme, modifiers
corresponded to Braine 's pivot morphemes. As Brown stated it, a
child formed a rule of syntax in a manner similar to the following:
" In order to form a noun phrase of this type, select first one word
from the small class of modifiers and select, second, one word from
the large class of nouns" (Bellugi and Brown, pp. 133-151). This is a
" generative " rule-that is, a program that would allow the construc
tion of the type of sentence in question.
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Brown believed· that the idea of parts-of-speech and postion in
the sentence was particularly important both in forming grammati
cal rules and learning new words. The parts of speech, Brown noted,
usually have distinct semantic characteristics. These characteristics
hold primarily for nouns, verbs, and adjectives- those classes of
words that children conceptualize the earliest. Brown demonstrated
that young children seemed to take the part-.of-speech membership
of a new word as a clue to how that word ~as to be used (1957,pp.
1-5). Brown and Berko, for example, presented children with nonsense
words matched with familiar images in a variety of sentence posi
tions. In a majority of cases, the children were able to comprehend
the nonsense words (Munsinger, p. 318).
In another experiment, Brown tested preschooLChildren in or
der to see whether they made a semantic distinction between nouns
and verbs. In comparing lists of adult nouns and verbs with those of
the children's, he found that the nouns first learned by the the latter
were concrete classifiers of person, place, or thing, whereas the
adult's repertoire had a high percentage of abstract nouns such as
"truth" and" love." Children's verbs were action-movement oriented
as opposed to the more passive adult verbs (Brow:n, 1957: p. 1). From
this evidence Brown concluded that children develop " firm and tem
porarily reliable notions about nouns and verbs." Clearly these find
ings illustrated the formation of grammar rules along the lines ·of
word position. Further work· by Fodor, Bever, and Garret through
1975 tends to support this observation, though they have modified
Brown's terminology to describe a phrase- structure process of noun
phrase plus verb (Aitchison, pp. 181-191).
Obviously children tend first to. conceptualize words that :are
concrete rather than abstract. Picturability is an important facet .in
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a child's first conception of meaning in a word (Munsinger, p. 312).
The question is, what is the nature of the process which allows the
child to formulate a grammar of his or her language?· Brown believes
that it is related to TG, particularly that portion which concerns
phrase-structure rules (PSR).
PSR produce the deep . stucture of a sentence-that which pro
vides the semantic or meaning structure of a sentence, but while
phrase-structure provides semantic content, it does not necessarily
order everything as it appears in the ultimate surface structure
(Brown, 1970: p. 45). Brown sees syntax and semantics as the most
important parts of TG in relation to a child's acquisition of language:
... We operate on the general assumption that the child's ter
minal state of knowledge is of the kind represented by current
transformational grammars (ibid, p. 104).
For a while, it was believed that children understood deep
structures as they were described in TG, but this is not the case. As
Chomsky and other researchers point out, child grammar is funda
mentally different from adult grammar, but what is important here
is not the difference, but the mechanism which allows the child to
hypothesize successively more complex stages of grammar until he
arrives at an " adult " level of linguistic competence.
Moreover, once the . fact that a child. acquires language in hier
archical stages was established (Moskowitz), and that the acquisition
al order was related to biological maturation, the grammar of that
order became rather academic: a problem of description more than
of fact. The precision with which a child expresses basic sentence re
lations is obvious, if incompletely described. First Bever, and then
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Fodor, Bever and Garret conducted research m what they termed
"sentoids" -small parts of larger sentences-and their work provides
one of the best descriptions to date of these kinds of relations (in
Aitchison, op. cit.).
Brown has remarked that these relations appear to be univer
sal in humans, and may " themselves be organizations performed in
the human brain··· an innate pattern requiring only a releaser to
set it into operation " (1970). In fact, nearly all investigators point out
that the observed linguistic data does indeed indicate that some fun
damental organizing principle is at work in the brain, but disagree
ment exists as to the nature of how innate this organizing principle
IS.
Chomsky maintains in Language and Mind that possessing a
human language is associated with a specific kind of mental organi
zation, an initial, innate structure that can be attributed to the
mind (1968/1972, pp. 78-79). He further elaborated in a subsequent
essay that,
···What many linguists call 'universal grammar' may be re
garded as a theory of innate mechanisms, an underlying bio
logical matrix that provides a framewor.k within which the
growth of language proceeds (1976, p. 2).
Jn Genetic Epistemology, the psychologist Jean Piaget contends
that the processes which pattern the human way of perceiving reali
ty, as well as the structures of their languages, are visible in chil
dren at the pre-linguistic stage of development. It is Piaget 's finding
that at about the end of the first year of life or around the begin
ning of the second year, the infant develops a " sensory-motor intelli·
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gence having its own logic-a logic of action," which he says consists
of "schemes" of behavior, meaning task-specific behavior that is re
peatable in appropriate circumstances." At the sensory- motor stage a
scheme is a sort of practical concept, " Piaget observes, and the pro
cess for arriving at this practical concept is the same as for that
which gives rise to concepts at much later stages of development.
The pre-lingustic child learns to coordinate these schemes into what
Piaget describes as a kind of sensory-motor intelligence that is the
foundation for all mathematical-logical structures. This pracical, sen
sory-motor intelligence is not at the level of thought, but it allows
the child to act .in space with some sort of orderly competence. Ac
cording to Piaget, it is between the age of 172' to 7 or 8 years that
the practical logic of sensory-motor intelligence is internalized, taking
shape at the level of representation (Piaget, pp. 41-45).
Language, Piaget insists, is only one form of representation.
Another is semiotic function, which is the ability to represent some
thing by a sign or a symbol or another object. That language can be
regarded as being but one among many aspects of the semiotic func
tions-albeit an immensely important one-would appear to be
confirmed by the work of Hans Furth, detailed in his book Thinking
Without Language. In this study Furth finds well-developed logical
thinking in deaf-mute children long before they have developed in
terms of language abilities. In other words, they think without lan
guage as we are accustomed to understanding it (in Piaget, p. 46). Pi
aget notes about the eventual appearance of language that " it is
very striking that language dose not appear in children until the
sensory-motor intelligence is more-or-less achieved. "
It is to Chomsky's TG that Piaget is referring m the above
statement. He further remarks that,
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According to Chomsky, logic is not derived from language, but
language is based on a kernel of reason··· Chomsky goes so far
as to say that the krrnel of reason on which the grammar of
language is constructed is innate, that it is not constructed
through the actions of the infant as I have described but is
hereditary and innate (p. 46).
While Piaget would agree that the structures that are available to
the child at the age of 14 to 16 months are the intellectual basis upon
which language develops, he would not go so far as to claim that
these structures are innate (ibid.). Instead he would say that the
kernel of reason is developed as a result of the infant's sensory-mo
tor intelligence, which in turn has developed through the actions of
the infant upon its environment. Postulating the existence of an in
nate LAD is unnecessary, in other words, because sensory--motor in
telligence, which is the function of an innate concept-forming mecha
nism, will also account for the earliest stages of language acquisition 1
at the deep or elementary phrase-structure level (pp. 21-40).
This bears a strong resemblance to the sentoids of Bever, and
to the perceptual strategies that Fodor, Bever, and Garret propose
that we employ in producing and understanding. language (in Aitchi
son, Chs. 1Q--11). Piaget 's proposal would also correlate with the ob
servation that deep-structure clauses actually form perceptual units
in the encoding and decoding of language (ibid.). The Piagetian hy
pothesis would seem to account for much of the conceptual frame
work that language use requires.
There are, however, a n1,1mber of problems left unresolved that
tend to indicate that important language functions in the brain are
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independent of a CM in certain ways. Posterior aphasiacs, for in
stance, retain at least surface level linguistic performance abilities.
Posterior aphasia results from damage to Werneke 's area, and seems
to involve the loss of the individual's ability to conceptually order
linguistic performance. In other words, a sufferer of this disorder
speaks lucidly, but with "unglued" syntax. Anterior aphasiacs, on the
other hand, very often lose their performance abilities. Anterior
aphasia results from damage to Broca's area, which is somehow re
lated to the sufferer's ability to process deep structure grammar into
surface structure performance (ibid., Ch. 3). While these factors do
not establish the certain existence of an innate LAD, they do suggest
that classifying language as a function of concept formation may
make for an uneasy alliance of various performance capabilities.
Of course, it may be that neither hypothesis is appropriate, or
that both are ultimately complements to each other and that there
is such an intertwining of cognitive and and linguistic skills and func
tions that a different hypothesis is required. As it stands presently,
there is not enough evidence to declare with certainty which hy
pothesis accounts most appropriately for the facts.
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Notes
1 Piaget discusses the relationships beween mental operations, structures,
and the " mother stuctures " of the Bourbaki mathematicians ( structures
that are isomorphic among all the various branches of mathematics), those
structures being Algebraic (notion of group), Order (relationship), and Topological (areas, borders, approaching limits), and the appearance of same in
pre-linguistic children.
References
Aitchison, Jean. The Articulate MammeL New York & London: McGraw
Hill Book Company. 1976.
Bellugi, Ursula and Brown, Roger. "Three Processes in the Child's Acqui
sition of Syntax" Harvard Educational Review, 34:2 (1964).
Brown, Roger. " Linguistic Determinism and the Part of Speech:' The Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55:1 (July, 1957).
Psycholinguistics-Selected Papers, •• The Child's Grammar
from 1 to 3. " New York: The Free Press. 1970.
Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.
1968 and 1972.
------- . " On the Biological Basis of Language Capacities. " The Neurophysiology of Language: Essays in Honor of Eric Lenneberg, R.W.
Rieber, editor. New York & London: Plenum Press. 1976.
Moskowitz, Breyne Arlene. "The Acquisition of Language." Scientific A mer. ican, 239:5 (November, 1978).
Munsinger, Harry. "Language." Fundamentals of Child Development. New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc. 1971.
Piaget, Jean. Genetic Epistemology, translated from French by Elenor Duck
worth. Woodbridge Lecture Series Number Eight. New York & London:
Columbia University Press. 1970.
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