Chapter/2

Acquisition: when I was a child,

I spoke as a child

Children are a focus of attention and affection in all societies. The

presence of an infant is a key to the hearts of strangers anywhere
on the globe. What a cute smile', they murmur, immediately
transfixed by the child's demeanor, What's her name? they
inquire. Does she speak yet? Because of their universally unique
status, small children evoke a certain sociolinguistic familiarity
and directness not permissible with older children and adults.
And if these encounters transpire in cross-cultural situations, for
example when a couple are touring a foreign country with their
young child, along with these typical expressions of affectionate
attention come cries of amazement when the youngster is enticed
or provoked into speaking its native tongue. There is a natural
wonder when the strange and difficult sounds of a foreign language
appear to pour effortlessly out of the mouths of mere
babes.
It is no surprise, then, that the ability of children to pick up
their mother tongue so quickly and seemingly so easily is the
central concern of the first major sub-field of the psychology of
language that we will review. Developmental psycholinguistics
examines how speech emerges over time and how children go
about constructing the complex structures of their mother
tongue. The emergence of speech is not only an apt chronological
stage to begin our reflections on the nature of the human mind, it
is also the stage where we can glean the least complicated data. As
Tennyson puts it, our first efforts at speech are not words but
cries:
So runs my dream, but what am I?
An infant crying in the night;
An infant crying tor the light,
And with no language but a cry.

So pervasive is the common perception that the crying of a baby

conveys some significant linguistic communication, that the early
Romans believed it was the gift of a specific spirit, Vigitanus, and
even Plato observed that the very first communicative distinction
is between comfort and discomfort. A common mistake of early
students of developmental psycholinguistics was to assume that
children had no language until they uttered their first word, usually
about the time of their first birthday.

‘… no language but a cry'

Over the past forty years, there has been an increasing amount of
research into the linguistic capacity of infants, and it seems the
more we study them the smarter they become. What we have
learned about crying is that it is not only communicative, it is also
a direct precursor to both language (human symbolic communication)
and speech (spoken language). In a sense, crying, at least
in the first few months, is a kind of language without speech,
because the child communicates different types of discomfort
without using normal speech sounds. As the infant matures, crying
helps the child learn how to produce linguistic sounds, and so
this earliest form of utterance is also a precursor to speech.
During the first few weeks of a child's life, crying is largely an
autonomic response to noxious stimuli, triggered by the autonomic
nervous system as a primary reflex. In brief, this means that
the crying response is hard-wired into the child, and crying is initially
a spontaneous reaction, unaffected by intentional control
from the voluntary nervous system, which eventually evolves as
the mover and shaper of most human behavior. Even at this relatively
primitive stage, however, crying is a direct preparation for a
lifetime of vocal communication. As anyone can witness when
observing a raucous infant in full voice, crying trains babies to
time their breathing patterns so that eventually they learn how
to play their lungs like bagpipes, with quick inhalations of air
followed by long, slow exhalations to fuel their vocal cords with
-prolonged wailing. This skill of timed breathing is crucial for
successful speech communication for the rest of the child's life,
and it is a direct result of a baby's ability to learn to control the
cries of birth.
Crying initially is completely iconic; there is a direct and trans-
parent link between the physical sound and its communicative
intent. For example the hungrier a baby becomes, the louder and
the longer the crying. It also increases in pitch. The degree of discomfort
is directly proportional to the intensity of the acoustic
signal. But in the first month or two of the child's development,
crying becomes more differentiated and more symbolic. This
means that it is not directly related to the child's sense of discomfort;
rather, the cries are subtly, indirectly, and almost randomly
associated with its needs. As most mothers realize intuitively, and
as recent studies have suggested, the baby may not cry to express
discomfort or pain, but rather to elicit attention. So even at this
rudimentary stage of linguistic evolution, there is a significant
transformation from using sound as an iconic or direct reflection
of an internal state to using it as a symbolic, indirect manifestation
of increasingly complex internal feelings. Later, we will learn
that this transition also represents a major difference between the
communication found in most animals and the way humans use
language.
Even at this earliest and most primitive stage of psycholinguistic
development, we cannot simply pretend that the baby exists
alone and evolves independently, Humans are born at an early
stage of development in comparison with most mammals. Even
when we are born after our natural full term of nine months, we
are physically so weak and underdeveloped that we are completely
dependent on our caretakers for several years, This forces
and forges an enormous degree of early bonding and socialization
After several weeks of extensive interaction with its care- taker,
the child starts to coo, making soft gurgling sounds,
Seemingly to express satisfaction. Crying and cooing affect, and
are affected by, caretaker behavior. It is difficult to surmise
whether the coos and gurgles of a just-fed baby reinforce the
mother's contentment in caring it, or whether the mother's
sounds of comfort when nurturing her baby reinforce the child's
attempt to mimic the contentment it perceives. In a statistical
study of the interactions between the sounds that ten Japanese
mothers and their babies made when together, Nobuo Masataka
showed that there was a clear similarity between the sounds
made by mother and child which had emerged by the time the
infants were only five months old. Most likely then, a baby's early
vocalizations, and the constant responses of the caretaker, mutually
reinforce each other. Obviously then, even these earliest
attempts at communication underscore the importance of social
interaction in the acquisition of human language.
This cooing stage emerges at about two months of age but is
succeeded, when the child is about six months old, by a babbling
stage, Babbling refers to the natural tendency of children of this
age to burst out in strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters,
almost as a kind of vocalic play. Some psycholinguists distinguish
between marginal babbling, an early stage similar to cooing where
infants produce a few, and somewhat random, consonants, and
canonical babbling, which usually emerges at around eight months,
when the child's vocalizations narrow down to syllables that
begin to approximate the syllables of the caretaker's language.
Interestingly enough, when infants begin to babble consonants
at the canonical stage, they do not necessarily produce only the
consonants of their mother tongue. That is, their earliest acquisition
is not of the segmental phonemes (the individual consonants
and vowels) that go to make up their native tongue. In fact,
children seem to play with all sorts of segments at this stage, and
frequently produce consonants that are found in other languages,
not just the language by which they are surrounded. Hence we
find the first of several psycholinguistic ironies. A six-month-old
infant, raised by English speakers, may very well babble a sound
that is not in her mother tongue say the unaspirated/p/ sound in
Spanish pico ("beak'), which sounds more similar to the English
/b/ in 'by' than the aspirated English /p/ in 'pie.' But this same
child, when trying to learn Spanish words twenty years later, may
have great difficulty producing this same unaspirated Spanish /p/
sound she babbled with ease as a baby!
Since infants may babble vowels and consonants which are not
part of their mother's native repertoire, babbling is not evidence
that children are starting to acquire the segmental sounds of
their mother tongue. But recent psycholinguistic research supports
earlier assumptions that children are beginning to learn the
suprasegmental sounds of their mother tongue at this stage. The
term suprasegmental) refers to the musical pitch, rhythm, and
stress which accompany the syllables we produce and which play
such an important role in marking grammar, meaning, and intention.
Eight-month-old babies reared in English-speaking families
begin to babble with English-sounding melody; those of a similar
age who are brought up in Chinese-speaking homes begin to
babble with the tones and melodies of Chinese. Babbling is the
first psycholinguistic stage where we have strong evidence that
infants are influenced by all those many months of exposure to
their mother tongue. Up to this stage, there is very little difference
between the speech production of a normal child and that of a
baby born profoundly deaf, Both infants will progress through
the crying and cooing stages with little overt manifestation of the
significant difference between them in hearing ability. However,
as the babbling stage begins, a half a year into life, the lack of
suprasegmental accuracy in the babbling of a deaf baby is often
the first overt signal of the child's disability.

First words
After crying, cooing, and babbling, we come to the culmination of
a child's early language development-the first word. A child
crosses this linguistic Rubicon at about one year old, although
there is a wide range of latitude as to when the first word emerges
and as to what constitutes a 'word'. For one thing, it seems that
children often use idiomorphs, words they invent when they first
catch on to the magical notion that certain sounds have a unique
reference. For example, one psycholinguist recorded that when
his daughter was about one year old, she came up with 'ka ka' as
the word for 'milk', But just as frequently, youngsters begin to
learn the vocabulary of their mother tongue straight away. A survey
of the words children first learn to say shows that they tend to
be those which refer to prominent, everyday objects, and usually
things that can be manipulated by the child. Thus, 'mama' and
dada' (of course), and 'doggie', 'kitty', but also 'milk', 'cookie,
and 'sock', Even at this most rudimentary stage of vocabulary
development, we can see evidence for what Piaget calls egocentric
speech. Children, quite naturally, want to talk about what surrounds
them; at life's beginnings, they are the center of their universe.
If the child cannot manipulate the object during this early
period of physical development, it does not appear to be worth
naming. Parents spend a lot of time putting diapers on and taking
them off their one-year-olds, but because babies themselves (quite
fortunately!) don't handle them, 'diapers' or 'nappies' do not
become part of a child's early linguistic repertoire.
Parents fuss a great deal over their child's first word; this, and
the first step, rank as singular benchmarks of maturation. The
first cry, the first coo, or the first babble is often ignored or unrecognized,
but the first substantive evidence of vocabulary acquisition,
even if indistinguishable from a controlled burp to outsiders,
is often duly recorded and dated by proud parents. Just as the first
steps are symbolic of the evolution of man from ape-like animal
to biped, the first few words, whether idiomorphs or words from
the parent's native language, demonstrate to the mother and
father that their child has successfully made the transition from
an iconic creature to a symbolic human being.
The Miracle Worker, the compelling drama about the early life
of Helen Keller, saves this marvellous moment for its powerful
conclusion. Annie Sullivan, the teacher hired to transform the
blind and deaf, asocial and non-communicative young Helen, has
been laboring throughout the play to get Helen to communicate
by finger spelling, but now, with Annie's contract almost up, all
seems hopeless. Helen remains entrapped in an iconic world without
speech or language. But as they stand in the well-house, next
to the water pump, where Annie has led Helen for her daily chore
of filling the pitcher for dinner, the water spills accidentally on
Helen's hands and the miracle unfolds. Helen seizes Annie's hand
and finger-spells what Annie has written so many times on
Helen's hand, apparently without success. W-A-T-E-R. From this
moment on, words cascade onto Helen's fingers like the water
which is accidentally spilt at the well; and from this moment
comes an explosion of linguistic learning, so that Helen is eventually
able to write about the experience in her own words.
That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy,
set it free... I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything
had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought.ioi
(from Helen Keller. 1903. The Story of My Life. Doubleday,
page 44)
More remarkable than the drama, and the actual biographical
anecdote it depicts, is that most of us have experienced a
similar moment when, at about the age of one, we too suddenly
recognized the mystic harmony, linking sense to sound and
sight', and entered the sentient and symbolic world of human
communication. Once the first few words are acquired, there is
an exponential growth in vocabulary development, which only
begins to taper at about the age of six, when, by some estimates,
the average child has a recognition vocabulary of about I4,000
words. It is no wonder then that parents are excited by their
child's first word: it represents a step into symbolic communication,
and it signifies the start of the rapid vocabulary growth
with which thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, as well as other
areas of linguistic development, are framed.

The birth of grammar

Even well over a century ago, parents noticed that their children
seemed to use single words as sentences. In 1877 Charles Darwin,
for example, recorded in the journal that he kept on his son's
acquisition of language that the single word 'milk could some
times be a statement or a request, or, if his son had accidentally
dropped his glass, an exclamation. This use of single words as
skeletal sentences is referred to as the holophrastic stage, and
though there is some debate about its verifiability, most psycholinguists
believe that the intonational, gestural, and contextual
clues which accompany holophrases make it clear
that children are using single-word sentences, exactly as adults
often do in conversation. "Milk? is often used as the truncated
form of ‘Do you have any milk?’ but, given the appropriate
context, Milk! is just as obviously an abbreviated version of
‘I’d like some milk'. Recall that from the very beginning,
infants are reared and nurtured in a world where virtually all
communication evolves through intimate social interaction, and
so it is entirely plausible that a child's earliest form of grammar
should manifest itself in the same highly contextualized
holophrastic utterances which adults use when conversing with
each other in familiar social setting, Holophrastic speech is the
bridge which transports the child from the primitive land of cries,
words, and names across into the brave new world of phrases,
clauses, and sentences.
Of all the areas investigated by developmental psycholinguists,
the acquisition of grammar has been studied the most intensively.
Much of this can be related to the development of Transformational-
Generative (TG) grammar, the most influential school of linguistics
to affect the study of language over the past four decades.
Although TG grammar has evolved and devolved into many different
sub-schools, it has always been involved most centrally
with the study of sentences, Another reason why people investigating
child first language acquisition are inclined to focus on the
attempts of children to acquire grammar is that the data is easy to
obtain. Unlike the tape recordings of cooing, babbling, and burping
babies, where the acoustic signals are fuzzy and the gathering
of data a laborious and indeterminate task, the gleaning of information
on how children create sentences is manageable, discrete,
and can be done while caring for the child, No wonder that so
many studies are done on the acquisition of grammar by toddlers
as they converse with their parent/linguist parent at home. The
transcripts recorded often reveal the amazing ability of youngsters
to acquire their mother tongue fluently and, at the same
time, create novel expressions

Father/Linguist (Supervising daughter getting dressed):

‘I think you've got your underpants on backwards.’
Daughter (Age 3 [yrs] 9 [months]): 'Yes, I think so.’
Father/Linguist: 'You'd better take them off and put them
on frontwards,’
Daughter (Taking them off and turning them around): ‘Is
this the rightwards?’
(from P, Reich, 1986. Language Development, Prentice-
Hall, page 142)
Even at an earlier age, a child's acquisition of syntax displays a
subtle but definitive understanding of universal properties of
human language. Roger Brown and his colleagues, in the first,
elaborate chronology of how children acquire English grammar,
published in 1973, demonstrated that children progress through
different stages of grammatical development, measured largely
by the average number of words occurring per utterance.
Although individuals differ, especially at very young ages, in the
speed with which they move from one stage to another, all children
begin to create sentences after the holophrastic stage, first
with two words, and subsequently with more. The many studies
conducted of the early two-word stage reveal that, even within
these limitations, children demonstrate a surprising amount of
grammatical precocity. They do not randomly rotate words
between first and second position, for example; certain words
(pivots) tend to be used initially or finally, and other words then
can be used to fill in the slot either after or before these so-called
pivots. The order of the words in these two-word utterances tends
to follow the normal word order of the expanded version used by
adults in longer sentences, which indicates that children are
already sensitive to the word order of their mother tongue.
Finally, it is quite rare for youngsters to repeat the same word
twice in forming their little sentences; children are parsimonious
with their language and make each word count.
A telling indication of just how much children have acquired by
the time they are approximately two years old, and have begun to
use two-word sentences consistently, is to contrast examples of
their grammar with the output collected from one of the most
prominent experiments to teach a human language to a chimpanzee.
The chimp examples below come from a project which
attempted to improve upon previous attempts to teach a form of
human sign language (American Sign Language or ASL) to young
chimpanzees. ASL has become a popular human language to
teach to these animals because, due to the anatomical differences
between human and simian vocal tracts, chimps cannot make the
sounds of a human language. In this project, the researchers
young pupil was "Nim Chimsky', named, of course, after the
father of TG grammar, Noam Chomsky. The examples below
contrast utterances by a two-year old human child with Nim's
longest attempts to sign in ASL. Even though this comparison is
already skewed in Nim's favour-two-word utterances by the
child are contrasted with four-word phrases by the chimp-it is
clear that in terms of conveying meaning, the child's language is
far more developed.

Two-word utterances by a human child

(from M. D. S. Braine. 1963. The ontogeny of English phrase
structure: The first phrase.’ Language 39:1-13)
it ball see ball get ball there ball want baby
it doll see doll get doll there doll want car
it checker see Steve get Betty there momma want do
it daddy there doggie want get
it boy there book want up

Four-word phrases in ASL by a chimp

(from H. S. Terrance. 1979. Nim: A Chimpanzee Who Learned
Sign Language. Washington Square Press, page 3 19)
(1) eat drink eat drink (6) grape eat Nim eat
(2) banana Nim banana Nim (7) banana eat me Nim
(3) eat Nim eat Nim (8) banana me eat banana
(4) Nim eat Nim eat (9) play me Nim play
(5) banana me Nim me (10) drink Nim drink Nim

Even in this sparse amount of data, there are obvious differences

in performance. The child displays great lexical diversity
(19 items): the chimp seems confined to a small stock of words
(7 items). The child displays very little repetition. The chimp
seems to find it impossible to sign a single sentence without referring
to either Nim' or 'banana'. The child appears to have a sense
of syntax: a two-word sequence is introduced by a pivot word like
‘it’ or 'want', which is followed by a slot filled by a wide variety of
lexical items. The chimp, on the other hand, is a prolific producer
of permutations: he can cleverly churn out random sequences
of signs, but there are no fixed pivot words around which
predictable slots can occur. In sum, the child's output can be
symbolized by a simple set of phrase structure rules, grammatical
rules which demonstrate that a series of words form a structured
phrase or clause and are not simply a list of unconnected items.
The child's sequences appear to be more like words in a sentence.
The chimp's sequences, on the other hand, seem to be much less
like sentences and more like a grocery list. Thus they are much
more difficult to describe by rules.
Notice that the child has a simple set of rules which are very
powerful; they generate a large number of diverse utterances.
Each rule is a logical linguistic extension of the previous rule. This
capacity to generate new utterances has long been observed as an
essential and universal characteristic of human language. In the
eighteenth century, the German philosopher Leibnitz observed
that 'human language uses finite resources to create infinite utterances’,
and two centuries later Chomsky founded the TG school
of grammar on the same insight. Note too that the child's rules are
elegant and simple, the two criteria most valued by grammarians,
logicians, and theoretical mathematicians.
In contrast, the chimp's 'rule system', if we can be so generous
as to call it such, is not nearly so tidy; indeed, these 'rules', like the
actual data they attempt to reflect, are an ungainly sequence of
random collocations. Nim's 'grammar, if it can be called a grammar,
is unable to provide rules which can be used to describe
many different sentences.
In comparing these two sets of data, we are led to the
inescapable conclusion that even at a very young age, before they
have any conscious awareness of the difference between parts of
speech such as nouns and verbs, young humans very rapidly
acquire the notion that words do not combine randomly but follow
a systematic pattern of permissible sequences. Even at the
stage when they are still producing two-word utterances, this
system allows young children to generate a wide range of linguistic
permutations. Chimps, on the other hand, do not appear to
have even an inkling of any pattern or system, but randomly
throw signs together in a haphazard fashion. At best, Nim's
grammar seems to tell him something like ‘throw any four signs
together from any category, and the nice man will give me a
banana or a grape!’

Evidence for innateness

The example we have just reviewed is only one measure of the
weight of evidence for innateness, which is the belief most psycholinguists
now hold that the acquisition of human language is
not based solely on the external influence of a child's environment.
If linguistic stimuli from a child's or chimp's surroundings
were indeed solely responsible for language acquisition, we
would not expect such a glaring discrepancy between the performance
of these two primate species. In fact, we might even expect
Nim to be the better of the two performers because he was constantly
bombarded with signs and was continually rewarded and
reinforced whenever he attempted to use them to communicate
with his handlers. And although human children also receive
an enormous amount of linguistic input on any given day, they
are infrequently rewarded just for speaking up, indeed they are
sometimes encouraged to be 'seen but not heard'. There are even
cultures (for example some of the Native American tribes of
Arizona and New Mexico) which discourage young children
from engaging adults in prolonged conversation. This kind of
argument led Chomsky and a whole generation of developmental
psycholinguists to claim that a sizeable part of early linguistic
learning comes from an innately specified language ability in
human beings. In other words, learning your mother tongue is a
very different enterprise from learning to swim or learning to play
the piano.
No one would argue, not even the most radical rationalist, that
humans have innate areas of their brain genetically programmed
to help them swim the back stroke, or play a tune on the piano.
Environmental conditioning is crucial for these and many other
human activities, and among the plethora of arguments in support
of this fact is the simple observation that huge numbers of
people never learn to swim or to play the piano at all, yet it is
exceedingly rare, as we shall discover in Chapter 5, to stumble
across anyone who has never learned to speak. Chomsky has
argued that just as humans have some kind of genetically determined
ability to learn' to stand upright or to walk, so too do they
possess an LAD, a ‘Language Acquisition Device’ (now replaced with
the more linguistically accurate UG or ‘Universal Grammar’).
Chomsky's position is accepted by a great many contemporary
psycholinguists and is most articulately and assiduously defended
in Steven Pinker's popular book, The Language Instinct. In summary,
to return to humans and chimps, most psycholinguists
agree that an ape like Nim will never be able to ape his human
namesake, nor any one of us, without the human DNA molecules
that account for so much of our collective behavior and our
unique humanity.

Childish creativity
There is another way in which child language acquisition is relatively
independent from environmental influences, despite the distinct
control that the latter exercise on the course of our first
language development. Obviously, a child's linguistic surroundings
determine its mother tongue: children raised in Shandong,
China, grow up speaking Mandarin; children raised in
Bedfordshire, England, grow up as native speakers of English;
and children, like your author, who grow up in Shandong but are
reared by native speakers of English, usually acquire bilingual
proficiency in both of these tongues. But despite the obvious
impact the environment has on the choice and general direction of
mother-tongue learning, children are prone to come up with all
kinds of words and expressions which they have never heard in
their mono- or bilingual environments. Children are creative
wordsmiths, as evidenced in the following exchange between a
friend and her two-year-old.

Daughter: Somebody's at the door.

Mother: There's nobody at the door
Daughter: There's yesbody at the door.
(from P. Reich. 1986. Language Development. Prentice-Hall,
page 142)
From about two to four, children produce all kinds of expressions
like this which they have never, or rarely, heard in their
environment, but which they create on their own in their attempts
to construct, or reconstruct, their mother tongue. Common at
this age are regular plurals for irregular ones (mans, knifes,
sheeps), regular past-tense endings for irregular verbs (goed,
singed, eated), and even 'double tensing' when children seem to
be caught in transition between recognizing an irregular verb
and yet reluctant to jettison the regular past-tense ending that
they have acquired. This kind of tuning, to use a term to describe
one type of cognitive processing, usually shows that the child has
progressed to a slightly more advanced linguistic stage of language
development (‘Yesterday, we wented to Grandma's.’).
Overgeneralizations like these are very common in the mother
tongue learning of young children and are, perhaps mistakenly,
referred to as 'false analogies. One could make a convincing case
that it is not the child who is in error but the language, since it fails
to adhere to the symmetry of its own grammatical patterning.
This process of creative construction is yet another example of the
relative autonomy of the child's developing linguistic system in
relation to the adult version of the language. Children are not
chimps, and are definitely not parrots or tape recorders. They are
a bit more like well-programmed computers, who make creative,
but often inaccurate guesses about the rules and patterns of the
language they are acquiring.
Even at this early age, children can sometimes display a profound
understanding of the syntactic machinery of their mother
tongue. There is some irony in the fact that, through their creative
syntax, they reveal linguistic rules or patterns which might well
have escaped the grammatical ken of their highly educated parents.
One three-year-old child, upon spying a family friend
approaching for dinner, exclaimed: "There Carlos is!' It took considerable
effort on the father's part to figure out why this sentence
was ungrammatical, but why it also sounded almost acceptable.
The child was probably overgeneralizing from Patterns A and B
to form the close-but-not-perfect C (marked with an asterisk to
indicate its ungrammaticality).

Pattern A: There's Carlos! [There's/Here's+ Noun]

Pattern B: There he is! [There/Here Pronoun+ is]
Pattern C: *There Carlos is! [There/Here+ Noun + is]

Readers afflicted with a pathological addiction to grammar

might want to consider how complex this particular paradigm
really is, as well as how clever a linguistic puzzle solver this observant
child had become.
Sometimes, children's creative constructions reflect their
apparently inborn sensitivity to the syntactic structures of the language
they are acquiring. Consider the following two examples of
the creation of two-word verbs using up by two different five-year-olds.
A.K.: Ben's hicking up. He's hicking up. oot
Adult: What?
A.K.: He's got the hiccups.
(from S. A. Kuczaj II. 1978. 'Why do children fail to over-
generalize the progressive inflection? Journal of Child
Language 5: 167:710)

Father: Don't interrupt.

Child: Daddy, you're interring up!
(from C. Hockett. 1968. The State of the Art. Mouton,
page 115)

There is nothing wrong with the hearing of these two children.

In the first example, hiccup and hick up' are phonologically
indistinguishable. In the second, given the fact that final consonant
clusters in English (as in the cluster /pt/ of ‘interrupt’), especially
when they are voiceless, are usually not fully pronounced,
the difference between the final syllable of ‘inter up’ vs. ‘interrupt’
would be consistently difficult to perceive in normal conversation,
even for an adult. So the children's 'errors', if we wish to
label them such, are not mistakes of the ear, and since, of course,
these children have not yet learned to read, neither are they slips
of the eye. Rather, they are another example of how children creatively
construct their grammars based on what they have learned
and on what they can plausibly assume. Indeed, their assumption
about the structure of English in these examples appears to
reveal an uncanny awareness of a growing grammatical trend.
Compared to most other languages in the world, including its
cousins from Europe to South Asia, contemporary English has
become very much a 'prepositional language, and one indication
of this tendency is the growing profusion of two-word' verbs-
verbs plus prepositions such as turn on or look over. The point is
that children are not only active and creative participants in the
acquisition of their mother tongue; even their 'errors' often indicate
that they are remarkably sensitive to the subtle but inherent
grammatical characteristics of the language they are learning.
Stages of linguistic development
The study of child first language acquisition has now become an
autonomous and growing discipline with its own texts, journals,
and national and international conferences. It is difficult to pre-
sent a concise summary of such a massive amount of research,
even limiting our curiosity to just the acquisition of English as a
mother tongue. Another large and equally burgeoning subdiscipline
of developmental psycholinguistics is the area of bilingualism
and its ancillary- and often politically controversial-
branch devoted to bilingual education. Adding to the scope of this
body of knowledge is the extension of first language acquisition
research to older ages of childhood in order to investigate what
kinds of complex linguistic structure are acquired by elementary
school-aged children and, equally important, what possible age
constraints on mother-tongue learning might reveal themselves
when children turn into teenagers. For example, the emergence of
‘foreign accents’ in the speech of bilingual children at about the
age of twelve suggests to some psycholinguists that there exists a
critical period for first language learning which is biologically
determined. To conclude this brief summary of an ever-expanding
field, let us take a look at one universal and pervasive phenomenon
on that has been discovered at all ages of child language learning,
with virtually every type of linguistic structure, and in all of
the scores of world languages where child development has been
intensively investigated. What most typifies first language acquisition
is the fact that it invariably occurs in stages.
We must preface this brief description of the stages of language
acquisition with the admission that there is and always will be
individual differentiation. In all biological populations, there are
always exceptions which fall on either side of the normal structure
or behavior that defines a particular species, and this individuality
is very conspicuous among Homo Sapiens. In one of the
earliest pieces of research on the acquisition of a mother tongue
by several child subjects, Roger Brown discovered that there was
glaring difference in the rate of language learning among the
three children that he and his co-workers researched over a period
of several years. Indeed, at about three years of age, one of the
three children studied was linguistically already a year ahead of
the other two. This should not be surprising, given the differences
which exist in all animal species, and the great diversity of genetic
and early environmental backgrounds that are found in even the
most seemingly homogenous human populations. This differentiation
can be seen in the supernormal performances of those rare
children who burst forth from their peers with a genius for language,
music, art, or sport. Consequently, these prodigies are
becoming increasingly studied by psychologists because of their
very individuality. But in spite of these individual differences, perhaps
the most consistent finding in all of developmental psycholinguistics
has been that there are universal stages of language
learning. All children, no matter how rapid or how pedestrian
their rate of acquisition, proceed systematically through the same
learning stages for any particular linguistic structure.
An early example of this is found in the work of Brown's colleagues,
Edward Klima and Ursula Bellugi, who proved that children
learning English produce two different types of WH
questions before they eventually come up with the correct adult
version. They identified three distinct stages.
Stage 1
(use of WH word but no auxiliary verb employed)
What Daddy doing?
Why you laughing?
Where Mommy go?
Stage 2
(use of WH word and auxiliary verb after subject)
Where she will go?
Why Doggy can't see?
Why you don't know?
Stage 3
(use of WH word and auxiliary verb before subject)
Where will she go?
Why can't Doggy see?
Why don't you know?
(E.S. Klima and U. Bellugi. 1966.'Syntactic regularities in
the speech of children' in J. Lyons and R.J. Wales (cds.):
Psycholinguistic Papers. University of Edinburgh Press,
pages T83-208)
 All children begin with Stage I utterances before proceeding to
Stage 2 examples several months later. Eventually they end up
with the linguistically appropriate target examples at Stage 3. No
matter how precocious the children are, that is, no matter how
fast their rate of progress through these stages, they do not skip
over any of them; no child goes from Stage r immediately to Stage
3 without at least some examples of Stage 2 structures. Rates
vary; stages don't.
Another example of developmental stages is seen in the acquisition
of English negatives, again originally described by Brown
and his colleagues in their study of the language learning of three
young children. Brown divided their grammatical development
into periods of ‘Mean Length of Utterances’ (MLUs), showing that as
the children progressed in the acquisition of their mother tongue,
their MLUs grew from a minimum of about two words to about
four. Recall that even when children are not yet two years old and
are just beginning to string two words together, they seem to
notice that words are not simply piled on top of one another like
bricks. Certain words act as mortar and seem to hold words
together in a certain order. It is this sensitivity to word choice and
structure that allows children to create grammatical sentences,
and it is the lack of this syntactic sense that appears to prevent
chimps from creating sequences resembling human language.
One example of young children's acquisition sensitivity to syntax
is in the way they learn negation in English. Note how the primitive
negatives found in Stage 1 (with an MLU of 1.75 words)
eventually evolve into the adult-like forms of Stage 3 (where the
MLUs are from 3.5 to 4 words),
Stage 1
(use of NO at the start of the sentence)
No the sun shining.
No Mary do it.
Stage2
(use of NO inside the sentence but no auxiliary or BE verb)
There no rabbits.
I no taste it.
Stage 3
(use of NOT with appropriate abbreviation of auxiliary or BE)
Penny didn't laugh.
It's not raining.
(E.S. Klima and U. Bellugi. 1966. 'Syntactic regularities in
the speech of children' in J. Lyons and R.J. Wales (eds.):
Psycholinguistic Papers. University of Edinburgh Press,
pages 183-208)

There may be some argument over the exact number of stages

for a given structure; some researchers have suggested that there
are four, not three, stages represented in the two grammatical
examples illustrated here. However, starting with these examples
taken from Brown's early fieldwork, there has been continual
confirmation of the existence of sequential staging for many of
the grammatical patterns acquired by children learning their first
language, and of the finding that all children proceed immutably
from one stage to the next. One especially insightful development
in this research on acquisition stages has been the discovery that
similar stages and staging is found in adult second language learning.
Research pursued by applied linguists for several decades
demonstrates that, like little children, adolescent and adult foreign
language learners also differ a great deal in their rate of
language acquisition but not in the stages through which they
progress. This finding has several implications, but one of the
most obvious is the possibility that the process of language acquisition
is a common psychological challenge for both the young,
maturing child, and the older, experienced adult. When it comes
to the human mind, age differences tend to evaporate, and we
witness one common cognitive process when the minds of either
youngsters or their older counterparts are confronted with a similar
task, for example the tremendous challenge of picking up a
completely new system of symbolic communication-in other
words, learning a language.
The inquiring and acquiring mind is the common denominator
for all areas of psycholinguistics and is, perhaps, an apt topic with
which to conclude this discussion of first language acquisition
and to begin to contemplate language production.
Chapter/3
Production: putting words in
one's mouth

We are quick to recognize the exceptional precocity of talented

writers, artists, or athletes, but we often fail to appreciate the gifts
underlying so many of our everyday activities. It is only through
loss or injury that we suddenly realize how much we take them
for granted. The skill involved in such a literally pedestrian activity
as walking down a flight of stairs is immediately recognized
after one has sprained an ankle. It is only then that we begin to
appreciate the marvellous manner in which the visual input from
our eyes and the tactile information from our feet transmit complementary
information to our brain's sensory cortex. There it is
immediately synthesized and fed to corresponding areas of the
motor cortex which, in turn, feeds the cerebellum, the part of the
brain devoted to the programming, timing, and coordination of
all voluntary muscular movements. From the cerebellum radiate
hundreds of simultaneous messages along the nerve pathways
which go to the appropriate muscles involved in the head and
neck (to focus the face and eyes downward toward the stairwell),
in the back (to keep the posture erect and tilted slightly backward
to compensate for the downward motion of the body), in the arms
and hands (to slide down the banister for continual support and
feedback), in the legs (to maintain a lifting and dropping motion
quite different from normal walking), and in the feet (to angle the
foot in just the right manner so that the ball of the foot catches the
stair). Even this elaborate description is a gross oversimplification
of the neurosensory and neuromuscular processes that are
involved at any single moment of a descent down a staircase. But
all of this is taken for granted and considered uninteresting, until
we stumble and injure ourselves. Loss of what we consider the
simple and common gives us renewed appreciation of life's
uncommon complexity.
The production of speech is neurologically and psychologically
far more complicated than negotiating a flight of stairs, but its
intricacy also goes unappreciated until we suffer some linguistic
disability or commit a slip of the tongue. In daily conversations,
we remain generally unaware of the complexity of our achievement.
Again, it is only through disability that our marvellous
ability is made manifest.
We have already seen in the previous chapter that psycholinguists
tend to divide linguistic phenomena into stages. One of the
most influential psycholinguistic models for speech production,
developed by Levelt, views it as a linear progression of four successive
stages: (1) conceptualization, (2) formulation, (3) articulation,
and (4) self-monitoring. We will look at each of these in turn, not
forgetting that viewing speech phenomena as a step-by-step
sequential process is only one way of investigating production.
Alternative approaches exist; for example, characterizing the production
of speech as a holistic activity where several simultaneous
and parallel activities are taking place to create the utterances we
intend to produce.

Conceptualization
Where does the very beginning of any spoken utterance come
from? What sparks speech? These are difficult questions to
answer, partly because we still don't know enough about how
language is produced, but partly because they deal with mental
abstractions so vague that they elude empirical investigation. The
American psycholinguist David McNeill, however, has gone on
record with an interesting mentalistic account of how speech is
first conceptualized in the human mind. His theory is that primitive
linguistic concepts are formed as two concurrent and parallel
modes of thought. These are syntactic thinking, which spawns the
sequence of words which we typically think of when we talk
about how language is initiated, and imagistic thinking, which
creates a more holistic and visual mode of communication. The
former is segmented and linear and creates the strings of syllables,
words, phrases, and sentences that together make up speech.
The latter is global and synthetic and tends to develop the
gestures which we naturally use to punctuate and illustrate our
conversations.
McNeill's claim, that syntactic thought and imagistic thought
collaborate to conceptualize conversation, is quite convincingly
demonstrated by the way in which speech utterances and ordinary
gestures seem to be tied and timed together in any conversation.
Consider the following very simple example. Two people are
holding a short discussion over the whereabouts of a lost object.
Visualize in your mind how they gesture as they interact in the following
two dialogues. You might even try reading these aloud,
acting out Person B's role by pointing at the appropriate moment.

First dialogue
Person A: Where's my briefcase?
Person B: There's your briefcase!
Person B points to the briefcase the same moment he says
There's.

Second dialogue
Person A: Where's my coat and briefcase?
Person B: There's your briefcase!
Person B points to the briefcase the same moment he says
briefcase.

What are the very first things that are going through Person B's
mind when she is responding to Person A's questions in these two
dialogues? Of course we cannot be too mentalistic and pretend
we know what B is thinking. After all, we are often unsure of
what we are thinking ourselves when we think about what we
think, if we think about thinking at all. This is the problem with
mentalism. But McNeill offers some plausible evidence for this
bimodal view of how speech is produced. It seems likely that after
B hears A's query in the first example, her syntactic thought might
generate something that begins with the demonstrative, 'there
while, simultaneously, her imagistic thought might be of someone
pointing toward an object, in this case, a briefcase. Evidence that
these two modes are operating concurrently at the conceptualization
stage is found in the simultaneous timing of the pointing gestures
with the stressed words in each of these two scenes. In the
first dialogue, B points to the briefcase (manifesting the imagistic
part of her attempt to communicate) just as she stresses the word
there' in her speech (illustrating the syntactic component of her
communicative intent). Again, in the second dialogue, we see the
synchrony of image and speech; at the end of the phrase B points
to the briefcase just as she stresses the word in her articulation. If
you read this last example out loud, you will also note a slight
change in B's intonation-the voice trails off a bit as if to say
‘There's your briefcase…’ Were B suddenly to spot the coat, she
could continue with 'and there's your coat', with a more decisive,
falling intonation on 'coat' and, of course, another pointing gesture
to show A where his coat was located.
Appealing as McNeill's hypothesis might appear, and convincing
as these examples might be, it is difficult to use his model to
explain this first stage of production. For one thing, his attempts
to describe how imagistic and syntactic thought are initially conceptualized
are unclear. For another, the illustrations he uses to
describe how gestures synchronize with important syntactic
breaks in spoken language are difficult to follow. Perhaps this
form of research, like studies of American Sign Language, can
only be adequately illustrated by a videotape and not by drawings.
Levelt's initial stage of conceptualization seems justified. After
all, speech does not start from nothing, and if it does not start with
concepts, how else could it possibly begin? At the same time, we
realize how difficult it is to actually define this stage in non-mentalistic
terms, and despite the plausibility of McNeill's binary model
of language and gestures being birthed together, like twins, it is
difficult to muster any hard evidence to support this, or any other
theory for the embryonic development of speech. Although we
know very little about how speech is initiated at this first stage of
conceptualization, we have psycholinguistic evidence to help us
understand the successive stages of production, so it is easier for us
to describe and to understand Levelt's second stage, formulation.

Formulation

Introduction
We have seen that the initial stage of conceptualization is so far
removed from the words we actually speak and write that it is
difficult to delineate this phase of production. But at the second
stage of speech production, formulation, we move close enough
to the eventual output of the process to allow us to be more
precise in our terminology and more convincing in our use of
empirical data. Conceptualization is hard to conceptualize, but
formulation is much easier to formulate. Well over three decades
ago, the psychologist Karl Lashley published one of the first
attempts to account for the way speakers sequence strings of
sounds, words, and phrases together so rapidly and accurately,
and his essay was influential enough to be included in the first
book ever published in English which focused exclusively on the
then very new field of the psychology of language. His essay was
first presented as an oral address, and it is intriguing to see how
Lashley organized it to demonstrate some of the very concepts
about speech production which he was writing about. For
example, he talked about how common it is to commit spelling
errors when one is typing, and he mentioned how he misspelled
‘wrapid’ with a w, while typing rapid writing', most probably
because as he was about to type 'rapid', he anticipated the 'silent w’
in the following word. These slips of the tongue, or pen, or computer
keyboard, are of keen interest to us in this chapter on production.
A moment later in his talk, to illustrate several of the
themes that were central to his presentation, Lashley gave the following
utterance as an example of how we comprehend spoken
sentences.

Rapid righting with his uninjured hand saved from loss the
contents of the capsized canoe

Remember that this sentence was heard, not seen, so having

been primed by the earlier phrase 'rapid writing', it was natural
for the audience to hear Rapid writing with his uninjured hand!'
Of course, like all native speakers of any language, the listeners
were able to readjust their comprehension of this sentence. After
they recognized they had initially wandered down the wrong garden
path of comprehension, they were forced to retrace their
steps, and to choose the proper path toward complete understanding.
Thus Lashley was able to demonstrate many of the
themes which were central to this seminal essay on speech production.
First, he showed how slips of the tongue (or the computer
keyboard) provide vivid insights into our understanding of how
speech is formulated. Second, he illustrated the power of priming
in guiding the direction of speech production and comprehension.
Because Lashley first talked about 'writing', his audience
was primed to hear the phrase again, and this is what confused
them initially when they heard 'rapid righting' as part of an utterance
about a canoe. Note also that it is possible that priming
works in the production process as well.
A critical insight from this example, and from Lashley's essay
as a whole, is the way it demonstrates how both the production
and the comprehension of speech is largely a linear process. The
audience didn't know that Lashley had purposely misled their
comprehension until they suddenly heard something about 'saving
the contents of the capsized canoe'. People tend to produce
and comprehend sentences in a linear way, and for comprehension,
each additional piece of information we receive has the
potential to force us to revamp our understanding of what we
have already heard. The comprehension of the 'canoe' example,
taken from Lashley's lecture and subsequently published paper,
lends credence to the notion that, in several ways, production and
comprehension are similar. Both are largely sequential, both are
affected by priming, and they both depend, to a large degree, on
the constant winnowing of implausible alternatives at each juncture
in our stream of speech.

Slips of the tongue

Think back to the example at the beginning of this chapter of how
we tend to ignore the complexity of strolling down a flight of
stairs until we trip. Over the past few decades, psycholinguists
have become excited about a new way of discovering how we put
words into our mouths: they look at what happens when we
trip over our tongues. Unlike stammering or aphasia (linguistic
loss due to brain damage), slips of the tongue, or typographical
mistakes, are normal, everyday occurrences which pervade our
speaking and our writing. And because of this, as soon as
Our friends spot our mistake, or we happen to catch the goof ourselves,
we can immediately backtrack and correct. However,
when speech and language disintegrate into clear pathologies, as
they do in stammering and aphasia (to be discussed in Chapter 5),
there appears to be no recourse, and the error remains uncorrectable
and uncorrected. So we can see why slips of the tongue
provide the data that delight psycholinguists; they allow us to
peek in on the production process because we know what the
speaker intended to say, but the unintentional mistake freezes the
production process momentarily and catches the linguistic mechanism
in one instance of production.
The use of linguistic deviations as data for scientific investigation
is a new phenomenon, but the recognition of speech errors
goes back more than a century. Spoonerisms, like the unfortunate
use of 'the breast in bed' instead of 'the best in bread', are named
after the Victorian cleric and teacher, William Spooner, who
reputedly blundered through many a lecture or sermon with infamous
slips in speech production. He called a group of Welsh miners
'you noble tons of soil' and supposedly scolded an errant
student by saying, you have hissed all my mystery lectures; in
fact, you have tasted the whole worm!' Spoonerisms then are slips
of the tongue in which an actual word or phrase is created, often
with a humorous twist to the meaning which was intended.
The mention of verbal miscues, especially ones like the ‘bread’
example just cited, evokes a discussion of Freudian slips. In one of
his earliest treatises, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Sigmund
Freud hypothesized that slips of the tongue were important
because, like dreams, they help to reveal the unconscious mind.
But most psycholinguists have ignored Freudian interpretations
of speech errors for a variety of reasons. For one thing, although
slips like 'the breast in bed' appear to be embarrassingly indicative
of an unconscious desire, a coldly empirical approach to this
mistake would propose at least two explanations for the source of
this illicit feeling: either the speaker was sexually provoked (and
was unconsciously thinking about the first noun in the phrase), or
he was actually fixating on the second noun because he was so
exhausted! Here, we run into exactly the same problem we
faced earlier when we tried to define what the conceptualization
stage for speech consisted of; we are in danger of becoming to00
mentalistic-that is, relying on logic and intuition rather than
experimental evidence -in our attempts to fathom what exactly
puts words into people's mouths. A more important reason why
psycholinguists tend to ignore Freudian analyses of why who said
what is because, irrespective of their meaning, the formulation of
slips of the tongue reveals important linguistic patterns-patterns
that also pervade normal and natural speech. That is, what is relevant
to psycholinguistics is not what is being said, but how it is
being said, or, to be precise, misspoken.
But before leaving Freud, it might be illuminating to examine
some recent work in the psychology of language that attempts to
wed the Freudian, mentalistic tradition of psychology with the
experimental school which so strongly colors contemporary
psycholinguistics. This was the goal of an experiment in which
university students were asked to read aloud two, unrelated
words flashed quickly in front of them on a computer screen. For
example, the subjects might have seen 'barn door' instantaneously
flashed in front of them, and they either read them
correctly, Or, as was often the case, because of the pressure of
time, came up with a slip of the tongue, such as 'darn bore'. There
were three different situations: a control-or normal-situation,
where the subjects had no distractions; a second situation where
subjects knew that they might receive a small electrical shock at
any moment, and a third situation, where they performed the task
in a state of slight sexual arousal (the subjects were all male, and
the experimenter was an attractive and well-dressed female).
Here are examples of two stimuli phrases which were flashed to
all three groups.

(1) sham dock (2) past fashion

Although most of the subjects were accurate most of the time

under all three conditions, the slips of the tongue which did occur
differed significantly among the three groups. The control group
tended to make arbitrary errors, such as 'darn bore', but the two
experimental conditions tended to elicit two different kinds of
slips. When (1) was flashed to the subjects who were in the group
that was threatened with a potential electrical discharge, they,
much more frequently than the other two groups, came up with
the slip 'damn shock'. And when (2) was shown to the group with
the attractive female experimenter, they, as you have already
anticipated, came up with the phrase fast passion' much more
frequently than the others. This experiment comes about as close
as we can expect to get to testing Freud's ideas under laboratory
conditions, or to catching a glimpse of the conceptualization
stage of speech production. Be that as it may, our focus here is on
formulation, and from all of the examples cited so far, we can
readily see that slips of the tongue are not a random, haphazard
zigzagging of the production mechanism, like quarks in a cloud
chamber. Sounds and words are not thrown together arbitrarily;
there is a clear, linear and hierarchical order to the way in which
we put words into our mouths.
There has been a long and rich tradition of examining speech
errors in psycholinguistics as a window to the formulation
process and not as a reflection of some Freudian motivation.
Based on examples gleaned over the years, researchers have
been able to demonstrate that these superficially trivial quirks of
communication are quite useful in offering insights about how
speech is formulated. For one thing, there is sure evidence from
this data that the units of speech, such as 'phoneme' and 'morpheme,
which linguists have proposed and discussed for
many years are psychologically real. This means that when we misspeak,
we make errors within the boundaries and the framework
of a certain language structure, as if we had intentionally
planned our slips to fit an appropriate linguistic slot. Mistakes
do not pop out just anywhere when we speak, they occur at
predictable points and follow predictable patterns. It is almost as
if we think about syllables, words, and phrases as we are formulating
what we are going to say, and this is why psycholinguists
find slips of the tongue insightful. Let us review some of this
evidence.
Linguists divide sounds into vowels and consonants and subcategorize
each of these into various phonetic groupings. Speech
errors seem to follow the phonetic classifications established by
linguists and rarely, if ever, cross over these linguistic boundaries.
Consider the following examples.

(1) a reading list a leading list

(2) big and fat pig and fat
(3) fill the pool fool the pill
(4) drop a bomb bop a dromb

As trivial and silly as these mistakes may appear initially, they

actually tell us a great deal about the organization of the English
language. The anticipation of [l] in the third word in (1), creates
the substitution of for[l] for [r] in the second word. Phoneticians
point out that [l] and [r] are two consonants which share many
phonetic features for example, both are pronounced in the same
part of the mouth, so that this type of substitution would always
be likely. There is no such phonetic explanation for a substitution
of [l] for [sh] (e.g. 'shopping list' becoming lopping list’ ), and, in
fact, whereas flip-flops of [l] and [r] for each other pervade the
miscue data, transpositions of [l] or [r] for sounds like [sh] are
exceedingly rare. The second example is a bit more subtle,
because at first sight it seems that [p] is randomly introduced into
the phrase from nowhere. But again, linguistic analysis gives a
clear explanation. The phonetic feature of voicelessness of the following
[f] in fat seems to be anticipated when the speaker is about
to produce the [b] in the first word of phrase (2). As it turns out,
the voiceless equivalent of the consonant [b] is [p]. Although we
are focusing on sound structure in these first few examples, it is
also possible that speakers are simultaneously being influenced by
other linguistic factors, so that the person who misspoke 'pig and
fat may have also been gently nudged by the semantic association
between these words.
In (3) we see the psychological reality of the contrast between
vowels and consonants in the minds of speakers. The vowels in
the two words replace each other. It is theoretically possible for
vowels to substitute for consonants and vice versa, but again, this
rarely occurs because they are so distinct linguistically. Finally, in
(4) we see how speech errors follow rules about what consonants
can go together to form clusters. We can't just put any two consonants
together in English, or in any other language for that matter:
although we have [dr] in ‘drop’ and [st] in 'stick', we have no
words that begin with [sr] like 'srop or even worse, [dt] as in
‘dtick’. So even though there is no word 'drom' in English, the [dr]
cluster that the slip in (4) creates is permissible, and it tells linguists
that people who come up with odd expressions like these
still follow the sound patterns of English.
Slips of the tongue also reveal that when we formulate speech,
we are not only influenced by the sound system of the language
we are speaking, we are also conditioned by the way words are
put together in that language. Consider the following examples as
evidence of the psychological reality of morphology-the way
words are organized and structured in a language.

(5) sesame seed crackers sesame street crackers

(6) rules of word formation words of rule formation
(7) a New Yorker a New Yorkan
(8) the derivation of the derival of

Unlike the first set of examples, these slips do not involve individual
sounds; rather, they seem to reflect a higher level of linguistic
organization because they are associated with complete
words, or with significant parts of words. (5) and (6) are very
common examples, and they remind us of the spoonerisms discussed
earlier. Notice how the misspoken forms still adhere to
normal patterns of word usage. For example 'Sesame Street
crackers' might be a brand of cracker named after the children's
TV show. Note too the manner in which (6) adheres to a regular
word pattern in English. A four-door sedan' has four doors, an
‘apple pie’ is made of apples. A common error by learners of
English is to call these objects a 'four-doors sedan' and 'apples
pie', following the logical, but non-English pattern of extending
the plural to the formation of noun phrases. But native speakers,
who follow the rules of word formation, do not simply swap the
two words that are reversed in (6) and say 'word of rules formation.
Even during the micromomentary process of formulating
their speech, they follow the regular and established pattern.
Examples (7) and (8) are further elaborations of this same
theme, but in this case, the suffix slots are exchanged while the
original words remain the same. The person who misspoke (7)
might have been thinking, if an 'American' is someone who lives
in America, why isn't a resident of New York a New Yorkan?"
And by the same logic, it 'arrival is the noun form of the verb
‘arrive’, why isn't the noun form of 'to derive', 'derival?' Once
again we witness the way slips of the tongue provide psycholinguistic
insights into the production of speech; they help us see
how speakers arrive at derivations.
Speech errors are also helpful in revealing a third level of language
processing at the formulation stage; they give support to
the notion that utterances are not just strings of sounds and linear
sequences of words, but are formed into larger structural units.
This is demonstrated in examples (9) and (10).

(9) he swam in the pool he swimmed in the pool

(10) the children are in the park the childs are in the park

These mistakes are much less common than the swapping of

words and parts of words that we find in spoonerisms and similar
constructions, but their occurrence, however rare, tells us some-
thing about the way grammar affects the formulation process.
Those familiar with the speech and writing of non-native users of
English will recognize these goofs as learner errors, but the big dif-
ference between learner errors and the slips exemplified by (9) and
(10) is that native speakers almost always correct themselves when
they err; learners of English, on the other hand, experience great
difficulty recognizing exactly what was wrong and how to rectify
it. Almost immediately after saying (10), for example, a native
speaker might stop and say I mean children'. Learners, upon recognizing
that they said something wrong in a sentence like (1o), or,
more commonly, having it pointed out to them, will often miscorrect
the original error and come out with something like I mean
childrens’. The fact that native speakers correct themselves shows
that they are also paying attention to grammar, in addition to concentrating
at the sound and word levels of the language, It is no
accident that these last examples all involve irregular words. It
looks very much as if the speaker has chosen the words and the
slots which they fill, and at the last moment, forgotten to choose
the right verb or noun form. The errors suggest that speakers organize
their utterances into smaller groups of words, like noun
phrases, or clauses with a main verb, and having filled these groups
with the appropriate lexical items which express the intended
meaning, the speakers finally add the appropriate grammatical
inflections. Almost always, this complicated process is completed
fluently and accurately, and only occasionally, as in these examples,
does the formulation of speech slip up. But when it does, it
provides us with a glimpse of the production process

The planning of higher levels of speech

Another way of trying to understand the process of producing
language is to analyze the steps we have to take and the decisions
we have to make in order to produce an intended utterance.
Suppose, for example, that you might want to give a response,
either spoken or written, in a certain situation, Let's say you are in
a discussion with a friend about the importance of a particular
matter, and your friend asks for your opinion about the gravity of
the situation. You decide to frame a response, and for whatever
reason, you choose to conceptualize the idea that the matter was
not important. How do you go ahead and formulate this concept
linguistically? Granted, you are constrained by all the phonological,
lexical, and grammatical patterns of English which were
exemplified and supported by the slip of the tongue data just discussed,
but, despite all these rules and patterns, there is still a
great deal of flexibility in what you say and how you say it.
Of course, how we choose to formulate what we are about to
say or write is influenced by such factors as politeness or social
appropriateness. These extremely important variables are not
usually dealt with in the relatively social circles of psycholinguistics,
but they are central to the concerns of linguists who
investigate pragmatics-the study of what people mean when they
use language in normal social interaction, or those who study
sociolinguistics -the study of why we say what to whom, when,
and where. But just within the narrow confines of how we formulate
a simple concept such as 'not important into actual words,
following the rules of the language we have chosen to speak, and
disregarding all the complicated nuances of pragmatics and socio-
linguistics, we still have many choices to consider. Given all the
decisions we are forced to make every time we begin to open our
mouth, it is quite astonishing that conversations aren't painfully
slow trickles of syllables, dripping intermittently from tongue
tied interlocutors. In fact, they are often the reverse -cascading
torrents of speech pouring so rapidly and so easily that conversants
overlap and interrupt each other in their eagerness to fill the
silence.
We will freeze this fictional conversation at the very instant
when one speaker decides to put the concept 'not important into
words. Many choices come to mind. Should the concept be
expressed lexically, that is through the choice of a word, or
should it be expressed by means of a syntactic pattern? Supposing
the speaker makes the first choice, further alternatives still
remain. Will the word chosen be grammatically negative, as in
(a), or affirmative? If the latter, will the word be an antonym, or
opposite of important' as in (b), or will it contain an explicit
negative prefix like un- in (c)?

(a) It's nothing.

(b) It's trivial.
(c) It's unimportant.

It may seem a bit peculiar to differentiate among these three

choices by calling the first negative and the other two affirmative,
because they all convey the same idea, that the speaker believes
the situation is not important. But language is not always as it
seems, a fact that most native speakers are blithely unaware of
and one that allows psycholinguists to make a living. Think, for a
moment, about one very common way of asking questions in
English-by placing a tag at the end of an utterance. You've probably
asked questions like this a lot, haven't you? Observe that an
affirmative sentence, like the tag question immediately preceding
this one, uses a negative tag, and vice versa, so if we choose to formulate
a negative sentence, then the tag is affirmative. You're not
confused about this, are you? Let us go back to our three examples
and see what happens when we transform these sentences
into tag questions.

(d) It's nothing, is it?

(e) It's trivial, isn't it?
(E) It's unimportant, isn't it?

The affirmative tag is it' in (d) tells us that even though there is
no overt negation in this short response, it is still considered
grammatically negative. If it weren't, it would have a negative tag
at the end, wouldn't it? In contrast, both (e) and (f) must have
negative tags because they are both grammatically affirmative
phrases. Nevertheless, they are not similar: (e) expresses the concept
of 'not important' by choosing an antonym; (f) says the same
thing by using a negative prefix with 'important'. And the choice
of prefix in (f) is an additional complication, because English
proffers a wide range of potential prefixes. Some words take
several choices (for example unEuropean, non-European, anti- European),
but even words like important', which only take
un-, create a production problem. When speakers choose 'trivial',
the only thing they have to remember is the word itself, but when
they select a word which takes a negative prefix, they have to
recall which one to use. Again, we often fail to realize the complexity
of the production process until we see it fall apart, as in the
incorrect choice of a prefix by a learner (for example unpossible
and disimportant),
Let us go back now to the initial choice the speaker made.
Recall that the first alternative the speaker had in formulating the
concept not important', was whether to express the negative
response lexically-via words, or grammatically-via the use of
syntactic negation. Let us suppose the second alternative was
picked, creating the series of choices exemplified by sentences (g)
and (h).

(g) It isn't important.

(h) It's not important.

You may have to glance at these twice to catch the slight differences
between them, and they are so minimal that you might be
provoked into using some of the earlier examples: the differences
are nothing; they're trivial! But if the speaker has chosen to
express the negation grammatically rather than through word
choice, important differences can be indicated by means of stress.
Normally, the contracted negative in (g) is chosen because negation
is typically not the focus of our attention, but (h) offers an
effective way of emphasizing negation. Supposing you are in an
argumentative state, and your conversational partner keeps
insisting that the situation is desperate; (h) allows you to be
emphatic about your denial. Put tersely, the difference between
the two sentences is that in (g) the negative is not usually stressed,
but in (h) it receives unusual stress.
The significance of these slight differences may seem minimal
within the context of the myriad sounds, words, and sentences
that comprise our daily staple of communication, but along With
the slip of the tongue examples, they demonstrate the enormous
number and intricacy of choices facing a speaker, or a writer, at
this important stage of formulation.
Articulation
We have spent considerable time examining the second stage of
speech production, and for good reason. Like the operation of a
computer program during word processing, the formulation
stage of speech involves thousands of split-second decisions
regarding the hierarchical and sequential selection of myriads of
potential segments. But this third stage of articulation is similar to
what happens when all of those bits of information selected by a
word processing program go from your computer to your printer;
unless this vast amount of electrical data is 'articulated' into
letters of the alphabet and successfully printed, no message is
received. In fact, if the printer is not functioning properly, there is
no evidence that the message was ever even composed. So, too,
with the production of speech. Unless all of the electrical impulses
streaming from your brain in the form of speech are transformed
into audible and comprehensible articulations, no words are
heard and nothing is communicated. The conceptualization stage
might pompously perceive itself as the primary and ultimate composer
of communication, and the formulation stage might pride
itself as the conductor and orchestrator of speech sounds, but
without the instruments of articulation, the music of our voices
remains unheard and unappreciated. Like the operations of a
printer or the playing of instruments then, the articulation of
speech sounds is a vital third stage of production and, quite naturally,
attracts the interest of psycholinguists.
As recently as the 1960s, linguists upheld the common sensical
and seemingly incontrovertible notion that the chest, throat, and
mouth were anatomical organs designed solely for biological
functions. Only in a secondary way could they be considered the
organs of speech. Surely, the basic function of our lungs is to
exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide, not to produce syllables
and, most assuredly, the primary use of our teeth is for chewing,
not for the articulation of sounds like [t] and [d]? True as these
assertions may be, they do not preclude the possibility that some
organs may have been shaped in their recent evolutionary history
to enhance the production of human speech sounds. Some thirty
years ago Eric Lenneberg, a psycholinguist, showed that whereas
the majority of these organs have primarily evolved to serve
essential biological functions such as respiration and ingestion, a
few of them have adopted secondary functions connected with
the enhancement of speech articulation. In a few cases, there are
organs that have changed anatomically to fit this new role as
speech articulator. So dramatic are the changes that they differ
physically from the corresponding organs in closely related
species like chimpanzees.
Perhaps the most dramatic example of an organ which has
adapted itself for human articulation is the larynx-the voice
box' which houses our vocal cords. Like all the other speech
organs, the larynx did not initially evolve with the specific function
of helping humans to articulate language. For one thing, the
vocal cords in all animals possessing a larynx serve as a kind of
emergency trap door which can prevent foreign matter, such as
bits of food, from falling from the mouth down the pharyngeal
tube and through the trachea into the lungs. When bits of debris
do manage to find their way down these passageways, the vocal
cords help control explosions of air from the lungs to cough this
potentially life-threatening jetsam back up out of the mouth. The
larynx thus helps keep the respiratory tract clear, but it serves
another primary function which is just the opposite of coughing.
By squeezing tightly closed, it can trap air in the chest cavity and
create a solid fulcrum for the limbs to work against when heavy
physical exertion is required. However, in the case of our species
we could claim that speech has now become the primary function
of the larynx and the other, original purposes of the voice box
have diminished to secondary stature.
Evidence for the evolutionary modification of the human larynx
to create speech is quite dramatic. Lenneberg and others have
documented several speech-enhancing characteristics of the voice
box that are unique to humans and are absent in other mammals,
even the primates like chimps and gorillas. No wonder then that
they have remained unable to master articulate speech. The most
striking difference between humans and all other animals in this
area of the body is the position of the larynx. In all other animals,
the larynx is found high in the throat, crammed behind the
tongue, an exceedingly advantageous position for preventing
debris from entering the trachea, for it can be trapped immediately
as it leaves the mouth. But this is not true for us. Feel your
neck and find your larynx (or Adam's apple'). You will locate
about halfway down, almost touching the top of a high-collared
shirt or blouse. Consider the awful consequences of this anatomical
deviation from natural evolution. Unlike all other animals,
our emergency trap door cannot stop foreign matter as soon as it
leaves the mouth. It is so far down that a passageway, called the
pharynx, has been created into which debris can easily fall, and
we, among all creatures, are the most susceptible to choking. Why
does nature deviate in this destructive manner for humans?
The advantages of the lower voice box reside in the way this
arrangement serves to embellish the articulation of speech
sounds. Unlike other mammals whose highly-positioned larynx
virtually precludes the existence of a pharyngeal tube linking the
back of the mouth with the opening of the vocal cords, the pharynx
benefits the production of speech in at least two ways. It creates
a new source of speech sounds-the throaty consonants of
Arabic, or the initial consonant of the two words in the English
salutation, Hi Harry!' A pharyngeal tube also increases resonance
by adding extra acoustic space to the already existing oral
and nasal cavities. The addition of a pharynx to the vocal repertoire
is not unlike the addition of a cello to the duet of a violin and
viola; the timbre of the human voice is that much richer, thanks to
the added instrument. Another enormous benefit of the lowered
larynx is the way it frees up the back of the tongue so that the
tongue root can maneuver and create more speech sounds. The
contrast between the vowels in the words look' and 'Luke' is
made largely by subtle movements of the tongue root, movements
that no other animals are capable of performing. So the linguistic
advantages outweigh the physiological disadvantages, and if the
emergence of language is as vital to our evolutionary history as
most anthropologists believe, and if language is so indispensable
to our species, it is no exaggeration to claim that the descent of the
larynx has permitted the ascent of mankind!
Given the anatomy of articulation we have been endowed with,
what do we know about the programming of articulation? How
do sounds trip so miraculously off the tips of our tongues once
speech is conceptualized and formulated? It is easy to assume that
speech sounds are produced in a linear, sequential fashion, like
cars off an assembly line, but a closer analogy might be to the
team effort that goes into producing a batch of cookies. While one
person might be chopping the walnuts, another might be preparing
the cookie dough, while a third might be preheating the oven
and greasing the cookie sheets. So too in the production of speech
sounds. The process might appear to be linear, but the lungs, larynx,
and lips may be working all at the same time, and coarticulation
is the norm, not the exception. That is, in the production of
any single sound, a lot of anatomical effort is devoted to performing
several different movements simultaneously.
Consider just one sound, the second [k] (spelled, of course,
with a 'qu) in the expression: Keep quiet kid!' Let us begin by
contrasting the second [k] with the first (in 'keep) and the last (in
kid'). All three of these sounds are dorsovelar which means they
are made in the back of the mouth. The back of the tongue (the
dorsum) hunches up and touches the soft palate at the back of the
mouth (the velum) to stop the flow of air momentarily to produce
the consonant [k]. But the process is much more complicated than
this, because every sound in the stream of speech is affected by the
sounds which swim around it. None of the [k]s in this particular
phrase is preceded by any sound which would demonstrably
affect its pronunciation but each is followed by sounds which do
affect articulation. 1The first and last are followed by a vowel pronounced
in the front of the mouth, so the [k] in 'keep and the [k]
in 'kid' slide forward a bit from their usual position in the back. It
is almost as if the tongue were at the starting line of a sprint and
was trying to inch up a bit to get a head start in the race to those
front vowels. There is a double contrast between the [k] in 'quiet
and the first and the last [k]'s. First, because the vowel in this
word at least begins with a sound in the back of the mouth (the
initial [a] of the diphthong [ai]), the [k] in this word does not inch
forward at all, but actually sits well back in order to hit the following
back vowel. Secondly, because 'qu' is actually a cluster
[kw] and not a single sound, the initial [k] is rounded in anticipation
of the following [w]. In other words, the lips assume an ‘o’
position when we begin to articulate ‘quiet’, whereas they
remained flat and unrounded in the production of the first and
last words. Try reproducing this phrase in front of the mirror, and
you'll obtain visual evidence of the effects of coarticulation; the
mouth momentarily puckers up when you begin to pronounce
‘quiet’. Here we observe the complexity of articulation. Sounds
do not emerge as segments strung together sequentially; they are
mixed and melded, with each sound shaping its neighbours while
concurrently being shaped themselves.
Psycholinguists have developed a number of competing models
to try to account for the complexity of speech articulation, and
they have tried to employ various sources of evidence to peek into
this complicated process, but much of articulation remains a
mystery. For example, despite the increasing sophistication of
modern neurology and the development of techniques such as
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Scans to examine the way the
human brain programs neuromuscular movements, we still have
little understanding of how the cerebral software programs the
anatomical printer to articulate sounds in such a glib manner. Let
us narrow the issue down to one simple question. How does the
tongue 'know' to cheat a little bit ahead in the first and last words
of the phrase described in the paragraph above, but ‘know’ not to
inch forward in the second word. And how do the lips ‘know’
when to pucker up? It would be impossibly difficult to explain the
rapidity and accuracy of articulation in such closely related
phrases simply as a chain of habits acquired in a linear way.
We see then that even at this seemingly uncreative and
mechanical aspect of speech production, complexity and
mystery abound, and speaking ceases to appear a simple and
mundane act. Speech production does not end with articulation,
however the fourth and final stage of production is the process of
self-monitoring.

Self-monitoring
Earlier, during our review of slips of the tongue, it was noted that
the production process sometimes goes awry and speakers will
verbally misstep, especially with irregular or more unusual
forms. Almost always, however, they instantly catch themselves,
retreat a step, and correctly recreate the intended sequence, as in
(1) and (2).
(1) The last I knowed about it (I mean knew about it), he
had left Vancouver.
(2) She was so drank {I mean drunk), that we decided to
drive her home.

In contrast to the conceptualization and formulation stages of

production but similar to the articulation stage which we just
reviewed, it seems that at this final stage of self-monitoring we
have direct evidence of what is happening when people compose
speech. Interlocutors not only produce speech and listen to one
another when conversing, they also seem to keep one ear open on
what they themselves are saying, and if they catch something
amiss, they are quick to amend the goof and then continue to
converse.
All speakers and writers of any language, regardless of their
degree of native fluency, commit linguistic blunders, To err is
human. Common to all speakers too is the way in which fluency
seems inversely proportional to the amount of attention they pay
to the production process. It also appears to vary inversely in pro-
portion to the degree of stress they are under, or the quantity of
certain beverages they have imbibed! S. Pit Corder, a pioneer in
the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) classified these slips
of the tongue and the pen as mistakes. The examples listed earlier
in this chapter, or goofs like the typos and misspellings we are all
responsible for from time to time, are mistakes, whether they
come from native or non-native mouths and fingers. Mistakes are
production problems; they are the troubles you have with your
linguistic printer, not with the original software. The true test of a
mistake is to see whether or not it is corrected, and (1) and (2)
above, as well as most of the other illustrations we have covered,
are surely mistakes under this definition. Errors, on the other
hand, are committed only by non-native speakers (NNSS) according
to Corder. Even when the speech gaffe is pointed out to NNSs,
they have difficulty correcting it. For example when NNSs goof
up in the production of irregular verbs, as beginning learners of
English often do, they frequently fail to notice that they erred in
what they said or wrote. Even when they are told that they erred,
unlike the native speakers exemplified in (1) and (2), NNSs do not
immediately replace the deviancy with the correct form.
The fact that native speakers do not commit 'errors' (in Corder's
sense of the word) coupled with the fact that they often produce
‘mistakes’ which they almost immediately self-correct, reveals three
insights into the production process. First and most transparently,
it demonstrates that speakers (and writers) are constantly self-editing.
Production is not a one-way transmission of messages; it is a
self-regulating process with a feedback loop to ensure that each previous
stage of output was accurate. Second, it suggests that speakers
are intuitively sensitive to what stage of the production process
went awry, if indeed a mistake was made. Speakers and writers are
quickly capable of readjusting a message at the stages of conceptualization,
formulation, or articulation, depending on where they
noticed the breakdown in production occurred. Finally, the fact
that native speakers can monitor and quickly correct
any mistakes in linguistic output proves Chomsky's contention that
there is a distinction between performance and competence. The former
refers to the words we say or write, the overt manifestation of
our ability in a language; the latter describes our tacit, intuitive
knowledge about the language or languages we have mastered. At
this final level of production, competence monitors performance to
ensure that our production is accurate.
There are several different ways native speakers edit their linguistic
performance, Psycholinguists have studied the kinds of
self-repairs speakers make and have discovered some significant
contrasts in the ways they monitor their output. When speakers
were dissatisfied with the social or situational appropriateness of
their speech (i.e. their choices were wrong at the very beginning,
at the conceptualization stage), they were much more likely to
backtrack and begin the utterance all over again; however, if
speakers were content with the conceptualization of their utterance,
but had somehow goofed up at the formulation or articulation
stages, they were less likely to start afresh. They would
retreat a few syllables or words to the linguistic juncture in the
utterance where plans began to fall apart, and renew the sentence
from that point, as seen back in examples (1) and (2).
Once more we witness the way in which language and speech
provide windows to human cognitive processing. Evidence
appears strong that stage models of production, such as those
posited by Levelt and described in this chapter, accurately reflect
the manner in which people produce and edit conversations or
compositions.
 Along with mistakes, such as slips of the tongue, psycholinguists
have also relied on the trivial and sometimes annoying
hesitations which punctuate our unplanned, spoken discourse to
gain insights into the ways in which we monitor the language we
produce.

(3) I think it costs just about ... uh. twenty-five dollars.

(4) They have to try to .. uh . contact an attorney

Hesitations like those exemplified in (3) and (4), or the ubiquitous

'y' know' which pervades a great deal of contemporary conversation,
are not mistakes certainly not in the sense that the
term has been defined and illustrated here. Nevertheless, they do
seem to indicate a lack of fluency. But however clumsy they might
appear to an articulate speaker of the language, they are not random,
but rule-governed, and hence they are of interest to psycholinguists.
Notice how the hesitations in (3) and (4) appear at a
crucial point in the sentence before the object of the verb in (3)
and before the complement of the verb in (4). The intrusive ‘uh’
suggest that the conceptualization phase is still in the process of
selecting the information to appear at the end of the sentence,
after the verb in these examples, and so the speaker pauses in mid-
utterance to allow the computer to program the last part of the
message to be printed. However awkward these hesitations might
sound, they reflect the grammatical structure of the language
being spoken, and they would almost never violate linguistic constraints.
We very rarely find utterances like (5) and (6).
(5) I think it costs just… uh… about twenty-five dollars.
(6) They have ... uh… to try to contact an attorney

‘Just about' and 'have to' function as linguistic units, so it is

improbable that the speaker would hesitate in the middle of either
one, after having already chosen to fill the linguistic slot of the
utterance with those phrases.
One final point about self-monitoring. It contrasts markedly
with the dated and very inaccurate depiction of communication
as consisting of a message that speaker A sends to listener B. The
attested presence of a self-monitoring stage presumes that people
don't just communicate with others, they communicate with
themselves; they don't just listen to others, they listen to them-
selves. Communication is not a one-way broadcast of a signal,
but it is an interactive process, involving not just the interaction
between the interlocutors but also the interaction within each
individual speaker. The self-editing process confirms for psycholinguistics
what has long been known to exist in most biological
functions of the body-the presence of feedback loops. Speech
production (or written composition) is not a linear ‘one-way’
process; it is a parallel, 'two-way' system involving both output
and the concurrent editing and modulation of that output.
Let us go back to the theme with which we began this chapter.
All of the complexities of production which we have reviewed
here are largely overlooked by speakers. Language generally
flows effortlessly, and even our hesitations, slips, and backtrackings
are so swiftly executed that they go mostly unnoticed. It is
only when this marvellously evolved and efficient instrument of
communication breaks down that we appreciate its intricacy.
And it is also only then that we begin to glean significant
psycholinguistic insights.
Chapter/4

Comprehension: understanding
what we hear and read

Understanding language, like producing it, is such an automatic

task that it may appear to be a relatively straightforward process.
Sounds or letters strike our ears or eyes in a swift and linear fashion
creating words, which in turn very quickly form phrases,
clauses, and sentences so that comprehension seems to be nothing
more than the recognition of a sequential string of linguistic symbols,
albeit at a very rapid pace. What appears on the surface to be
linguistically transparent, however, turns out to be almost impenetrably
complex from the perspective of psycholinguistics. What
is apparent from the vast research into the comprehension of
spoken and written language is that people do not process linguistic
information in a neat, linear fashion; they do not move
smoothly from one linguistic level to another as if they were riding
a lift that began on the ground floor of phonology and finally
stopped at the top floor of meaning. The research shows that in
most situations, listeners and readers use a great deal of information
other than the actual language being produced to help
them decipher the linguistic symbols they hear or see.

The comprehension of sounds

Here is a simple example of how what we hear is influenced by
psycholinguistic variables and is not just the accurate perception
of the sequences of sounds or words that hit our ears. In one psycholinguistic
experiment, a set of sentences was played to a group
of listeners who were asked to write down the sixth word in each
of the following sentences.
(1) It was found that the_eel was on the axle.
(2) It was found that the_eel was on the shoe.
(3) It was found that the _eel was on the orange.
(4) It was found that the_eel was on the table.

Notice that in every case, the subjects heard eel as the key word
in the sentence, but most of the subjects claimed they had heard a
different word for each example-specifically, wheel for (1), heel
for (2), peel for (3), and meal for (4). The insertion of a different
missing sound (phoneme) to create a separate but appropriate
‘eel’ word in each sentence is called the phoneme restoration effect.
Under these conditions, listeners do not accurately record
what they hear; rather, they report what they expected to hear
from the context, even if it means they must add a sound that was
never actually spoken at the beginning of the target word. Several
simple but significant observations can be drawn from this
sample of the early psycholinguistic research into the nature of
comprehension.
First of all, as just illustrated, people don't necessarily hear each
of the words spoken to them. Comprehension is not the passive
recording of whatever is heard or seen; listeners are not tape
recorders nor readers video cameras. Second, comprehension is
strongly influenced by even the slightest of changes in discourse
which the listener is attending to. In these examples, except for
the last word, each of these sentences is identical. Finally, comprehension
is not a simple item-by-item analysis of words in a linear
sequence. We don't read or hear the same way we count digits
sequentially from one to ten. Listeners and readers process
chunks of information and sometimes wait to make decisions on
what is comprehended until much later in the sequence. It is the
last-not the sixth or ‘target’-word in each of the four examples
above which dictated what the listeners in the experiment
reported they heard. We don't seem to listen to each word individually
and comprehend its meaning in isolation; we seek contextual
consistency and plausibility, even if it comes to adding a
sound or inventing a word that wasn't actually spoken. This
chapter then reviews some of the ways in which psycholinguistic
processes affect the way listeners and readers comprehend
language.
 Although, in the course of everyday conversation, we don't
hear vowels and consonants as isolated sounds, we can, with the
help of machines, measure acoustic information extremely precisely.
The /p/ in the following English words is pronounced
slightly differently depending on where it occurs in the word or
what other sounds follow it. The initial /p/ of 'pool' is pronounced
with puckered lips but the 'same' /p/ in ‘peel’ is spoken
with the lips spread, and neither of these /p/'s sound quite like the
/p/ in 'spring. Although these details may seem trivial to a native
speaker of English, they are significant enough acoustically to be
heard as contrasting phonemes in other languages. Despite these
differences, and other variations of /p/ that could be cited in
countless other examples, native speakers of English claim they
hear and pronounce the same /p/ sound. Notice that for these and
most of the other examples, we spell the sound with the letter ‘p’
and furthermore, despite all the variations in /p/, native speakers
of English almost never confuse any manifestation of the /p/
sound with /b/, which is acoustically very similar. Recall that in
the discussion of the articulation stage in Chapter 3, we saw that
there was a sizeable phonetic difference between the initial /k/s of
‘keep’ and kid' and the /k/ sound which begins the word 'cool'.
Phoneticians have been fairly successful in writing rules that predict
which precise acoustic form of /p/ is pronounced (or heard)
under which phonetic condition; nevertheless, they have been
unable to explain how this variation is processed by the mind or
how all the phonetic differences which occur among all the many
languages of the world can be accounted for in terms of the common,
universal processes of perception that are shared by all
humans. Although the exact details of this acoustic processing
have yet to be resolved, psycholinguists have come up with some
explanations for this most fundamental level of comprehension
Suppose we are engaged in conversation with a friend and are
discussing two other acquaintances with similar sounding
names ‘Benny’ and ‘Penny’. What phonetic information do we
employ as we listen to distinguish these names which are identical
in pronunciation except for the initial consonant? Phoneticians
have discovered that the main feature which English speakers
attend to, albeit unconsciously, is the Voice Onset Timing (VOT) of
the initial consonant. Using instruments which are sensitive
enough to measure contrasts as small as milliseconds in the duration
of speech sounds, they have demonstrated that the most significant
acoustic difference between English consonants like /b/
and /p/ is the length of time it takes between the initial puff of air
that begins these sounds, and the onset of voicing in the throat
that initiates any vowel sound which follows the consonants.
Since almost all the other phonetic features of this consonantal
pair are identical, the crucial clue that separates the voiced /b/ and
its voiceless counterpart /p/ is a VOT of a scant 5o milliseconds
This means that the correct comprehension of the name 'Penny',
as opposed to the mistaken recognition of the similar sounding
‘Benny’, depends on an ability to perceive a voicing delay of one
twentieth of a second! The simple task of recognizing which per-
son is being referred to during a conversation is based on your
ability to isolate one subtle phonological feature from the myriad
sounds hitting your ear and to make a split-second judgment,
How do speakers of English, or any language for that matter,
make these incredibly difficult decisions about speech so rapidly
and so accurately?
It appears that the acquisition of this phonetic ability cannot be
completely explained only by exposure to, or instruction in, the
language. In other words, native speakers do not acquire all of
this acoustic information from direct experience with language,
and as we learned in Chapter 2, parents and caretakers do not
provide explicit instruction on these matters. Even phoneticians
do not subject their children to hours of nursery training listening
to minimal pairs like 'pie' versus 'buy'. Psycholinguists have discovered
through careful experimentation that humans are actually
born with the ability to focus in on VOT differences in the
speech sounds they hear, and they have proven that rather than
perceiving VOT contrasts as a continuum, people tend to categorize
these minute phonetic differences in a non-continual,
binary fashion.
All of this has been decisively documented in experiments
where native speakers of English listened to artificially created
consonant sounds with gradually lengthening VOTs and were
asked to judge whether the syllables they heard began with a
voiced consonant (like /b/ which has a short VOT) and a voiceless
one (like /p/ which, as was just pointed out, has a VOT lag of
about 50 milliseconds). When subjects heard sounds with a VOT
of about 25 milliseconds, about halfway between a /b/ and a /p/,
they rarely judged the sound to be 5o% voiceless and so%
voiced, they classified it as one sound or the other. This phenomenon
is called categorical perception. Psycholinguists have been
able to prove the presence of categorical perception in very young
infants, through a series of cleverly designed experiments. And in
equally ingenious research with several species of animals, they
have found, by and large, that this kind of all-or-nothing acoustic
perception does not exist in other species, Categorical perception
is seemingly unique to human beings, and appears to qualify as
one aspect of universal grammar (UG), the genetic propensity for
comprehending and producing language which most psycholinguists
believe is a uniquely human endowment. These experiments
with VOT perception in human infants are one of the few
solid pieces of evidence we have that UG exists and that at least
part of human language is modular-that is, some parts of language
reside in the mind or brain as an independent system or
module.
Although categorical perception of VOT is an ability children
are born with, it is also influenced by the linguistic environment
a child is raised in. Here lies the second part of the puzzle of
how native speakers of English grow up with the intrinsic ability
to distinguish instantly between the names 'Benny' and Penny'.
Because the English language divides the VOT spectrum into two
sets of sounds, for example the voiced and voiceless pairs of consonants
/b/ versus /p/, /d/ versus /t, and /g/ versus /k/, children
learning English acquire the ability to use their innately specified
gift of categorical perception to divide the VOT continuum into
two equal halves, corresponding to the voiced and voiceless consonants
just exemplified. On the other hand, children exposed to
a different language, say Thai, which has three, not two, VOT
consonantal contrasts, grow up after years of exposure with
the ability to make a three-way categorical split. Thus Thai
children rapidly acquire the ability to hear an extremely short
VOT as /b/ (as in /bail, the Thai word for leaf), a slightly
longer VOT as /p/ (a sound like the /p/ in the English word
'spring', as in /pai/, the Thai word for 'go'), and any VOT longer
than 50 milliseconds as an aspirated /ph/ (a sound very close
to the English /p/ and which is used in the Thai word, /phai/,
which means 'paddle).
When any language learner, whether a child learning their first
language, or an adult a second language, is exposed to the VOT
settings of a particular language over an extended period of time
with lots of opportunities for acoustic input, it appears that they
use their innate ability to hear speech sounds categorically to
acquire the appropriate VOT settings. The successful comprehension
of speech sounds is, therefore, a combination of the innate
ability to recognize fine distinctions between speech sounds
which all humans appear to possess, along with the ability all
learners have to adjust their acoustic categories to the parameters
of the language, or languages, they have been immersed in. We see
then that learning to comprehend, like all aspects of language
acquisition, is again a merger of both nature and nurture.

The comprehension of words

Sounds represent only a tiny and rather primitive component of
comprehension. What about our comprehension of words?
What psycholinguistic mechanisms affect lexical processing?
Obviously, the comprehension of words is much more complex
than the processing of phonemes. Because even short, one- syllable
words are made up of at least several sounds, because
these sounds may be written in different and inconsistent ways in
various languages, because there are literally tens of thousands of
words in the vocabulary of any language (in contrast to a few
score phonemes), and, most importantly of all, because they
convey meanings, the comprehension of words is indeed a very
complex psycholinguistic process.
One model that psycholinguists have adopted to account for
this complexity is Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP). Using a
model of cognition developed from recent research in neurology,
computer science, and psychology, the PDP perspective argues
that we use several separate but simultaneous and parallel
processes when we try to understand spoken or written language.
These processes are used at all levels of linguistic analysis, but
play a particularly conspicuous role in the comprehension of
words and sentences. One explanation, based on this approach,
for how we access the words stored in our mental lexicon is the
logogen model of comprehension. When you hear a word in a
conversation or see it on the printed page (as you have just done
with this new term), you stimulate an individual logogen, or lexical
detection device, for that word. Logogens can be likened to
individual neurons in a gigantic neuronal network; if they are
activated, or "fired', they work in parallel and in concert with
many other logogens (or nerve cells) to create comprehension.
High-frequency words (like the word 'word') are represented by
logogens with hair triggers; they are rapidly and frequently fired.
Low-frequency words (like the word ‘logogen’ itself) have very
high thresholds of activation and take longer to be incorporated
into a system of understanding.
By adopting this model, psycholinguists can account for the
comprehension of words in several different ways: in terms of
their spelling (for example homophones like ‘threw’ and
‘through’, which are spelled differently but pronounced alike); on
the basis of their pronunciation (for example homographs like the
verb ‘lead’ and the noun 'lead', which are spelled alike but pronounced
differently), or in terms of the grammatical functions
that the word might fill (for example 'smell' can function as either
a noun or a verb, but ‘hear’ functions only as a verb and requires
derivational or lexical changes, like ‘hearing’ or sound' when
used as a noun). Finally, comprehension can be linked via PDP to
the network of associations that are triggered by a word's meaning
(for example the word ‘leaf’ can very rapidly evoke images of
trees, pages in a book, or even words which sound similar such as
the verb ‘leave’).
A clear example of the usefulness of a PDP approach to the
comprehension of words is an experience many of us encounter
on an almost daily basis, what psychologists term the Tip-Of-the
Tongue (TOT) phenomenon. Because our long-term memory storage
is better for recognition than for recall, we often know that
we know a word so that, even when we can't recall it from our
memory, it is on the tip of our tongue, and we can instantly recognize
the word when it is presented to us. Psycholinguists have
studied this frequent linguistic experience and have discovered
several intriguing aspects of the TOT phenomenon. For one
thing, the momentarily lost word isn't always completely forgot-
ten; parts of the word are often subject to recall and, most commonly,
these remembered fragments are the first letters or the first
syllable.
Suppose you are trying to recall an obscure word, say the word
which refers to the belief that everything that happens to us has
already been ordained by God. If we have actually acquired this
word at some time in our life, then we usually have some TOT
memory of how it begins. We think that it is a polysyllabic word
which begins with 'pre-'. In trying to produce the word, we some
what frustratedly experience the TOT phenomenon because we
know we know the word, and we remember something about the
term, but we simply cannot recall it on demand. Another intriguing
aspect about examples like this is that although we cannot
reproduce the word, we can instantly recognize any words that
are not the one we are trying to recall. As soon as we see or hear
the following words, we know that none of them is the TOT item
we are searching for.

prestidigitation pretension Presbyterian predilection

We know that even though none of these words fits our

ephemeral image of the target of our lexical search, they are all
pretty good matches. For one thing, the TOT word we are trying
to recall seems to end with an -ion' like the set of terms above.
Often we have vague memories of the beginning and the ending of
TOT terms but not the middle, which is, so to speak, submerged.
This so-called bathtub effect allows us to search for words in a
dictionary, since memory of the beginning of the missing word
allows us to access alphabetical files, and conversely, the memory
of how the word ends allows us to use rhyming as one strategy
to confirm whether the word we are searching for is among
those on the page in front of us. Often, it is through these search
strategies that we suddenly come up with the word, or recognize
it instantly if it is presented to us. At one moment we have only
partial recollection, and at the next we remember the word is
‘predestination’.
Notions like logogens and PDP seem to be useful in explaining
the TOT phenomenon under discussion here. We were able to
recall, at least in this TOT example, the first and the last part of
the logogen for the target word, and this allowed us to compare
and contrast other words with similar logogens. Notice, too, that
we are not confined to one type of comprehension or recognition
processing when we are contrasting a TOT word with other possible
targets. While we are looking at these words morphologically,
we are also making other judgments. In the example above,
Presbyterian' was rejected because of the capital letter (the word
we were trying to retrieve was not a proper noun), and yet at the
same time, we might have been dimly aware of a possible semantic
connection since this word and our TOT term have something
to do with theology while the other words on the list do not. Here
our schematic knowledge, based on all of our life experiences,
assists the lexical search process.
A PDP model of comprehension is able to explain the very
rapid and accurate way people make judgments about which, if
any, words on a list are a temporarily forgotten TOT word
because it accounts for the concurrent use of more general, or top-
down, semantic information as well as more detailed, or bottom-
up, "bathtub knowledge about the phonology or the exact
spelling of the item being searched for. This example also demonstrates
the effects of spreading activation networks. When you first
try to recall a TOT word, it seems as if your memory is a complete
blank and you have absolutely no clues about the word in question.
Nevertheless, the more you think about the missing term
and the more you contrast it with similar but not identical words,
the more pieces of knowledge you activate so that the network of
associations spreads. The first two items on the list, 'prestidigitation',
and pretension', do not fit the lexical network you have
established, but 'Presbyterian' does and, depending on your linguistic
and schematic knowledge, even though this third word
isn't a match, it helps accelerate the activation of lexical relation
ships so that eventually the target word you are searching for is
reached.
Lexical recognition and comprehension then are much more
difficult processes to understand than the recognition of
phonemes, but we have learned several things about these
processes over the past few decades. First, we know that words
are not stored solely in alphabetical order in mental 'dictionaries,
although the bathtub effect demonstrates that this type of serial-
order recognition and retrieval is available to us. We also store
words according to how their last syllables rhyme, for example.
Second, we have learned that comprehension is not an absolute
state where language users either fully comprehend or are left
completely in the dark. Rather, it seems that comprehension
involves a dynamic, growing, and active process of searching for
relevant relationships in spreading activation networks. The
logogen model suggests that familiar words connect rapidly with
other nodes in the network; unfamiliar words take time because
the connections have not been automated. Finally, we see that
people do not rely on one general strategy to comprehend words,
but simultaneously use both top-down information involving
context and meaning and bottom-up data about the pronunciation
and spelling of words to assist them in decoding the words
they hear or read. From all this, it is manifest that listening and
reading are not 'simple' or 'passive' activities. They require just as
much complex and active mental processing as their more physically
overt linguistic counterparts, speaking and writing.

The comprehension of sentences

But comprehension involves much more than the decoding of
sounds, letters, and lexical meanings; it also involves the untangling
of the semantics of sentences. Psycholinguists first began to
examine the comprehension of sentences by basing their research
on the model of sentence grammar originally proposed by
Chomsky in the 1950s. Chomsky's model claimed that all sentences
were 'generated' from a phrase structure skeleton which
Was then fleshed out into everyday utterances by a series of transformational
rules (hence the term Transformational-Generative (TG)
grammar). In the original version of grammar, these transformations
were plenteous and powerful, and they could create many
varieties of 'surface structures' by rearranging, deleting, adding,
or substituting words which were found in the 'deep structure' of
the original PS skeleton. Using this model, psycholinguists immediately
became interested in comparing the number of transformations
used to derive sentences and the relative difficulty native
Speakers experienced in comprehending them. They based these
early experiments on sentence pairs like the following.
(1) The dog is chasing the cat.
(2) Isn't the cat being chased by the dog?

From the standpoint of TG grammar, (2) is much more complex

than (r), not simply because it contains two more words
(‘n’t’ and ‘by’), but because unlike (1) which corresponds with the
underlying PS sentence, (2) has undergone three transformational
changes; it has been transformed into a negative, passive, interrogative
sentence. Accepting this linguistic analysis for the
moment, it is easy to see why psycholinguists thought that pairs of
sentences like these might offer insights into the comprehension
process. It seems logical that simple kernel sentences like (1)
are easier to comprehend and remember than complex sentences
like (2).
Psycholinguists who first experimented with this hypothesis
called it the Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC), because difficulty
in comprehension was derived from the number of transformations
that were added on to the original phrase structure of
the kernel sentence. Several creative experiments were devised in
the 1960s to test the DTC. For example, subjects were given a
random assortment of sentences like the following and were then
asked to recall both the sentence they had just heard and a string
of words spoken immediately after the sentence.

(3) The dog is chasing the cat. bus/green/chair/

apple/etc.
(4) The dog isn't chasing the cat. car/blue/sofa/
pear/etc.
(5) Is the cat being chased by the dog? bike/pink/table/
peach/etc.
(6) Isn't the cat being chased by train/yellow/stool/
the dog? grape/etc.

Researchers hypothesized that since working memory con

strains the amount of new linguistic information we hear, and
because each sentence got more and more complicated in a very
quantifiable way, the subjects would remember fewer and fewer
words following each sentence. That is, based on the DTC, it was
claimed that (4) was (3) plus an additional transformation (the
negative), (5)was (3) plus two additional transformations
(the passive and the interrogative), and (6) was (3) with three
additional transformations (the negative, the passive, and the
interrogative). Accordingly, it was hypothesized that for sentences
like (3), subjects would remember several of the words
following the initial sentence (perhaps around six), but that for
each successive sentence, subjects would remember one fewer
word on the list because their working memory would be taxed
by additional transformations. Initial experiments like this
based on the DTC showed a very broad confirmation of the
hypothesis-the number of words remembered at the end of each
sentence seemed to correlate inversely with the number of transformations
presumably required to generate each of the sample sentences.
Nevertheless, even those original DTC experiments which
appeared to support the basic hypothesis, contained within them
evidence that all was not well. One disturbing result was that
although in general the more transformations a sentence contained,
the more difficult it was to process in an experimental situation,
there were unexplainable exceptions to this generalization.
In one experiment, which simply asked subjects to match kernel
sentences listed in a column on the left with their transformed
variants in a right-hand column, although the matching took
longer for sentences that contained more transformations, there
were several exceptions. Sentences like (4) in the examples on the
previous page, which had undergone only one transformational
change, into the negative, often took just as much time to match
as sentences with two or three transformations, as in examples (5)
and (6). This seems very odd given that the interrogative and
passive transformations, all contained in (6), are much more
complicated than the negative rule, which simply adds 'not' after
the verb ‘is’. The passive rule, on the other hand, is actually a collection
of cumbersome transformations with words being added
and rearranged in a complicated way. This would lead one to suspect
that, all things being equal, sentences in the passive would
take much longer to match (or cause greater constraints on
memory) than negative sentences, which have undergone only
minimal syntactic change. These early warning signals that the
DTC was not as straightforward or as insightful as was originally
hoped led to further experimentation. Failure to replicate the
apparent successes of the early research led to the demise of the
DTC by the end of the decade.
One such replication attempted to repeat the study which
looked at the reputed effect of the DTC on memory for lists of
words, except rather than have the subjects hear the list of words
after they heard the test sentence, the subjects listened to the
words before hearing the sentence. When this slight change in
protocol was introduced, it was discovered that the grammatical
form of each sentence had no effect on the number of words
recalled, suggesting that a larger number of transformations in a
sentence does not necessarily occupy more space in working
memory. Another series of experiments demonstrated that
semantics, rather than syntax, seemed to be the main determinant
of comprehension difficulty. Thus, in the examples below, passive
sentences like (7) took less time to process than active sentences
like (8) because they were semantically more plausible. In fact,
sentences like (8) tended to be remembered as (7) because subjects
retained a rough memory of the word order but were reluctant to
admit that they heard the highly implausible event described by
(8), even though it was an active sentence. Instead, they were
quick to claim what they actually heard was the reputedly more
difficult' but vastly more plausible passive counterpart (7).

(7) The struggling swimmer was rescued by the lifeguard.

(8) The struggling swimmer rescued the lifeguard.

Another way in which semantics seemed to intervene as a more

important variable than the DTC was the manner in which any
negative sentence seemed to confuse the subjects. As has been
already pointed out, the negative in English is a relatively easy
syntactic rule, especially in the case of sentences which include the
auxiliary 'be': 'not (or its contracted form, 'n't') is placed right
after the verb 'be' turning an affirmative sentence like (7) into its
negative equivalent.

‘The struggling swimmer wasn't rescued by the lifeguard’.

Contrast this solitary grammatical change with the four operations

that are needed to change an active sentence like (9) into its
passive equivalent (10): first the subject and object are reversed
second the preposition 'by' is inserted before the original subject;
third the verb 'be' is introduced in the correct tense; and fourth
the main verb is converted into its past participle form.

(9) The puppy hid the bone.

(10) The bone was hidden by the puppy.

Despite all of the changes passivization entails, it still seems

that negative sentences take more time to comprehend and are
more difficult to remember than passives, a finding that further
undermines the hypothesis that the DTC plays a significant role in
comprehension. This initial finding led to some further psycholinguistic
inquiry into the innate difficulty of negatives and showed
that negation, especially double or triple negation, is exceedingly
difficult to comprehend, despite the fact that grammatically, it is a
simple structure in English. As a simple but revealing confirmation
of this finding, quickly try to work out whether the following
sentence s true or false.

(11) It's not true that Wednesday never comes after a day
that's not Tuesday.

Finally, the original linguistic model which psycholinguists had

based their early experiments on had already undergone major
revisions. Ironically, even as psycholinguists began their series of
DTC experiments in the 1960s, Chomsky had already made
extensive changes to the primitive version of TG grammar upon
which the DTC studies were based. By the time they were being
conducted, he had introduced a revision which reduced the
number and the power of transformational rules and, concurrently,
featured a more prominent role for semantics in his model
of grammar. Not surprisingly, he has continued to introduce further
revisions in his model so that today there are virtually no
transformations at all. Now, some thirty years later, it is generally
accepted that transformational rules, especially as they were
conceived of several decades ago, are not psycholinguistically
relevant.
If transformational complexity does not affect comprehension,
what does? Thanks to further experimentation on a wide range of
variables, it seems, quite a few factors. For one thing, ambiguity
seems to slow down comprehension time, as has been demonstrated
by several studies that use phoneme monitoring tasks. These
sound like some sort of phonological measure, but they are in fact
a method psycholinguists use to tap into the process of sentence
comprehension. Subjects listen to sentences like the pairs below
and are asked to press a button as soon as they hear a /b/ sound.
This allows the experimenter to measure the subjects reaction
times between the moment they heard the /b/ and the instant they
reacted. The underlying assumption is that sentences which contain
more complex information in the clause preceding the target
phoneme will create a correspondingly greater lag in reaction
time. Notice that in sentences (12) and (14), the words immediately
preceding the target sound /b/ are ambiguous; men can 'drill
by using an instrument or by rehearsing marching formations,
and straw can refer either to dried grass or to a tube used for sipping
liquids. In contrast, sentences (13) and 15) do not use
ambiguous words immediately before the target phoneme.

(12) The men started to drill before they were ordered to

do so.
(13) The men started to march before they were ordered to
do so.
(14) The merchant put his straw beside the machine.
(15) The merchant put his oats beside the machine.

Sure enough, the subjects took several tens of milliseconds

longer to hit the button when they heard the /b/ for sentences (12)
and (14), most probably because of the ambiguity of the words
'drill and 'straw', which immediately preceded the target sounds.
Subjects were significantly faster in responding to the /b/ for sentences
(13) and (15), presumably because they did not have to
process two different meanings for march' and 'oats', the words
which they heard just before the target phoneme.
Sample sentences like the ones just cited reveal another important
finding in the psycholinguistic investigation of comprehension.
Just as words tend to be processed, at least in part, in a
linear, 'left-to-right' order, sentences also seem to be understood
sequentially so that each new word serves to add to the meaning
of the words which immediately preceded it and, at the same time,
helps the listener or the reader to anticipate the next word or
words which will follow. This form of 'spreading activation' at
the sentence level has led some psycholinguists to posit Automated
Transition Networks (ATNs) which can be used to predict the next
word or word sequence at any juncture of a sentence as it is
spoken or printed. Attempts to program computers to make predictions
using ATNs have met with limited success, and this
particular approach is not very popular, largely because it seems
too simplistic to explain sentence comprehension on the basis of
the single process of sequential prediction. The Parallel
Distributed Processing (PDP) model is a more robust alternative,
because it suggests the existence of multiple and parallel
sequences of psycholinguistic processes, operating concurrently
whenever we attempt to understand novel utterances.
But the general tendency for all listeners and readers to make
increasingly confident predictions about the meaning of a sentence
as it progresses is well-attested in psycholinguistics and is
colorfully called garden-pathing. One well-documented example
of this phenomenon is the way comprehension is temporarily
impeded when the listener or reader meanders down the wrong
garden path in comprehending a string of words. Consider the
following utterance and imagine that you were listening to it for
the first time. After the word 'mile', what word or phrase would
you expect to hear?

(16) Since Jay always jogs a mile seems like a short

distance to him.

You probably expected something like 'he' as in 'he is in fairly

good shape' rather than the verb 'seems', and this probably temporarily
confused you. In fact, you may have scanned the sentence
once or twice to see if there was some misprint. Actually, if we
adhered to the rules of English punctuation, there should have
been a comma after the first verb, jogs. Researchers asked subjects
to read sentences like (16) while they measured their rapid
eye movements scanning the text using specially designed contact
lenses. They found that when the subjects saw the word 'seems',
the eye-fixation time was much longer than at any other point in
the sentence. On the other hand, when sentences like (16) were
slightly modified so as to remove any ambiguity about the direction
of the sentence, as in (17), the subjects did not hesitate after
the word 'mile'.
(17) Since Jay always jogs a mile this seems like a short distance
to him.

Again we see evidence that the linguistic structure of the sentence

affects the processing time. When our guesses about which
direction a sentence will go are correct, as is normally the case
if we know a language well, our comprehension is rapid, but if
we choose the wrong path, as is easy to do in a specially designed
sentence like (16), our comprehension is disrupted. And what
slows us down is the way we expect words to fit together syntactically.
Since 'mile' follows 'jogs', it is natural to assume that all
the words to this point match the Noun + Verb + Noun pattern
we expect for simple sentences and combine to create the initial
clause, "Since Jay always jogs a mile'. But the stranded verb,
'seems' suddenly demonstrates that we chose the wrong path of
comprehension. Garden-pathing is such a natural comprehension
strategy, we are unaware of it until it is interrupted, as it is unintentionally
in poor writing, or intentionally in jokes or psycholinguistic
research.

The comprehension of texts

In addition to the research on sounds, words, and sentences,
psycholinguists have also examined the way we process texts.
What do we remember of a story that has just been told to us or a
letter that we have just read? First of all, with the exception of
mnemonists-people who have a rare and uncanny ability to
recall texts that they have heard or read-our memory is rather
poor for structure but is comparatively very accurate for content.
Earlier, we observed that the subjects in the DTC experiments
were somewhat hazy about the grammatical form of the sentences
they were asked to remember. Passive sentences tend to be
remembered as active ones, but usually not the reverse. That is,
our syntactic memory may be vague but it is not haphazard; we
tend to remember sentences in a form that is actually simpler than
the structure which we originally read or heard. If there is not too
long a gap in time, subjects can remember that a sentence like (6),
to take just one example, was a negative question, but they usually
recall it as an active sentence, ‘Isn't the dog chasing the cat?’
The basic content is remembered but not typically the grammar of
the sentence. Only when sentences violate our expectations, as in
example (8), do we tend to change the meaning into something
that more comfortably matches them, like (7). Interestingly
enough, even those with supreme memories for texts, the literally
one-in-a-million mnemonists, when they finally start to forget the
exact wording of a text, might make minor changes in the words
or the grammar, but not in the details of the content.
Psycholinguistic research into the comprehension of texts has
demonstrated, among other things, that the presence or absence
of background information can dramatically affect the way we
remember a piece of discourse. In a famous experiment, subjects
read a series of paragraphs and, after each reading, they were
asked to repeat as much as possible of what they had just read.
Read the following example and then try to replicate this study
yourself by closing the book and then by attempting to write
down as much as possible of what you have just read.

With hocked gems financing him, our hero bravely defied all
scornful laughter that tried to prevent his scheme. Your eyes
deceive you, he had said, an egg not a table correctly typifies
this unexplored planet. Now three sturdy sisters sought
proof, forging along sometimes through calm vastness, yet
more often over turbulent peaks and valleys. Days became
weeks as many doubters spread fearful rumors about the
edge. At last, from nowhere, welcome winged creatures
appeared, signifying momentous success.

Not only did you probably experience difficulty in recalling the

exact wording and the sequence of sentences in this seemingly
incoherent account, you may also have wondered what is was all
about. Now give this paragraph to a friend to read and to recall,
but before you do so, point out that this is the story of
'Christopher Columbus discovering America'. In the psycholinguistic
experiment that contrasted subjects' ability to recall paragraphs
like this, those who were given an appropriate title first
demonstrated much more accurate recall than those who were
not. This suggests that top-down information, which provides
general background knowledge about a text, is useful in the comprehension
of larger units of language because it helps activate
mental associations which then assist in overall comprehension
and recall.

Comprehension concluded
Once again we have discovered that an everyday activity that
seems to be simple and straightforward is, upon more intensive
scrutiny, complex and variable. In the comprehension of speech
sounds, we see further evidence that some parts of human language
are innate, and do not have to be learned. The perception of
major linguistic differences in sounds, such as VOT, is hard-wired
into the human brain, and even young children demonstrate the
ability to classify very small differences in VOT into one or
another phonetic category. This innate ability is extremely useful
for children as they grow up hearing their mother tongue, because
it allows them to pick up the few significant differences in that
particular language and, at the same time, to ignore the many
which are insignificant.
The research into the comprehension of words has shown that
we are very much affected by context, and that our understanding
is both facilitated and complicated by the different pieces
of knowledge we possess for each logogen. It is clear from the
TOT phenomenon that we have access to a dictionary-like memory
for words. We can 'search' for a partially-remembered word
by comparing and contrasting other words which share similar
specifications. But our knowledge of and about words is much
more extensive: the meaning of a word immediately triggers a
spreading activation of associations which help us understand it
in many different contexts, and may bring other related words to
mind.
The grammatical structure of a sentence might initially influence
the garden path we choose in trying to understand it, but the
greatest influence on sentence comprehension is meaning. We can
see this in the experiments with ambiguous sentences because it is
clear that ambiguity slows down processing time, but we also
observe it in recall. People remember the 'what' that is spoken or
written better than the 'how'. Finally, comprehension of larger
units of language also indicates the importance of meaning. Texts
that fit into a context which we understand and expect are com
prehended more quickly and remembered more readily than ones
which are presented to us without a context.
It is plain that only a complex model of comprehension like
PDP can begin to account for the way readers and listeners comprehend
the millions of linguistic messages they receive each day.
Psycholinguists have to develop a model of comprehension that
successfully integrates all the diverse, yet parallel and simultaneous
processes that we have examined in this chapter, and
obviously such a model will be exceedingly elaborate. It will have
to begin with the innate mechanisms for language that are wired
into the human mind. It will have to account for the way in which
young children rapidly learn to extricate significant phonemes,
words, sentence structures, and phrases from the multitude of
sounds and sights that besiege them each day. And ultimately it
will have to explain how some sort of executive decision-maker in
the mysterious garden of the human mind decides when to continue
along one path toward understanding, when to abandon it
abruptly for a more fruitful alternative, and how to seek almost
always successfully an accurate interpretation of the intended
message.

(Text comprehension passage on page 67 from D.J. Dooling and

R. Lachman. 1971. 'Effects of comprehension on retention of
prose: Journal of Experimental Psychology 88:216-22.)
Chapter/5

Dissolution: language loss

In many ways, this final chapter on the loss of language and the
unworking of the mind is the obverse of Chapter 1, which dealt
with how babies acquire their mother tongue. But unfortunately,
it is not just the natural progression of the years that can exact its
toll on our speech. Dissolution can be caused by an unhappy accident
which assaults the language area of our brain, or by a traumatic
event in our personal life, or, as researchers are just
beginning to discover, even by some unfortunate roll of the
genetic dice. The study of abnormalities of speech has provided
psycholinguists with several direct insights into the psychology of
language, for example the slip of the tongue data reviewed in
Chapter 2. Another illustration of this type of inquiry is the large
field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, which
could be considered a branch of applied psycholinguistics. Here,
the errors that non-native speakers make while they are learning a
new language have turned out to reveal at least some of the learning
processes they employ. So it is no surprise that psycholinguists
have found that the dissolution of language, whether due to accident
or age, is a rich source of information about how the human
mind controls our attempts to communicate.

Neurolinguistics and language loss

The evidence from aphasia

We will begin with the most extensively studied examples of psycholinguistic
dissolution, the loss of language due to brain damage.
Since the brief comment on Emily Dickinson's poem quoted
in Chapter 1, talk about the brain has been avoided in an attempt
to focus on the mind and on mental processes. So far we have
assumed that mind and brain are relatively distinct and that it
would be misleading to consider them psychologically synonymous.
However a different perspective would take the other
extreme and claim that the mind and brain are one.
Neurolinguistics, an offspring of psycholinguistics, investigates
how the human brain creates and processes speech and language.
Before we examine the findings of neurolinguistic research, we
need to clear up some popular misunderstandings about the
human brain and the way it functions. One example is the disproportionate
attention devoted to the well-known anatomical
fact that human brains have two separate and virtually identical
cerebral hemispheres. Biologically, this is an unremarkable piece
of information, for this bifurcation is found in all vertebrates and
is itself a characteristic of the bilateral symmetry that pervades
our living world. However, there exists an unusual enchantment
with the brain in our current culture, so that this anatomical condition
has prompted a great deal of discussion about left brain
versus right brain' differences in human behavior. What the
media and most people forget is that, anatomically, there are millions
of association pathways which connect the left and right
hemispheres together so that in normal brains any information in
either hemisphere is immediately shared with the other. The function
of the corpus callosum (the largest sheath of association pathways
connecting the two hemispheres) is often unknown,
ignored, or misunderstood so that nowadays it is often represented
as a ‘fact’ that there are ‘left-brained’ and ‘right-brained’
people in the same way that individuals can be left- or right
handed. Misconceptions like these about neurology lead, quite
naturally, to misconceptions about the relationship between the
brain and mental states or linguistic structures. But in this final
chapter, it is time to take a look at the brain and to acknowledge
the legitimacy of neurolinguistics as a sub-field of the psycholinguistics
of language. Sadly, we learn the most when this precious
piece of anatomy is damaged.
We can get an idea about the way the brain controls human
speech and language without resorting to an anatomy text or
arranging to view a craniotomy. Take your left hand and cup it
over your left ear so that the palm of your hand is clapped over
your car hole. You will find that your hand covers most of the left
side of your head and that the first two fingers of your hand
extend upward almost to the top of your scalp. If you could see
the interior surface of your brain lying under your hand (as surgeons
would if they had flapped open the left side of your skull to
expose the brain in a craniotomy), you would be able to identify,
after some scrutiny, two vertical strips of brain tissue running
down from the top of your head, roughly the same size and in the
same position as the first and second finger of your hand. The
more forward strip, the one covered by your middle finger, is
called the motor cortex and is the primary area of the brain for
the initiation of all voluntary muscular movement. The strip just
parallel to this, and covered by your index finger, is the sensory cortex.
This is the primary location for processing all sensations to
the brain from the body.
Because our central interest is in language and not in the
anatomical mapping of human neurolo8Y, we are most concerned
with the location of the control of speech organs and the sensation
of speech sounds within these two strips. And here, we run
into one of the many oddities of our neurological system. It is, in
fact, the top part of the brain which controls the lower extremity
of the body and vice versa. In an equally counterintuitive manner,
the left side of the brain is responsible for the right side of the
body and vice versa. It follows that the tops of the motor and
sensory cortices take care of the movement and sensation of your
feet, and the bottom parts of these two strips are responsible for
your head. Returning to the hand-on-the-head illustration, the
tips of your first two fingers lie over the area of the brain which
controls your feet (your right foot to be specific), and the base of
those two fingers, where they meet your palm, cover the motor
and sensory areas which control your head, mouth, and throat.
Because language is represented for most people in the left hemisphere,
the area of the brain which is crucial for the production
and comprehension of human language is covered by the spot
where your first two fingers join your hand. Because of their
importance to linguistic communication, these two locations,
motor and sensory, are named after the two nineteenth-century
neurologists who first described their unique linguistic functions.
The bottom portion of the motor cortex, the area that is slightly
more forward and is covered by the base of your middle finger, is
called Broca's area, named after a French physician, Paul Broca,
who also helped coin the term aphasia, the loss of speech or language
due to brain damage. Just behind this area, at the lower
portion of the sensory cortex, the spot covered by the base of
your index finger, is Wermicke's area, named after Broca's Austrian
contemporary, Karl Wernicke.
These discoveries of the location of speech centers in the cerebral
cortex well over a century ago also helped to demonstrate
that the human brain differs from the brains of most other
animals because it was not equipotential. For many species, including
mammals like rats, much of the brain seems to function
holistically; if half a brain is damaged, the animal seems to lose
about half of its functions, so approximately any area is equal in
potential importance to any other area. Not so with the human
brain, as Broca, Wernicke, and other nineteenth-century neurologists
discovered and as has been further confirmed and refined by
a century of research. One of the first pieces of evidence that certain
functions of human behavior were localized and were not
diffusely represented throughout the brain was this nineteenth
century discovery that different areas of the brain controlled
different language functions. Speech production resided largely
in Broca's area and comprehension of language was confined
pretty much to Wernicke's area. By localizing specific functions
to particular areas, it seems that human brains create more
compact and powerful neurological 'computers' than those
employed by most other animals, which tend to rely more on
the equal potential of any area of their cortex tor functional
processing.
But like all animals, humans are susceptible to injury, probably
even more susceptible than animals when it comes to the central
nervous system (the brain and spinal cord). Suppose a friend or
relative of yours was unfortunate enough to sustain an injury that
just happened to be located in either of these two relatively small
areas of the brain straddling the top of your left ear. The damage
could arise from a loss of blood supply to that location due to a
stroke, or from an invasive injury like an automobile accident or a
gunshot wound. There are at least two consequences to misfortunes
like these that make the central nervous system unique in
relation to any other part of the body. First of all, because there
are no pain receptors in the brain, any distress that is felt comes
from the tissues that surround the brain, the source of discomfort
in a headache, and not the brain itself, and that is why a stroke,
unlike a heart attack, is not necessarily a painful experience. The
second irony is that of all the tissue that comprises the human
body, the nerves in the central nervous system do not regenerate.
Once they are damaged, they do not grow back, so brain injury is
permanent, though, given the right circumstances, functional loss
is sometimes recovered, most frequently within a year of the
initial injury.
Let us return now to the consequences of injuries to the two
'language centers' of the brain. There are many different types of
aphasia, varying in their degree of severity and the way they might
overlap, but the two classic types are representative of this
malady. Damage to Broca's area usually affects one or all of the
stages of speech production reviewed in Chapter 2. Broca's aphasia
is characterized by speech and writing which is slow, very
hesitant, and in severe cases, completely inhibited. Although
automatic specch and function words can remain almost unaffected,
usually the production of key words, like subjects, verbs,
and objects, is hesitant and inaccurate. Nevertheless, comprehension
is relatively spared. If the injury is located in a more posterior
position, just to the back of the upper ear, then patients usually
experience Wemicke's aphasia; speech production and writing are
pretty much intact, but because the sensory cortex is damaged,
patients experience a great deal of trouble processing linguistic
input. Although speech flows more fluently and comfortably than
for Broca's aphasics, patients afflicted with Wernicke's aphasia
tend to ramble somewhat incoherently. Part of this stems from
their inability to process conversational feedback due to the problems
they confront in comprehension. Remember that in both
types and for most cases, aphasia occurs only if either of these two
areas are damaged in the left hemisphere of the brain. Broca's and
Wernicke's areas are unilateral, and reside only in the left hemisphere,
at least for almost all right-handed people. Damage to the
parallel areas in the right hemisphere does not normally affect
language production or comprehension, although, as neuropsychologists
have discovered, it affects other types of human
behavior, for example the correct recall and naming of familiar
faces, or the ability to read maps.
A good illustration of the type of language dissolution these
two types of aphasia create is found in the following excerpts
from speech produced by a Broca's and a Wernicke's patient.
Although written transcripts fail to capture many of the features
of speech so conspicuous in a tape recording or face-to-face inter
view, the examples printed below reveal remarkably different
patterns of linguistic production for the two patients. The Broca's
aphasic struggles to search for appropriate words and ends up
producing mostly nouns. He also seems unable to use grammatical
function words to string phrases and clauses together,
although his intention to communicate is almost painfully apparent.
The speech of the Wernicke's patient, on the other hand,
appears to be a series of cohesive phrases and clauses, without
coherence or apparent communicative purpose.

Broca's aphasia
[The patient is attempting to describe an appointment for
dental surgery.]
Yes... ah… Monday ... er ... Dad and Peter H ..., and Dad…
er ... hospital... and ah... Wednesday… Wednesday, nine
o'clock … and oh...Thursday ... ten o'clock, ah doctors.
two... an' doctors.. and er... teeth... yah

Wernicke's aphasia
[The patient is trying to describe a picture of a family in a
kitchen.]
Well this is... mother is away here working her work out
o'here to get her better but when she's looking, the two boys
looking in the other part. One their small tile into her time
here. She's working another time because she's getting too…

(from H. Goodglass and N. Geschwind. 1976. ‘Language

disorders (aphasia)’ in E. C. Carterette and M. P. Friedman
(eds.): Handbook of Perception: Volume 7. Language and
Speech. Academic Press, pages 389-428)
The surgical evidence
Neurolinguistics has progressed enormously since the nineteenth
century, and as a consequence of advances in diagnosis and
surgery, the particular sub-field known as aphasiology (the study of
aphasia, or loss of speech) has flourished especially. Two kinds of
surgical operation have a particular bearing on questions of language
dissolution. One of these procedures is hemispherectomy. In
rare cases, when a life-threatening neurological condition is found
in either the left or right hemisphere of a patient (for example a
rapidly growing malignant tumor), and there is no alternative to
surgical treatment, neurosurgeons will open up the affected side of
the skull and remove almost the entire left or right hemisphere!
This procedure used to be performed even on adults, but now it is
fairly much restricted to children under the age of ten. There is a
dramatic difference between the effects of this operation on adults
and young children when it comes to speech. When an adult
undergoes a left hemispherectomy, he or she becomes completely
aphasic, except for a few words of automatic speech, and this is
why such operations are rarely performed nowadays. Conversely,
hemispherectomies performed on young children, quite amazingly,
do not lead to loss of speech.
How do we reconcile this neurolinguistic phenomenon with
the claims made earlier that language centers are localized to specific
areas of the left hemisphere? Certainly, the key factor here is
the age of the brain. During the first decade of life, the human
brain is continuously evolving and growing. Cognitive and linguistic
functions have not yet been localized to specific areas
(although these sites appear to be genetically predetermined), and
this allows for the neuroplasticity of the still maturing brain. When
a young brain encounters traumatic injury, even to the extent of
losing an entire cerebral hemisphere, because it is still maturing
and because the primary areas of cognitive and linguistic functioning
have not undergone canalization (established as neuronal
networks), a child does not suffer the extensive functional loss
that an adult does. Consequently, we can see that the effects of
neurological damage on linguistic performance are not strictly
predictable from anatomical change. In this case, for example,
age is a critical factor.
Does this mean that children are spared all neuropsychological
or neurolinguistic disadvantage? Certainly not. Childhood aphasia
exists, though it is much less common than its adult counter- part,
and congenital language disorders such as autism, to be
discussed in a moment, very likely stem from neurological abnormalities.
But we can see even after this briefest of excursions into
neurolinguistics that it is difficult to forge clear-cut links between
the neurology of the brain and the language of the mind.
A second, and better known, surgical procedure which also has
neurolinguistic relevance is the split-brain operation which was
developed in the 1970s to help treat specific and rare cases of
severe epilepsy. This ancient affliction is most often caused by discharges
in the motor cortex in one hemisphere that are instantly
transmitted to the corresponding cortex of the other hemisphere
via the corpus callosum. There are certain severe and singular
forms of epilepsy which remain unaffected by pharmacological
treatment, and split-brain surgery was developed to spare sufferers
from the terrible trauma of major seizures. n an operation
much less dramatic than a hemispherectomy, the surgeon makes a
front-to-back incision along the corpus callosum, severing most
of the association pathways which connect the left and right
hemisphere. Although this might sound almost as grim as a
hemispherectomy, there are actually very few negative consequences
to the operation, and this rests largely on the fact that all of our
senses are bilaterally represented. Our left eye, for example, is
controlled by both hemispheres: the left visual field (everything
we see to the left of center) is controlled by the right hemisphere
and the right field (everything we see to the right of center) by the
left hemisphere. The same is true for the right eye, and so even
after the corpus callosum is cut, in normal, everyday situations,
information from either eye goes to both hemispheres.
A number of unique neurolinguistic consequences of this surgical
operation have been discovered. Most daily functions, including
speech and language were found to be unaffected; it was only
under experimental conditions that certain strange, linguistic
processing constraints emerged. For example, when specially
selected words were flashed very rapidly on a screen, normal subjects
read them as single words, but these same words were read
as only half a word by the split-brain patients. Take the following
nustration. When the word ‘HEART’ was flashed to subjects on a
screen, with the middle of the word right in the center of the
field of vision, normal subjects had no trouble in reading it. When
the same word was flashed to split-brain subjects, however, they
read only the right half; that is, they claimed they saw just the
word 'ART', and seemed to miss completely the HE' on the
left.
HEART HEART
[What normal subjects read.] [What split-brain patients read.

The discrepancy can be explained by the fact that when a word

like ‘HEART’ is flashed momentarily in front of Our eyes, the
image does not last long enough for us to read it completely, but
we can reconstruct it as one word because our corpus callosum
instantly transfers all linguistic information which enters our
right hemisphere from the left visual field into our left hemisphere,
the one that contains the language centers which comprehend
and produce language. These centers immediately read this
linguistic stimulus as one word, 'HEART'.
Under non-experimental conditions, when there is much
more than the merest fraction of a second to catch a word, a
split-brain patient has time to scan back and forth and ensure
that both the right and the left side of the word are caught by the
right visual field and hence fed directly to the left or linguistic
hemisphere. The word is then read correctly, just as it was by
the patient before surgery. But under these experimental conditions,
when words are flashed too fleetingly to be scanned, the
split-brain patient is confined to reading only half the field of
vision, always the right half. Since 'ART' is an English word,
and since it is quickly fed from the right visual field directly to
the left hemisphere, it is the only word that is comprehended.
Because it lies in the left visual field, 'HE' is just as quickly
picked up by the right hemisphere, but since the neurological
bridge between the two hemispheres has been cut, the lexical
information remains trapped in the right hemisphere, which is
not as literate as its cerebral twin. But the left side of the brain
does not monopolize al of language processing; there are secondary
or tertiary linguistic areas even in the right hemisphere,
so split-brain patients are dimly aware that there is more than
just the word 'ART' staring them in the face. When they are
asked, however, to point with their left hand to the word they
have just read ('ART'), patients usually point to the letters 'HE'.
Apparently, they are influenced by the stranded memory of the
word, 'HE' that is floating in the periphery of consciousness in
the right hemisphere.
What do the split-brain studies tell us about neurolinguistic
processing? Some of them have been interpreted to the public as
support for the left versus right brain duality. They have been
viewed as additional evidence that the left brain houses the logical
and conscious mind whereas the right brain is home to the intuitive
and the unconscious. But it is not very useful to draw such
gross generalizations about normal neuropsychological processing
from the results of split-brain patients in experimental studies.
It is an enormous leap of faith and logic to assume that the inability
of patients to fully process a word flashed momentarily on a
screen because their corpus callosum has been severed due to
severe epilepsy can be generalized to the claim that, in normal
people in everyday situations, the right hemisphere is the seat of
intuitive, nonconscious thinking.
Research into aphasia, and studies of hemispherectomy and
split-brain patients, has given rise to two superficially contradictory
claims about the manner in which the brain processes language.
On the one hand, there is irrefutable evidence that for the
vast majority of adults, the production and comprehension of
speech is located in two closely situated but clearly distinct areas
of the left hemisphere, Broca's and Wernicke's, and this localization
of function is not fully completed until about ten years old.
An incidental corollary of this fact is that the exceptions, who
number from five to ten percent of any given population, tend to
be left-handers. For them, there is a greater probability of language
being localized to the right hemisphere or being represented
bilaterally. On the other hand, in contrast to these claims
about the neurolinguistic primacy of the left hemisphere, research
n all areas of language dissolution shows that human linguistic
ability does not solely reside in these two relatively small areas on
one side of the brain. The left-handed exceptions just cited are
a singular counter-example. But even for the preponderance of
people, who are right-handed, more and more evidence has
implicated the role of secondary and even tertiary areas of speech
processing. The 'HEART' example described above provides
support for this.
These two findings alone are enough to call into question the
validity of neuropsychological models which neatly map various
human behaviors on to the brain like a modern version of
phrenology, the belief, popular in the nineteenth century, that the
configurations of the skull's surface indicated the presence of different
emotions. They suggest, instead, that models which use the
analogy of a hologram might be more representative of how the
human brain works. Holography is a modern form of photography
which uses lasers to mold thousands of holograms together to
create a rough, but identifiable, three-dimensional picture of an
object. Each hologram, or individual cell, in that picture has the
potential to depict the entire picture. In other words, holography
creates a single picture from many individual depictions of the
original. Genuine ‘neurolinguistic’ programming seems to work
in the same way. There are primary locations in the brain for all
complex human activities such as language; nevertheless, at the
same time, language is diffusely represented in several other locations
as well. The holographic metaphor also helps explain why
neuroplasticity is lost. The different areas of the young brain can
be neurologically programmed to fulfil a variety of functions, but
as the child's environment and experience grow in complexity,
these various functions are localized to allow for a more efficient
allocation of neurological tissue. At about the onset of puberty, as
the child enters an adult world, neuroplasticity is lost because
localization is complete. But, like the hologram which is both one
picture and many, the overall control of language and speech is
both localized and diffuse.

Speech and language disorders

Dissolution from non-damaged brains

Up to this point, we have been discussing examples of language
dissolution that are the result of operations on the brain, but these
cases are rare when compared to the many ways in which an individual's
language can deviate significantly from social norms.
Their number is too vast to summarize adequately here, but a
brief review of two representative examples, stuttering and
autism, will help to reinforce several themes and insights that
have been brought out earlier in this book.
Stuttering, also referred to as stammering, is one of the most
common articulation problems encountered by speech pathologists,
at least in most English-speaking countries. Like the slips of
the tongue reviewed in Chapter 3, stuttering reveals psycho-
linguistic information about how speech is organized and
planned. Research has demonstrated, first of all, that stuttering is
not random: it does not punctuate our speaking spasmodically,
like a hiccough. It occurs, most frequently on the initial word of
a clause, the first syllable of a word, the initial consonant of a
syllable, and on stop consonants (like /p/, /t/, k/). There is an
enormous and somewhat controversial research literature on the
causes of stuttering, and explanations range between two classic
psycholinguistic extremes.
On the one hand, the Johnson theory represents the extreme
behavioral view and claims that stuttering originates from traumatic
events occurring in early childhood when overly sensitive
parents (who often themselves were childhood stutterers) and/or
primary school teachers are too assiduous in attempting to ensure
that the child speaks fluently. Because language is such a fundamental
component of human socialization, caretakers often display
disproportionate attention to a child's speech compared to
any other aspect of its development. The same parent or teacher
who criticizes a four-year-old for blurting out P-p-p-please!' is
unlikely to comment on the child's less than perfectly coordinated
way of walking, for example.
The opposite extreme of this behavioral explanation (which, as
might be imagined, has never been much appreciated by either
parents or teachers!) is an equally long-standing neurological
explanation. The Orton/Travis theory states that stammering 1s
Caused by the absence of unambiguous lateralization of speech to
the left hemisphere. Recall that roughly five per cent of the population
(about half of all left-handers) are probably right hemisphere
dominant for speech and that another two point five per
cent (about a quarter of the left-handed population with a few
tight-handers thrown in) probably has neither side of the brain
dominant for language and speech. According to this neurologically
based explanation, this latter group of exceptional children
often become stutterers, largely because the brain lacks a fully
established primary language center and is therefore indecisive
about how to initiate speech.
Both of these clearly contrasting views use the same statistics
for support. Stuttering is usually stereotyped as more characteristic
of boys than girls, of left-handers than right-handers, and is
seen to run in families. The Johnson theory explains these demographics
in the following manner. Since caretakers and primary-school
teachers are usually women, and since girls usually
supersede boys in linguistic ability at an early age, boys' speech
receives more of the inordinate attention and criticism that fosters
frustration and stuttering behavior. As they strive to cope with
the difficult task of learning their mother tongue, left-handed
boys are a minority that are especially singled out and receive
excessive attention among all children. The Johnson theory also
tries to account for why stammering tends to run in families.
Parents and teachers who grew up in families of stutterers, or who
stuttered themselves as children, are more apprehensive of their
own children, or pupils, growing up with this disability. But
the very same evidence is used to account for the Orton/Travis
theory. Why boys? In some recent neurological experiments with
rats, it was found that atypically high amounts of testosterone can
sometimes decrease the chances that some aspect of behavior will
get lateralized to one hemisphere or the other, hence the possibility
that the bilateral representation of language will occur more
frequently in boys than in girls. Why left-handers? For both sexes,
about half of all left-handers do not have language represented in
the left hemisphere, and about a quarter of all left-handers have
bilateral control for speech. And why does stammering run in
families? This may be because there is a genetic component to its
origins. For example, it could be similar to color-blindness, which
appears most frequently among males but is passed down genetically
via the mother.
There are many weaknesses in both of these extreme positions.
Perhaps the most telling criticism is that the stereotypes just
described are inaccurate. For example there is little statistically
significant support for the notion that stuttering is disproportionately
represented in left-handed boys. Over the decades since the
promulgation of the Johnson and Orton/Travis theories, there
has been increasing evidence that it is a complex disorder that
varies not only among individuals, but is also highly dependent
on situational differences. Most experts believe it derives from the
complex interplay of both neurological and environmental causes
and can be reduced or cured with treatments which include the
use of delayed auditory feedback, behavior modification, music
and rhythm, or even medication. In one manifestation or another,
all of this work can be viewed as applied psycholinguistics, for it
not only attempts to account for the way the mind can control or
miscontrol speech, it also tries to apply this knowledge to rectify
problems.
All of this raises an extremely important point, one that pervades
every aspect of the psychology of language. Language is not
solely individual behavior: it is intricately interwoven into the
norms, beliefs, and expectations of society, and these serve to
define what is perceived as normal or 'abnormal linguistic
behavior. So it is with stuttering. Though there is some indication
that stuttering universally affects about one per cent of any population
of people, the percentage of stuttering varies from country
to country, as diagnosed by social institutions like schools. Even
between countries which share a language, like Britain and the
United States, speech behavior can be interpreted differently
because of contrasting social expectations. A moderate amount
of stammering in an older man, especially an academic, is completely
acceptable in England, but this same behavior is viewed as
a borderline speech disorder in America. One does not have to
look at brains or to caretakers to see that, for many language disorders,
the disability is not just in the mouth of the speaker but it
is also framed by the ears of the listeners.
Another disability that is fairly well-recognized though, fortunately,
much less common, is autism. Like that of stuttering, its
cause has long been disputed by opposing camps, who have
argued for either behavioral or neurological origins, with the latter
receiving the most recent support. But like the research into
stuttering, the more we study autism, the more we see that there
are several types, and the severity of the disability also varies considerably.
Unlike stuttering, however, it is not simply a language
impairment, and the first signs of this disorder are apparent in
infants, before speech has really developed. An autistic infant
exhibits a bizarre disregard for human interaction and, in contrast
to a normal child, ignores eye and face contact. Perhaps
because this condition creates a lack of social interaction and
early communicative bonding, the autistic infant quickly lags
behind in achieving the natural milestones of speech production,
and within a year or two, the significance of the disease becomes
conspicuous. This fundamental inability to bond with people,
coupled with the linguistic consequences of this constraint, creates
a behavioral pathology severe enough to be labelled a psychosis.
In fact, autism is often referred to as childhood
schizophrenia.

Language loss arising from inherited disorders

It is now popular to suggest a genetic basis for many forms of
human behavior. Genetics should be used as a court of last resort,
not as the first line of defence, but recent work in psycholinguistics
has uncovered certain rare examples of how language dissolution
appears to be inherited. In these cases, which are mercifully rare,
we have the truly curious situation where the genes which carry
the human heritage for speech are countermanded by an inherited
defect that is transported by the same genetic code, With one
exception, these inherited disabilities do not attack language
directly; loss of linguistic capacity is a consequence of the more
global loss of all higher cognitive functions. The least rare of these
disabilities is Down's syndrome, a disorder that occurs about once
in every 600 births and, along with marked anatomical abnormalities,
leaves the child moderately to severely impaired in all
cognitive functions. The degree of language disability is directly
proportionate to the amount of cognitive damage, and there are
cases of less severely afflicted children not only acquiring their
mother tongue, but learning a second language as well. The
enlargement of the tongue in Down's syndrome creates poor
articulation, and though comprehension is not significantly
affected, expressive speech is hesitant and limited, in a manner
reminiscent of Broca's aphasia.

Language loss through aging

There is a humorous birthday card which reads on the front
‘Congratulations! You have reached the age when anything
goes!’, and then listed inside are 'Hearing, Eyesight, Memory,
Hair, etc.'. Though the humor expressed might diminish proportionally
with the age of the card's recipient, it is true that a reduction
in physical and mental abilities often does accompany the
aging process. In a slightly more specific way, Jaques' famed soliloquy
in As You Like It, quoted in Chapter I, echoes the same sentiment.
As we progress through our 'seven ages', in some ways we
approach again the condition of the infant we once were, with our
‘big manly voice turning again toward childish treble’. As we have
already seen in this chapter, various afflictions, neurological,
environmental, or hereditary, mean that humans sometimes have
the gift of language taken away from them prematurely and
unnaturally. As we gradually progress through Shakespeare’s
seven stages, however, many of the rest of us reach a point when
speech is denied us as part of the natural process of aging. Maybe
it is on account of our fascination with youth and the future
potential it symbolizes, but the study of language dissolution
among older people has been practically ignored by psycholinguists.
Compared to the massive number of studies conducted on
all aspects of first language acquisition, there is a significant lack
of psycholinguistic research on language dissolution among the
aged. This is particularly unfortunate considering the ever-
increasing size of our older populations and the potential revelations
such investigations might furnish for the psychology of
language. Most assuredly, this is one area of psycholinguistics
that should, and probably will, receive more attention in the
future. We might begin by asking, was Shakespeare right? Does
language loss due to aging recapitulate in reverse order the stages
of language acquisition we reviewed in Chapter 2?
The most conspicuous faculty eroded by the aging process is
memory, and since language represents a major component o
Long Term Memory (LTM), it is inevitable that linguistic performance
adversely affected by any form of significant deficit in LTM. But
here as in any other aspect in the study of human behavior, we
must guard against anecdotal overgeneralizations. As people
grow older, they often complain about difficulty with recalling
names, and they perpetually attribute this deficiency to growing
o1d. But the more plausible explanation for this problem is that a
sixty-year-old knows considerably more people and more facts
than a sixteen-year-old, and since access to LTM is capacity limited,
it is more logical to assume that the more you have to
remember, the easier it is to forget.
One large study of people's ability to remember fifteen words
on a grocery list found that up to the age of fifty, LTM improved
slightly, but after the fifth decade, subjects typically forgot one
item for every successive decade of life. This loss is not as pro
found as is commonly believed, the same study found that when
the participants were asked to recall the list after a forty minute
delay, there was no difference between the younger and older subjects
in their LTM ability. Contrary to popular conjecture then, it
appears that the aged retain about as good an LTM as young
people. The memory constraints that may become evident as we
get older seem to be due primarily to Short Term Memory (STM) constraints,
or limitations on inputting and accessing the material to
be recalled. No definitive research has been undertaken on the
effects, if any, of the aging process on specific aspects of language,
such as phonology or syntax, but the little evidence just reviewed
on the impact of aging on lexical recall indicates that language
remains remarkably robust, even in the face of the natural decline
that accompanies the loss of physical and mental abilities.
Remember, too, that we cannot measure aging directly by
chronological years; geriatrics has long taught us that age is more
directly a manifestation of health than of the calendar.
This is evident from the occurrence of Alzheimer's disease which
affects millions of individuals each year. For as yet undetermined
reasons which appear to involve both hereditary and environmental
factors, the brain of an AD patient deteriorates prematurely,
and this loss has profound and ultimately injurious effects
on every aspect of a person's performance. Again, serious psycholinguistic
study of AD has just begun, but the research which
has been undertaken shows that speech and language are not
affected in isolation. Linguistic functions gradually disintegrate
together with those of emotion, cognition, and personality. A
recent study of the written language of older people concluded
that those who wrote more complex compositions (i.e. who used
more subordination in their sentences) seemed to have a much
better chance of not succumbing to AD compared to those who
used simpler sentence structures. Correlational studies like this
must be interpreted cautiously. The data most probably means
that the same cognitive development that promotes writing complexity
makes a person less susceptible to AD. It should certainly
not be interpreted to mean that classes in advanced composition
will develop immunity to this terrible illness.
Often in psycholinguistics, research in another language offers
fresh and valuable information in an area of psycholinguistics
that is not directly accessed by the linguistic structures of English.
Such is the case with some outstanding work by Japanese
researchers in neurolinguistics and AD. The Japanese writing
system is notably complicated, consisting, for the most part, of
two very separate orthographies: kana, which are syllabic
spellings(IOU for ‘I owe you’ would be a rough equivalent), and
kanji, which are ideographs borrowed from Chinese. When literacy
tests were conducted on Japanese AD patients, investigators
discovered that while the reading and writing of kanji was drastically
impaired, these skills were quite well preserved when
applied to kana, at least in the initial stages of AD. Again, the evidence
suggests that language is no different from other aspects of
human behavior; the more complex the endeavor (in this case, the
processing of kanji), the greater the degree of affliction from the
disease.

Concluding summary
What do all these examples of speech dissolution tell us about the
nature of language and mind? Well, for one thing, given the unbelievable
complexity of human language, it is quite astounding to
realize that among the world's more than five billion speakers,
only a remarkably small number of them are afflicted with any of
the communicative anomalies reviewed in this chapter. When we
consider the intricacy of acquisition, production, and comprehension
involved in just one language, our mother tongue, and then
add to this the fact that nearly half the world’s population are
bidialectal if not bilingual, and are able to process two distinct
varieties of language successfully, it is amazing that dissolution is
a comparative rarity and not the norm. So the first thing we learn
from all of these studies of aberrant language is that because they
are abnormal, the everyday use of language without disorders in
acquisition, production, or comprehension is a wonder of
miraculous proportions.
Second, we can acknowledge from the neurological examples
which were reviewed in this chapter that there is strong evidence,
from the way the brain processes information, for the unique
independence of language. In all varieties of aphasia and in many
of the neurolinguistic studies of patients who have undergone
major brain surgery, it is plain that language and speech enjoy
a unique neurological status in the human brain, and we find
support for the notion that the capacity to comprehend and
produce language is hard-wired to the mid-central area of the left
hemisphere for most adults. At the same time, evidence was
presented to indicate that speech and language are not always
narrowly and immutably localized to one area of the brain. For
young children especially, language seems to be more diffusely
controlled by both hemispheres. Indeed, one area of neurolinguistics
that needs to be more fully examined is how and why language
shifts from a broader, bilateral representation in young
children to a narrower, unilateral control in adolescents and
adults. An even more intriguing puzzle remaining to be solved is
why the neurolinguistic evidence tends to support the independence
of speech and language from other aspects of behavior,
whereas the psycholinguistic data suggests just the opposite-
that language is part and parcel of cognition and perception.
When we turn to examples of dissolution that do not seem to be
caused by brain damage, we discover that the data from research
on speech and hearing disorders does not differ significantly from
the information we have on normal development. The study of
stuttering, for example, endorses the notion that the formulation
stage is an important level of speech production. But in general,
all of these disabilities, irrespective of their origins, whether
behavioral, as in stuttering, or clearly genetic, as in DS, or the
natural forces of maturation, as in aging, or due to a still
unknown combination of forces, such as autism, point to the
third and most significant conclusion. By and large, language
seems to be closely related to other aspects of human behavior,
particularly to cognition.
In summary, the disruptions in the environment or in the
genetic code that bring about speech and language disabilities
never seem to single out language: they affect linguistic communication
because they afflict cognition and perception as a whole.
For this reason, psycholinguistics is drawn by language into a
more general inquiry of the workings of the human mind.