Psychology Library Editions: Psycholinguistics

Steven Schwartz

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134484287
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Psychology Library Editions: Psycholinguistics brings together as one set, or individual volumes, a series of previously out-of-print titles, originally published between 1970 and 1990. From a variety of academic imprints this set reflects the growth of psycholinguistics as a serious scientific discipline in its own right. It provides in one place a wealth of important reference sources from a wide range of authors expert in the field.

I	PAST AND PRESENT ISSUES IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

1	Controversial Issues in Psycholinguistics

Doris Aaronson

New York University

R. W. Rieber

John Jay College, CUNY

The word “psycholinguistics” denotes a composite of the two disciplines, psychology and linguistics. The rebirth of this interdisciplinary area after a rocky history (see Rieber & Vetter, Chapter 2, this volume) was stimulated about 20 years ago by the interaction of psychologist George A. Miller with linguist Noam Chomsky. Although this area of investigation has grown markedly in size and strength during the past two decades, the number of occasions on which psychologists and linguists actually combine efforts in a truly interdisciplinary fashion is painfully small. This book represents such an effort, and the chapter authors hope it will provide a stimulus for the readers to continue the active development of an interdisciplinary communication and a merger of ideas between psychology and linguistics.

This book is “interdisciplinary” in a second direction. It combines authors who are concerned with basic research and those whose goal is applied research and research applications to social problems in health and education. Basic researchers frequently add a “social relevance” section at the end of their grant proposals as a political move to increase their chances of funding by government and private sources. Also, people in applied linguistics and psychology occasionally attend basic research conferences. Hopefully, the present combination of authors with basic and applied orientations will lead to a strengthening of communication among others with these two orientations.

This book provides a meeting ground in a third direction: It represents a broad variety of theoretical approaches to psycholinguistics. For example, some authors focus on the surface structure of linguistic strings as the primary correlate of human verbal behavior. Other authors are more concerned with an abstract linguistic analysis of underlying representations and with the cognitive processes that occur when the mind must deal with logical reasoning and information coding associated with communication. The reader may often find more in common theoretically among some chapter authors of different disciplines than among those within the “same” area.

This book covers a broad range of topics in psycholinguistics, but it is not meant to be a comprehensive survey. For example, a thorough treatment of such topics as phonetics, pragmatics, neurolinguistics, and animal communication is missing, although some aspects of these topics are considered when relevant to material in chapters aimed in other directions. The book has four goals: (1) to discuss many of the important contemporary issues in psycholinguistics; (2) to explore the different views on major theoretical controversies; (3) to provide an analysis of background literature as a framework in which to evaluate the issues and controversies; and (4) to describe interesting high-quality research currently being done by the authors and some of their colleagues. Hence, this book is aimed at advanced students who already have a strong background in psychology or linguistics and more particularly at active workers in these fields who desire a critical interdisciplinary examination of contemporary and controversial ideas.

In this chapter, we point out some of the important issues in contemporary psycholinguistics. In particular, we briefly compare and contrast the approaches to these issues taken by authors of the various chapters. Sometimes these approaches are complementary, providing alternative views of the same problem, much as one might describe a painting in terms of its color, its form, or its thematic content. At other times, these approaches are in such sharp conflict that you would not be convinced the authors are even discussing the “same” painting. Points raised by the authors within each section are considered, followed by some general comments.

I. RESEARCH ORIENTATIONS

The chapter authors for the section on methodological orientations are psychologists and hence agree that an understanding of linguistic performance is the primary focus of their research. Linguistic competence is of secondary interest in that it places restrictions on the range of language behaviors that can be emitted by the human being. However, on many methodological and theoretical details, Kurt Salzinger and Doris Aaronson take seemingly opposing, but perhaps complementary, points of view. Salzinger calls his approach “radical behaviorism,” and Aaronson might be classified as a “liberal cognitivist.” Let us examine here three issues on which these authors take different stands. Each author's approach is typical of a strong “research camp,” but many researchers would also position themselves somewhere between these approaches.

A. The Naturalness of Language Situations in Language Research

Salzinger strongly maintains that the research situation must provide a representative sample of situations in which the language behavior being studied occurs naturally. Otherwise, the results obtained and the theoretical conclusions drawn may be quite misleading. He speaks out against the use of “contrived verbal materials” and unusual environmental contexts that are frequently devised in laboratory research settings. To emphasize these points, Salzinger calls his research approach “Ecolinguistics.”

In sharp contrast, Aaronson demonstrates that it is often necessary to distort the situational parameters in order to understand the underlying nature of human language processors, in order to get a picture of the qualitatively different types of language performance possible and of its variability and flexibility from one situation to the next and from one individual to another. If a stimulus overload is created by presenting perhaps two or more verbal messages simultaneously, or at super-fast rates or with degraded intelligibility, the ways in which the human “language processors” break down (as reflected in the number and nature of errors and in the patterns of response latencies) can provide information on how those processors are structured and the range of cognitive functions they can perform.

B. The Role of Environmental Stimuli in Determining Behavior

Salzinger views the stimulus environment as a critical determinant in the control of language behavior. He applies the “classical” and “operant” conditioning models, developed by Pavlov and Skinner in the animal lab, to human language situations. He maintains that verbal and nonverbal discriminative and conditional stimuli for communication, in contingency with appropriate reinforcements and unconditional stimuli, determine the person's linguistic response to that situation. In this view, stimulus generalization is an important theoretical concept. The same types of language behavior learned in one stimulus context will be emitted, in new stimulus situations that share stimulus properties with the initial setting. For example, when the child learns to name objects in the environment, and when adults use similar syntactic structures in related speech contexts, generalization of stimulus control is involved.

Aaronson's contradictory view is that the particular stimulus or stimulus class may have little direct control over human language behavior. She reviews research where language coding behavior and overt language performance learned in one stimulus situation persists even when the stimulus parameters are changed, so that it is no longer optimal to use the originally learned linguistic coding strategies. In other studies, she shows that the exact same stimulus sentences result in drastically different linguistic performance, depending on the cognitive task demands. When people must comprehend sentences, their patterns of word-by-word reading times reflect the semantic organization of the sentence: Prolonged pauses occur at key content words such as the subject and object, and reading times decrease with contextual redundancy. But when people must memorize those exact same stimulus sentences, the above patterns are absent. Instead, reading times reflect the syntactic structure; prolonged pauses occur at phrase boundaries, and reading times increase with accumulating linguistic information from one phrase break to the next.

One must ask whether these differences between a cognitive and a behavioral approach are as great as they appear on the surface. In particular, to what extent might there be a mapping between the concepts of “cognitive task demands” and “stimulus determinants?” Researchers have been debating this question for many decades, and the arguments are still quite lively.

C. The Effect of Reinforcement on Linguistic Performance

For Salzinger, positive and negative reinforcements within a communication context are critical factors for establishing language and for guiding future language behavior. The reinforcement strengthens the relationships between the environmental stimulus context and the linguistic response. He shows that this is a powerful concept when the child learns particular lexical responses and then functionally equivalent semantic response classes. Appropriate reinforcements and patterns or schedules of delivering reinforcement in behavior therapy programs can be used to train autistic children first to utter individual words and eventually to carry on meaningful communication when other verbal and nonverbal therapy programs fail miserably.

Alternatively, Aaronson maintains that the effects of reinforcement are often nonexistent or at best indirect and that they are not a critical link in supporting language behavior. Rather, she emphasizes the importance of subject-controlled cognitive or mental strategies for language perception and production. In this view, reinforcement has its major effect by providing “information feedback” to the human being. The informational components of reinforcement permit the subject to try out a wide range of cognitive-linguistic strategies and to develop flexibility in performance strategies that he can later call upon. In some cases, “reinforcement” for a correct response serves to alter the very stimulus-response contingency to which it was applied.

Again, we must ask whether the cognitive and behavioral approaches can be related theoretically. Such relations will depend on the qualitative nature and the generality of one's definitions for “cognitive strategy” and “reinforcement contingency” and the theoretical overlap between these terms.

II. PHONOLOGY

The two chapter authors on phonology are in agreement that a phonological analysis is needed in addition to a phonetic representation and that a major purpose of phonological theory is to account for the more readily observable surface structure of phonetic strings. But beyond these fundamental points, William Diver and Sandford Schane show little agreement on detail. Diver represents a rather empirical and behavioristic orientation, and Schane's approach is close to traditional generative phonology as developed by Chomsky and Halle. Both men sketch for us a picture of a broad range of views centered about their own positions, and they also question the fruitfulness of ideas within the opposing framework. Let us briefly consider three important issues or dimensions on which Schane and Diver sharply differ, and which are quite controversial in many corners of contemporary phonological investigation.

A. The Abstractness of Phonological Theories

In developing theoretical concepts and hypotheses, Diver presents a strong argument for sticking quite close to observable data. He shows us some intriguing data on “phonotactic skewing” (i.e., on nonuniform distributions of consonant clusters and of consonant-vowel patterns in English words). From these data, he uses an inductive approach to arrive at theoretical dimensions upon which to characterize the sound patterns. His goal is to account for particular phonetic patterns (i.e., very specific sets of linguistic problems) with the minimal amount of theoretical baggage in terms of number of unobservable entities and levels of derivation. He developed an interesting analogy between his approach and the approach taken by physicists to determine planetary orbits. Both observe the regularities in large quantities of empirical data and bring in theoretical hypotheses only as needed to account for the patterns, particularly the departures from uniformity. Physicists accounted for planetary orbits and predicted the existence of new planets based only on observed data, the (empirical) laws of motion, and the theoretical hypothesis of a gravitational force. Diver has accounted for important co-occurrence relations in phonetics in terms of a very few hypotheses that are in accord with other existing knowledge about human physiology and behavior.

In contrast, Schane views phonology as one part of the generative-transformational framework for linguistic analysis — namely, the component to account for sound patterns. He argues that it is important to account for a broad range of phonetic problems and patterns within the same general theoretical structure. A more abstract theory with a greater complexity of derivational rules can be motivated if one wants to account for phonetic patterns that are broad, for example across whole classes of consonants or vowels, perhaps across all phonemes (e.g., pluralization), and even across many languages. Schane takes a deductive approach, starting with a broad theoretical framework. He then considers what constraints might be considered for the nature of derivational rules (e.g., alternation and neutralization conditions) and for the ordering of derivational rules (e.g., bleeding and feeding relations) that could reduce theoretical complexity but still permit the theory to achieve an accurate and useful conceptualization of the surface structure.

B. Higher-Level Linguistic Organization in Phonological Analysis

In line with Diver's research philosophy to develop theory on a level close to the empirical phenomena, he excludes linguistic units of analysis beyond the morpheme. Phonotactic analysis should not transend word boundaries, because “at word boundaries there is almost nothing that could be thought of as phonological that controls the juxtaposition of phonemes” (Diver, this volume, p. 168). Analogously, he maintains that morphological sequences within words are controlled only partially by phonological considerations, that interesting patterns occur within the morpheme that do not occur across morpheme boundaries, and finally, that introducing higher-level theoretical structure would add more fog than ligh...