The Articulate Mammal

An Introduction to Psycholinguistics

Jean Aitchison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134110285
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

An established bestseller, The Articulate Mammal is a concise and highly readable introduction to the main topics in psycholinguistics. This fifth edition brings the book up-to-date with recent theories, including new material on:

• the possibility of a 'language gene'
• post-Chomskyan ideas
• language within an evolutionary framework
• spatial cognition and how this affects language
• how children become acclimatized to speech rhythms before birth
• the acquisition of verbs
• construction and cognitive grammar
• aphasia and dementia.

Requiring no prior knowledge of the subject, chapter by chapter, The Articulate Mammal tackles the basic questions central to the study of psycholinguistics. Jean Aitchison investigates these issues with regard to animal communication, child language and the language of adults, and includes in the text full references and helpful suggestions for further reading.

1
The great automatic grammatizator

Need anything be innate?

He reached up and pulled a switch on the panel. Immediately the room was filled with a loud humming noise, and a crackling of electric sparks … sheets of quarto paper began sliding out from a slot to the right of the control panel … They grabbed the sheets and began to read. The first one they picked up started as follows: ‘Aifkjmbsaoegweztpplnvo qudskigt, fuhpekanvbertyuiolkjhgfdsazxcvbnm, peruitrehdjkgmvnb, wmsuy … .’ They looked at the others. The style was roughly similar in all of them. Mr Bohlen began to shout. The younger man tried to calm him down.

‘It’s all right, sir, Really it is. We’ve got a connection wrong somewhere, that’s all. You must remember, Mr Bohlen, there’s over a million feet of wiring in this room.’

‘It’ll never work,’ Mr Bohlen said.

Roald Dahl, The Great Automatic Grammatizator

Every normal human being can talk. So the average person tends to think that there is little or nothing mysterious about language. As the linguist Noam Chomsky has pointed out:

We lose sight of the need for explanation when phenomena are too familiar and ‘obvious’. We tend too easily to assume that explanations must be transparent and close to the surface … As native speakers, we have a vast amount of data available to us. For just this reason it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that there is nothing to be explained. Nothing could be further from the truth …

(Chomsky 1972a: 25–6)

But the mysterious nature of human language becomes more apparent when one realizes that no one has yet managed to simulate the language ability of a human being. Computers can play chess, sort bank statements, and even talk about limited topics such as cubes, squares and cones. But we are far from producing a ‘great automatic grammatizator’ which could unaided hold conversations on any topic. Why is this? Perhaps we should think about language more carefully.

Nature or nurture?

When people start thinking about language, the first question which often occurs to them is this: is language natural to humans? – in the same way that grunting is natural to pigs, and barking comes naturally to dogs. Or is it just something we happen to have learned? – in the same way that dogs may learn to beg, or elephants may learn to waltz, or humans may learn to play the guitar.

Clearly, in one sense, children ‘learn’ whatever language they are exposed to, be it Chinese, Nootka or English. So no one would deny that ‘learning’ is very important. But the crucial question is whether children are born with ‘blank sheets’ in their head as far as language is concerned – or whether humans are ‘programmed’ with an outline knowledge of the structure of languages in general.

This question of whether language is partly due to nature or wholly due to learning or nurture is often referred to as the nature–nurture controversy, and has been discussed for centuries. For example, it was the topic of one of Plato’s dialogues, the Cratylus. Controversies which have been going on for literally ages tend to behave in a characteristic fashion. They lie dormant for a while, then break out fiercely. This particular issue resurfaced in linguistics in 1959 when the linguist Noam Chomsky wrote a devastating and witty review of Verbal Behavior, a book by the Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner (Skinner 1957; Chomsky 1959). This book claimed to ‘explain’ language as a set of habits gradually built up over the years. According to Skinner, no complicated innate or mental mechanisms are needed. All that is necessary is the systematic observation of the events in the external world which prompt the speaker to utter sounds.

Skinner’s claim to understand language was based on his work with rats and pigeons. He had proved that, given time, rats and pigeons could be trained to perform an amazing variety of seemingly complex tasks, provided two basic principles were followed. First, the tasks must be broken down into a number of carefully graduated steps. Second, the animals must be repeatedly rewarded.

In a typical experiment, a rat was put in a box containing a bar. If it pressed the bar, it was rewarded with a pellet of food. Nothing forced it to press the bar. The first time it possibly did so accidentally. When the rat found that food arrived, it pressed the bar again. Eventually it learned that if it was hungry, it could obtain food by pressing the bar. Then the task was made more difficult. The rat only got rewarded if it pressed the bar while a light was flashing. At first the rat was puzzled. Eventually it learned the trick. Then the task was made more difficult again. This time the rat only received food if it pressed the bar a certain number of times. After initial confusion, it learned to do this also. And so on, and so on.

This type of ‘trial-and-error’ learning was called operant conditioning by Skinner, which can be translated as ‘training by means of voluntary responses’ (the word ‘operant’ means a voluntary response rather than an automatic one). Skinner suggested that it is by means of this mechanism that the vast majority of human learning takes place, including language learning:

The basic processes and relations which give verbal behaviour its special characteristics are now fairly well understood. Much of the experimental work responsible for this advance has been carried out on other species, but the results have proved to be surprisingly free of species restrictions. Recent work has shown that the methods can be extended to human behaviour without serious modification.

(Skinner 1957:3)

All one needed to do in order to understand language, he said, was to identify the ‘controlling variables’, which would enable us to predict specific utterances. For example, in the same way as it was possible to say that a rat’s bar-pressing behaviour was partly ‘under the control’ of a flashing light, so a feeling of hunger might ‘control’ or predict a human utterance such as ‘Please pass the bread and butter.’ Or the presence of a beautiful painting might call forth the exclamation, ‘Oh how beautiful.’ Or a bad smell might cause one to exclaim ‘Oh what a terrible smell.’ A French notice, such as ‘Ne touchez pas’, might result in one saying, ‘That means “Don’t touch”.’ And if a child said ‘Hickory dickory dock’, you are likely to continue ‘The mouse ran up the clock.’ In theory, Skinner saw no difficulty in linking up any particular set of words which a human might wish to produce with an identifiable external happening.

In practice, the matter is far from simple, as Chomsky pointed out. Chomsky made two major criticisms of Skinner’s work. First, the behaviour of rats in boxes is irrelevant to human language. Second, Skinner fundamentally misunderstood the nature of language.

The irrelevance of rats

Chomsky pointed out that the simple and well-defined sequence of events observed in the boxes of rats is just not applicable to language. And the terminology used in the rat experiments cannot be re-applied to human language without becoming hopelessly vague.

For example, how do you know that someone is likely to say ‘Oh what a beautiful picture’ when looking at a beautiful painting? They might say instead, ‘It clashes with the wallpaper’, ‘It’s hanging too low’, ‘It...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface to the first edition
• Preface to the fifth edition
• Introduction
• 1 The great automatic grammatizator
• 2 Animals that try to talk
• 3 Grandmama’s Teeth
• 4 Predestinate grooves
• 5 A blueprint in the brain?
• 6 Chattering children
• 7 Puzzling it out
• 8 Celestial unintelligibility
• 9 The white elephant problem
• 10 The case of the missing fingerprint
• 11 The Cheshire Cat’s grin
• 12 Banker’s clerk or hippopotamus?
• Suggestions for further reading
• References
• Index