On the relationship between phonology and psychology

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On the relationship between phonology and psychologyCathy J. Wheeler aa Cincinnati, OhioPublished online: 21 May 2009.

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Papers in Linguistics: International Journal of Human Communication 13(1) 1980

ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN PHONOLOGY ANDPSYCHOLOGY

CATHY J, WHEELERCincinnati, Ohio

ABSTRACT

The theory of generative phonology and its offshoots claimpsychological reality, yet most phonological research is notpsychological. Most phonologists are still behaving like non-men-talist describers of language data. Many of them mistakenly re-gard language data as providing valid psychological evidence, andconfuse the psychological hypothesis of maximally general gram-mars with parsimonious description of language data. Even psy-chologically-oriented phonologists primarily produce analyses of,and arguments about, phonological not psychological data. Theymake many assumptions about internalized gammars which theyfail to state as explicit hypotheses and test empirically againstvalid psychological data.

INTRODUCTION1

. . . there is another, broader aspect of Chomsky's restruc-turing of the field which would appear to be of greater and morelasting significance: this is the contention that linguistics may beproperly regarded as a sub-field of psychology, that linguistic theo-ries are not mere descriptive conveniences but possess, in some moreor less direct manner, psychological reality,

William Orr Dingwall (1971: 759-760)

© L i n g u i s t i c R e s e a r c h I n c . 1 9 8 0 0031 -1251/80/01 051 - 0100

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52 Cathy J. Wheeler

1.1 Most linguists would undoubtedly agree with Dingwallthat one of Chomsky's more revolutionary innovations was to viewlinguistic theories and analyses as respectively representing speakers'linguistic ability and the knowledge they possess of their native lan-guage. It is also the case that linguists working within Chomsky'sparadigm and its offshoots have accepted this view nearly unani-mously. It will be argued in this paper, however, that, in the field ofgenerative phonology, the revolution which should have followedsome time ago from acceptance of the view that linguistics is a sub-field of psychology has just barely begun, and is not proceeding inthe proper manner. Most phonologists have not yet grasped what itreally means to be committed to phonology as a psychological the-ory. They have some serious misconceptions and confusions aboutthe relationship of phonology to psychology that arise from a fai-lure to think about phonology in sufficiently psychological terms.The result has been that progress in phonological research has beenseriously hampered.

One might object that, while this was a problem early onin the history of generative phonology, it no longer is, or, at least,is a rapidly diminishing one. After all, a growing number of phonolo-gists have become concerned with the problem of psychological rea-lity in the past decade. I refer here to people such as Kiparsky,Fromkin, Ohala, Vennemann, Skousen, Hooper, Derwing, andMcCawley, among others. Concern has been raised about the lack ofevidence on the psychological reality of various aspects of the stand-ard theory of generative phonology. There has been some discussionof the methods that ought to be used to obtain such evidence. It hascertainly become more common for works in phonology to includeremarks on the importance of obtaining empirical support for psy-chological claims. And some such evidence, especially from languagechange, has been presented in the literature. Some phonologists haveeven taken the view that the evidence already amassed doesn't sup-port the standard theory, or at least not all aspects of it, and haveproposed other views on the basis that they are closer to psychologi-cal reality.

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On The Relationship Between Phonology And Psychology 53

However, there are two reasons why the relationship bet-ween psychology and phonology as handled by most phonologistsshould nevertheless be regarded as a problem. One is that many pho-nologists are still doing phonology in a completely non-psychologic-al manner, while believing that their analyses reflect psychologicalreality. These phonologists have apparently forgotten that the modelof internalized grammars presented in SPE is only a hypothesis. Asa group they have questioned, and proposed revisions of, nearly ev-ery small detail of this model from a non-psychological point ofview. But they appear to take for granted that, as psychology, themodel is essentially an accurate one, in spite of the fact that littlework has been done to find empirical support for it, and much ofwhat evidence does exist fails to support it. Another reason is thateven the phonologists who are most concerned with psychologicalreality generally also fail to be sufficiently psychological in their ap-proach. They frequently engage in empty speculations, and make fartoo many unwarranted assumptions, about the psychology of humanlanguage, and they tend to fall back on non-psychological ways ofdoing phonology.

1.2 The purpose of this paper is to examine closely theways in which most generative phonologists handle the relationshipbetween phonology and psychology, and to demonstrate why theseways are so often unsatisfactory. This paper is also, of necessity,concerned with what this relationship ought to be. It was written inthe hope that a detailed examination of this problem, illustrated withexamples from the phonological literature, will clarify it in a waythat previous brief exhortations to stop speculating and being overlyconcerned with formalism, and to start getting valid psychologicalevidence, have so far failed to do. To help attain this goal, I will notonly discuss what phonologists do, or fail to do, but will also includemy own opinions as to why most phonologists have been unable tocommit themselves fully to a psychological phonology. I don't be-lieve that it is due simply to a lack of exposure to the field of cog-nitive psychology, although this may be a factor; rather, a major

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54 Cathy J. Wheeler

cause seems to be that there has been a generally unconscious carry-over of earlier views from pre-mentalistic linguistics of what consti-tutes a linguist's field of inquiry and approach to research. This ideawill be elaborated on at various points below.

The discussion to follow will be divided into two major sec-tions. The first is concerned with phonologists' confused treatmentof the idea that internalized grammars are as simple and general aspossible. The second takes up the problem that phonologists makemany assumptions about internalized grammars, and usually fail totest them empirically.

GENERALITY AS SCIENTIFIC PRINCIPLE AND AS PSYCHOLO-GICAL HYPOTHESIS

2.1 There is a basic and pervasive confusion in the field ofgenerative phonology over the data that is proper for a psychologicalphonology to be concerned with, as against the data that is appropri-ate for a non-psychological phonology. This confusion is most evi-dent in the work of phonologists who assume that the standard the-ory is a fundamentally accurate model of competence, but it is alsopresent in the work of phonologists who don't take this for granted.The data with which a non-psychological phonology is rightfully con-cerned is the phonological facts and patterns that are to be found innatural languages. Many phonologists, unfortunately, seem to thinkthat such data is also appropriate for a phonology that claims psy-chological reality. On the contrary, the type of data proper to thiskind of phonology is evidence about what speakers know about thephonology of their native language. These are two distinct fields ofinquiry, concerned with two distinct sets of facts. For example,there may be many facts about, and patterns to be found in, the pho-nologies of natural languages that are of interest for phonologists toknow about, but of which speakers may be unaware, tacitly orotherwise, and which, therefore, are not represented in their in-ternalized grammars. Likewise, factors such as concept-form-

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ation processes in humans determine how speakers perceive and or-ganize phonological data. As we know little or nothing about thesefactors, internalized grammars must be investigated directly. It issimply not possible to acquire any knowledge about them by study-ing language data and imposing on it phonologists' ideas about howsuch data ought to be organized.

A major cause of this confusion about data is no doubt thefact that, since its inception as a field of inquiry, linguistics beforethe Chomskian revolution was concerned first and foremost with lan-guage data, whether diachronic, as in the exclusively historical lin-guistics of the nineteenth century, or synchronic, as in the non-men-talistic structuralist linguistics of the twentieth century. Thus, bytradition, linguists gather language data and analyze it within a parti-cular model or framework; they do not obtain and interpret data onthe mental organization of linguistic knowledge in speakers. It is mycontention that generative phonologists have had difficulty in eman-cipating themselves from this tradition, which is why most of themhave been, and still are, only nominally, or at best sporadically, con-cerned with evidence that is valid for a psychological phonology.

2.2 However, this tradition alone would probably not be sodifficult to abandon if it were not for the central psychological hypo-thesis of the standard theory as presented by Chomsky and Halle.This hypothesis is embodied in the evaluation metric, which claimsthat speakers construct the simplest, i.e. most general, grammar com-patible with the data of their language. This psychological hypothe-sis of maximal generalization, as I will refer to it henceforth, happensto correspond exactly to a generally accepted scientific principle thatis applied in describing or theorizing about any body of data, name-ly, that the simplest description consistent with the data is to be pre-ferred. Details aside, what Chomsky and Halle's model of internaliz-ed grammars amounts to is that speakers account for the facts oftheir native language in the same way as linguists, as scientists follow-ing this established scientific principle, would account for these same

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56 Cathy J. Wheeler

facts within this model. The model includes principles and formal-isms for achieving the greatest possible simplicity of the overall gram-mar, each instance of which can, and should, be taken as a hypothe-sis of some aspect of the organization of speakers' internalized gram-mars in a mentalistic theory. Among them are principles such as thecycle and extrinsic rule ordering, and formalisms such as curly bracesand Greek-letter variables. However, these principles and formalismscould very well have been 'invented' in the context of a purely non-mentalistic generative model of phonology, the goal of which is togenerate the facts and patterns of the phonology of natural languagesin the most economical manner, without reference to human psycho-logy. In fact, they are treated in exactly this way in much of thephonological literature.

It must be remembered that the concepts of generality andsimplicity were not new ideas introduced into linguistics byChomsky as a consequence of his mentalistic viewpoint. The struct-uralists, most of whom were strongly anti-mentalist, also appliedthese concepts to analyses of language data done within their ownmodels, simply because they are basic to scientific descriptions. Forexample, Hockett (1942) lists as one of the criteria for identifyingand classifying phonemes that of economy; the analysis which esta-blishes the smallest number of phonemes should be preferred if otheranalyses equally satisfy the other requirements. Harris (1942), inpresenting a rigorous technique for determining the morphemes ofa language, states as one of its advantages that it will result in a sim-pler morphology. Bloch (1947) claims that his treatment of Englishverb inflection will be more useful, more uniform 'and in the longrun simpler.' In fact, McCawley (1976) views the evaluation measureof generative phonology as intended by Chomsky to be a more pre-cise formulation of vague concepts of simplicity and generality thathad previously been used by structuralists and other linguists. Con-necting them to a model of language acquisition was a non-arbitraryway of determining how these concepts were to be applied in linguis-tic analyses.

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At the time that Chomsky and Halle formulated their mo-del, there was essentially nothing in the way of psychological evid-ence on internalized grammars except, perhaps, for some informalobservation that both children and adults sometimes generalize be-yond the phonological data to which they have been exposed. Giventhis situation, the hypothesis of maximal generalization was as reas-onable as any other to start out with. However, in a field which un-til then had been occupied nearly entirely with describing, and mak-ing discoveries about, language data, this hypothesis was an unfor-tunate choice. The fact that it is identical to a scientific principleused to account for any body of data, made it all too easy for phono-logists, with their traditionally non-psychological orientation, to con-fuse their own accounting for language data, using this new model,with how speakers account for it. The result was that the necessityof submitting the psychological hypotheses of the standard theoryto empirical testing was obscured, and most phonologists continueddoing what they felt most comfortable with, namely analyzing lan-guage data. As will be discussed in section 3.1, it is not fruitful for apsychological phonology to be occupied with analyzing languagedata except insofar as such analyses are made for the express pur-pose of providing concrete and explicit hypotheses about speakers'internalized grammars that are going to be empirically tested.

2.3 What most phonologists have failed to understand suffi-ciently is that the description of a body of data in the most econom-ical and general way doesn't necessarily correspond to how humansordinarily account for the same set of data. It may be helpful at thispoint to examine some examples from outside linguistics to illustratethat there is often a divergence between an economical characteriza-tion of a system and that of an ordinary human who has knowledgeof that system.

Let us first consider models of human memory. One suchmodel, proposed by Collins and Quillian, hypothesizes that there isa 'cognitive economy' in how properties of a particular concept are

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58 Cathy J. Wheeler

handled in memory. For example, according to this model, peopledon't store directly the fact that a canary is an animal. Rather, theyinfer this from their knowledge that a canary is a bird and a bird is ananimal, thus minimizing redundancy as much as possible. However,according to Anderson and Bower (1973), there is a fair amount ofexperimental evidence that human memory does contain redundantfacts, i.e. that properties are stored with every concept they define.It seems, then, that at least one aspect of memory is not maximallygeneral.

Another example is the relationship between various sys-tems of logic that have been developed by logicians, and the proces-ses of reasoning and inference that people use in everyday life. Manyphilosophers, and some psychologists as well, have believed thatthese systems of formal logic correspond to how people actuallymake inferences. For example, the rules of inference in logic are setup to apply to all propositions of a certain form regardless of seman-tic content; in this sense, they have maximum generality. But, asWason and Johnson-Laird (1972:245) say: 'Only gradually did werealize first that there was no existing formal calculus which correct-ly modelled our subjects' inferences, and second that no purelyformal calculus would succeed. Content is crucial and this suggeststhat any general theory of human reasoning must include an impor-tant semantic component.' A further example also comes from thepropositional calculus, which contains, among others, two rules ofinference, modus ponens and modus tollens. In fact, the latter rulecan apparently be derived from the former. But, according toJohnson-Laird and Wason (1977) adults use modus ponens compe-tently, while they do not fare so well with modus tollens, suggest-ing that the latter may not be a rule of inference for many people.

In connection with the above example, it is interesting tonote that Ringen (1975) has argued that the 'test procedures' used incurrent practice in transformational generative grammar are parallelto those used by logicians and mathematicians in exploring and char-

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acterizing the concepts of logic, mathematics, and formal analyticalphilosophy, and are very different from those used in sciences suchas physics and chemistry (and, he might have added with more rele-vance for linguists, psychology). It is not easy to evaluate his argu-ments, however. They differ considerably from those presentedhere, and his specific examples are all drawn from syntax rather thanphonology.

Finally, a particular fascinating example of the contrast bet-ween characterization of a system and human knowledge of it is thatthe way in which a human (or a dog for that matter) ends up in thecorrect position to catch a ball that has been thrown into the air canbe characterized by the simultaneous solutions of a pair of doubledifferential equations. But no psychologist would dream of assumingthat humans, not to mention dogs, actually solve such equationswhen they catch balls.

In summary, it is clearly wrong to assume that a scientist'sparsimonious characterization of a system necessarily has any psy-chological reality. A researcher investigating the latter must obtainevidence on human knowledge about systems, and cannot, therefore,be concerned only with the data of the system itself.

2.4 Returning now to linguistics, let us examine two waysin which the confusion between generality as a goal for the charact-erization of language data and generality as a psychological hypothe-sis about the organization of internalized grammars has manifesteditself in linguistic research. This confusion is present in all phonolo-gical analyses which are formulated in accordance with the principleof maximal generalization, and which are labelled as, or are assumedto be, psychologically real, i.e. most phohoiogical analyses donewithin the paradigm of generative phonology. However, the two il-lustrations that will be presented are not phonological analyses of theusual sort; they were chosen because they point up the confusionmore clearly than ordinary analyses do.

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60 Cathy J. Wheeler

The first example is the way in which the evaluation metricitself is presented in some general works on phonology. In SPE, it isclearly presented as a psychological hypothesis about the form ofgrammars that children construct, namely that these grammars aremaximally general. It is presented likewise in Hyman (1975). But inSchane (1973) and Sommerstein (1977), its psychological aspect isdropped. This is especially clear in the latter work, in which the eva-luation metric is connected with generality and simplicity only as ap-plied to the description and characterization of phonological data asa system. To be fair, Sommerstein does later relate generality andsimplicity to language acquisition, but not very seriously. This atti-tude is perhaps explained by his earlier discussion of mentalism inwhich he indicates that empirical evidence on the theory cannot yetbe obtained, a belief arising from his strange notion that the type ofevidence needed is data on neuro-chemical patterns in the brain.Schane connects the evaluation metric solely with naturalness, i.e.with common and/or phonetically 'sensible5 segments and processesin natural languages. In his view, the metric is a feature counter thatshows natural segments and processes to be simpler than others be-cause they need fewer features to express them. He gives no psycho-logical interpretation to the idea of naturalness (as other phonolo-gists have done) such as that 'natural' rules are easier to learn.

In one sense, Schane and Sommerstein can be accused ofpresenting the evaluation metric incorrectly, because in the standardtheory it is clearly a psychological hypothesis. But in view of theway most phonological work has actually proceeded, this treatmentof the metric merely reflects a general, if unacknowledged, reality.It is often applied as if it had no reference to human psychology atall, i.e. as if it were not a basic hypothesis about internalized gram-mars that must be tested. The general, tacit assumption in muchphonological research is that the goal of phonology is to describephonological data as simply and generally as possible, taking 'natur-alness' into account, and to modify the theory only when it fails toachieve this goal.

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Even in SPE, the presentation of the evaluation metric en-courages this view, in spite of the authors' insistence on its psycholo-gical status. They don't give any evidence in support of the hypothe-sis, not even a reference to creativity in phonology, which might beat least vaguely supporting. Nor do they encourage a search for evi-dence, or suggest where such evidence could be found. In fact, SPEas a whole encourages the opposite attitude, that of regarding gener-ality as a principle of scientific description of language data, as it in-cludes a detailed analysis of maximally-generalized English phonolo-gy which covers far more ground than necessary if its only purposewere to illustrate the type of analysis that this theory posits forspeakers. Conspicuously absent is empirical support for any aspectof the theory as a set of psychological hypotheses. It is significantthat Chomsky and Halle had to stress in SPE the fact that the formaldevices and evaluation metric of their theory were not chosen on thebasis of 'elegance', but were empirical hypotheses about the form ofinternalized grammars. However, they themselves did, and have sincedone, nothing to show that the evaluation metric is empirical and un-connected with elegant descriptions of language data, beyond merelylabelling it as such. I myself have had to correct this same misappre-hension about elegance a number of times in psychologists of my ac-quaintance who have ventured a little into phonology. People out-side the field of linguistics will continue to have this misconceptionas long as maximal generalization is not submitted to testing as a psy-chological hypothesis but is automatically applied to analyses as if itwere a well-established and unquestionable principle.

Descriptive generality and psychological generality are alsoconfused in the idea that language data analyzed in accordance withthe principle of maximal generalization can explain the existence ofcertain facts found in languages, can tell us about speakers' innatelinguistic capacity, and can determine what constitutes a possible na-tural language, all of which are treated as closely interrelated issuesin the phonological literature. Even worse, phono legists often make

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62 Cathy J. Wheeler

claims of this type without making it clear that the idea that inter-nalized grammars are constructed so as to be maximally general iscrucial to these claims. Thus an impression is given that the facts oflanguage themselves can yield information on human innate intellec-tual capacity and related questions. Whether or not maximal general-ization is brought overtly into the discussion, phonologists makingthese claims don't seem to realize that they could have plausibilityonly if it were known for certain that maximal generalization is acharacteristic of internalized grammars. The actual situation, ofcourse, is that most evidence now available on the subject fails tosupport this contention, and, at the time when phonologists firststarted making such claims, evidence either for or against maximalgeneralization was completely lacking.

Let us consider several examples. Chomsky (1972) givesan argument for the existence of the phonological cycle based onword-level stress in English. He points out that the vowel in thesecond syllable of words like relaxation and connectivity doesn't re-duce to [ 9 ] , although unstressed, which is the usual environmentfor vowel reduction, in contrast to the vowel in the second syllableof words like demonstration, etc. His 'explanation' for this pheno-menon is that the cycle blocks reduction in the former group ofwords because it stresses the vowel in question on the first cycle (i.e.relax, connect, vs. demonstrate^ where the stress never falls on thesecond syllable.) This is, of course, an abstract stress because itdoesn't occur in the phonetic form. Because it doesn't seem possi-ble to Chomsky that language learners could figure out the principleof cyclic application of rules by induction, he proposes the phonolo-gical cycle as an 'innate organizing principle of universal grammar.'He apparently believes that the very reason why, for example, relax-ation has an unreduced [ o^\ is that humans have as part of their in-nate mental equipment the principle of cyclic application of phono-logical rules.

Although he never mentions it in the discussion, Chomsky's

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analysis of the data assumes that speakers construct the simplest,most general, grammars possible. Many other analyses are possibleif the maximal generalization requirement is dropped. For example,words like relaxation could be treated simply as exceptions to vowelreduction. The explanation for the existence in English of the parti-cular phonetic form of this word and other such words may well beentirely diachronic rather than synchronic, an obvious possibility inmany other cases of this kind. There are, for example, some word-pairs in English that exhibit an [s]/[r] alternation, with [s] usuallyoccuring word-finally and before a consonant, and [r] usually occur-ing between vowels, e.g. rustic/rural; Venus/venereal; honest /honor;genus/genera, etc. The existence of these pairs in English can be 'ex-plained' on purely diachronic grounds, namely the fact that theywere gradually borrowed into English from Latin, a language whichhas many words with this same alternation due to a sound changeearly in its history. As little research has yet been done on internal-ized rules, we simply don't know whether English speakers relateany, or all, of these word-pairs semantically, and, if so, whether theyare able to discern the distribution of the [s]/[r] alternation. Thereis no known reason why these forms can't exist in the grammars ofEnglish speakers as separate lexical items with no common underly-ing form, or why some, but not all, may be generated with an sir rulefrom a common underlying form. Therefore, the existence in itselfof an sir alternation in pairs of possibly semantically related wordscan tell us nothing about rules that English speakers have in theirgrammars, not to mention anything about their innate linguistic ca-pacity. The same goes, of course, for the mere existence of wordslike relaxation. What Chomsky has actually done is to demonstratethat the mechanism of the cycle can handle apparent irregularitiesor exceptions as regularities, and hence account for them parsimoni-ously. From the point of view of system characterization, this is ofinterest. But Chomsky has given no evidence whatsoever that thecycle is part of people's innate mental endowment and, if so, that itis used by English speakers to generate the particular data he pre-sents.

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Lightner (1975) actually suggests using diachrony as a guidein formulating synchronic grammars, on the basis that this will some-how reveal 'the innate intellectual capacity of man.' For example,according to his proposal, the English words quick (meaning 'alive'),vivid, vital, vivacious, biology and zoo will all be generated from thesame underlying root because they all come from the Indo-Europeanroot *gOJei> through Germanic, Latin, and Greek respectively. Fur-thermore, English will have some form of Grimm's Law as a syn-chronic rule to account for pairs and triples such as father!paternal;tooth I dental; foot I pedal; three I trio; warm I furnace I thermal, etc. Heassures us that without this approach, many generalizations will belost. Of course, if humans don't make generalizations of this type,such analyses will reflect nothing at all about internalized grammars,much less innate mental capacities. The history of English borrowingis quite sufficient to explain the co-existence of these words in thelanguage. And it should definitely not be assumed that speakers areable to perceive the complicated and obscure patterns of sound cor-respondences among cognate words that have been borrowed intoEnglish from other Indo-Europeon languages, or even that thesewords are all connected semantically by speakers. Furthermore, ifthese (or any other) analyses do happen to reflect psychological rea-lity, we will never know it unless direct research is done on the struc-ture of internalized grammars. Again, what Lightner has actuallyshown is that certain patterns noticed by linguists can be captured ifhistorical facts determine synchronic analyses, not that speakers act-ually perceive these patterns.

The ability of the standard theory of generative phonologyto 'explain' or render regular certain language phenomena that seemunconnected or irregular might be regarded as its greatest glory.Chomsky's analysis of English stress discussed above is one exampleof this sort of explanation. Another is found in Kiparsky (1972):the stress pattern in Eastern Cheremis, a Finno-Ugric language, re-quires two separate, apparently unrelated, rules when described verb-ally. However, when the principle of maximal generalization and the

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convention of disjunctive ordering are applied in formalizing this pat-tern, only one rule is needed. This is indeed impressive. However,analyses such as this tell us nothing about the form of internalizedgrammars. To repeat, we don't know whether speakers organizetheir grammars on the basis of maximal generalization or if their in-ternalized rules are disjunctively ordered. Therefore, the mere factthat the stress pattern can be characterized by one rule doesn't meanthat speakers necessarily characterize it in this way.

Many phonologists seem to believe that because the theoryof generative phonology allows us to 'find' such unexpected gener-alizations in languages, they must reflect psychological reality. How-ever, different mechanisms and principles of linguistic analysis wouldallow us to find different patterns and generalizations in language.As there are a large number of possible analyses for any set of possi-bly related phonological forms, it is clearly invalid to simply assumethat humans analyze linguistic data according to a particular princi-ple, and then use analyses made accordingly to infer things about in-nate mental capacity. The task of a psychological phonology is todiscover what principles and mechanisms speakers actually use inconstructing grammars from language data. Only once a fair amountof knowledge has been acquired on this subject will it be appropriateto begin thinking seriously about what constitutes a possible, i.e.learnable, natural language, and what innate intellectual capacitieshumans have which make such learning possible.

2.5 It has been demonstrated above that what phonologistsoften call 'internal' evidence, i.e. phonological data analyzed in ac-cordance with the principle of maximal generalization, is not validevidence about speakers' linguistic knowledge. Evidence that is validis often called 'external' in the phonological literature. Lists of vary-ing length purporting to specify the various sources of such evidenceappear in a number of the more psychologically-oriented phonologic-al works. These sources include language change, borrowing, slips ofthe tongue, language games, language universals, language acquisition,

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66 Cathy J. Wheeler

and experiments. However, as one of these sources is inappropriate,and another is often unreasonably rejected, some discussion of thissubject is in order.

One point that phonologists need to understand is that, giv-en our current state of knowledge, language universals cannot beused as a valid source of evidence about internalized grammars. Sub-stantive universals, such as segments and phonological processes com-monly found in natural languages, are not necessarily more easilylearned than other phonological facts, nor do they necessarily revealanything special about what is preferred in grammars. The reasonwhy these phenomena are so common may lie entirely in the struc-ture of human articulatory and/or perceptual systems. If this is so,their common occurance has nothing to do with the relative ease ordifficulty of forming concepts about them, which is what is involvedin the construction of internalized grammars. The problem with for-mal universals has already been discussed in section 2.4; those thathave been proposed are all based on the assumption that certain prin-ciples such as maximal generalization govern the construction of int-ernalized grammars, thus begging the question we are trying toanswer.

Another important point is that experimental data can bean excellent source of evidence on internalized grammars. However,phonologists are generally either negative or indifferent to experi-ments. In my view, this attitude arises from a combination of thelack of committment to a psychological phonology, and an unfami-liarity with the nature of experiments and how experimental researchproceeds. In view of the fact that experiments provide the majorsource of evidence in the field of cognitive psychology, of which lin-guistics is supposedly a part, it is appropriate to examine this issue insome detail.

The general objections to experiments made by phonolo-gists are not valid. For example, according to Kiparsky (1968a), ex-

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perimental evidence on competence is overly contaminated with per-formance, while linguistic change, in contrast, can provide a 'win-dow' on competence that is not obscured by performance. This viewis not a reasonable one. Both experimental evidence and evidencefrom language change consist of forms produced by speakers. Of ne-cessity, performance factors, as well as factors connected with com-petence, are involved any time forms are emitted. No one producespure competence, whether they are speakers making innovations intheir language under 'natural' circumstances, or subjects in a labora-tory taking part in an experiment.

Botha (1971) objects to experiments on the grounds thatinferences made about competence from the results of experimentsare invalid. According to him, such inferences involve the logical fal-lacy of 'affirming the consequent', i.e. if the thefi-claust in an if-thenstatement turns out to be true, it is invalid to assume that the ij-clause is necessarily true, since the then-clause could have othercauses. So, for example, if an experimenter predicts that a mentalmechanism, if it exists, would produce some particular behavior, andthen conducts an experiment in which that behavior is manifested, itwould be fallacious to conclude that the proposed mental mechanismwas necessarily responsible for it. This description of inferencesmade from experiments might be accurate if one considers only oneexperiment taken out of the context of other related experimentsdone before and after it. But experiments in psychology and otherexperimental fields are not carried out in isolation. Researchers fre-quently propose alternative hypotheses about the causes of 'conse-quents', and experiments themselves can be, and are, designed expli-citly to decide among alternative hypotheses about causes ofbehavior.

Actually, experiments have the potential to be a more flex-ible source of evidence on internalized grammars than the othersources listed above. As J. Ohala (1979) puts it, experiments pro-vide a way 'to make the crucial events occur' that are necessary to

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68 Cathy J. Wheeler

provide evidence on the phenomenon we are investigating. In con-trast, the other types of evidence, such as language change, are whatOhala calls 'nature-made experiments' where we must take what evi-dence nature has produced (and, I might add, what we are fortunateenough to have come upon).

Furthermore, experiments can provide a wider range of evi-dence than the other sources. Evidence from the latter consists en-tirely of either phonetic change made by speakers in original forms,or new forms produced by speakers which consist in part of already-existing forms or patterns. This is not only a description of the dataof analogical change. For example, borrowing data consists of phon-etic changes made by speakers in forms of another language, whileslips of the tongue and language games involve phonetic changes insome forms of the speaker's native language. The most interestingevidence from language acquisition consists of forms produced bychildren that differ phonetically from adults', or that are new crea-tions. It is the specific nature of these phonetic alterations or newcreations, whatever their source, that allows specific inferences to bemade about the form and content of internalized grammars.

Likewise, much of the relatively small amount of experi-mental evidence now available in phonology consists of this sametype of evidence, most commonly new creations (see, for example,M. Ohala 1974, Moskowitz 1973, Haber 1975, and J. Ohala 1973).The only difference is that these productions are induced in a lab-oratory setting rather than awaited passively.

In addition, experiments can also provide other types ofevidence. For example, Kiparsky and Menn (1977) report on an ex-periment by Rosemary Myerson which used recall of nonsense,English-like forms to find out whether speakers have learned hypo-thesized morphological patterns that are, or may be, unproductive.Although this particular experiment did produce evidence involvingphonetic changes in forms, it did so in an unusual way, through re-

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call of forms provided to subjects by the experimenter. An entire-ly different approach is found in an experiment on morpheme recog-nition done by Derwing and Baker (1977). This approach involveddirect tapping of speakers' linguistic knowledge. The experimentersasked subjects directly whether one of two forms (such as the secondforms of the pairs teach I teacher and holy /holiday) comes from theother and whether they had ever thought about it before. Wheelerand Schumsky (1979) also directly tapped knowledge by having sub-jects draw a line between stem and suffix, or state a suffix aloud, inexperiments on the location of the morpheme boundaries of deriva-tional suffixes.

There are, of course, methodological problems with experi-ments that phonologists will have to deal with, just as psychologistsdo now, if they start using them as a source of evidence, as I believethey should. However, these problems are far from insurmountable(for example, see Wheeler and Schumsky, 1979, on convergence ofresults from different experiments). It should also be kept in mindthat other sources of psychological evidence with which phonologistsfeel more comfortable also have methodological problems. Forexample, a number of inferences have been made by phonologistsfrom language change data that are probably invalid.

2.6 Let us turn now to examples in the phonological liter-ature that illustrate the confusion about generality, and with it, theinappropriate use of so-called 'internal' evidence. In contrast to ear-lier examples, these are drawn primarily from the work of phonolo-gists who have shown more concern than most with psychologicalreality. The idea that doing phonology consists of making maximallygeneral analyses of synchronic data so permeates phonological think-ing that it is still exercising a covert influence on the work of eventhe most psychologically-oriented phonologists. The first set of ex-amples is from writings on the abstractness controversy. This is fol-lowed by a sampling of other analyses and comments exhibiting thesame confusion.

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70 Cathy J. Wheeler

A survey of the major literature on abstractness reveals thatthe evidence and arguments used in the debate are a mixture of thosewhich are validly psychological and those which are relevant only tothe task of economically characterizing the phonological system.Very often, both approaches appear in the same paper, illustratingbeautifully the absurd situation to which a failure to be either entire-ly psychological or entirely non-psychological has led the field ofphonology. At one extreme, Brame (1972) bases his arguments en-tirely on the increased generality of a number of rules, and the elim-ination of apparent exceptions, that will result if the grammar ofMaltese Arabic contains an abstract underlying voiced pharyngealspirant, and.he appears to believe that this analysis has psychologi-cal reality. Arguments of this kind are of interest to a phonologywhose goal is to generate phonological facts in the most economicalmanner, but do not in the least further our understanding of internal-ized grammars. At the other extreme is the experiment reported inM. Ohala (1974), the purpose of which was to investigate whetherspeakers had an abstract analysis of some aspect of Hindi. This is,of course, an entirely psychological approach.

The other works exhibit a mixture of these two approaches.Kiparsky (1968b) starts out sounding like it will fall entirely into thepsychological camp, but it does not. He presents some languagechange evidence in support of his stand against absolute neutraliza-tion, but his analysis of vowel harmony is justified almost entirely onthe basis that it is more general than other solutions. He gives histor-ical evidence and maximally -generalized synchronic 'evidence' equalweight, apparently seeing no difference between them. Hyman(1970) and (1973) both stress how important psychological evidenceis in resolving the abstractness controversy, and, in support of abs-tractness, the former paper presents data on phonetic changes inwords borrowed from Yoruba into Nupe. But although Hyman ratesthis as the most important evidence he gives, he devotes even morespace to arguments involving pattern congruity of underlying seg-ments, naturalness of rules, and 'explanations' of the surface distribu-

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On The Relationship Between Phonology and Psychology 71

tion of phonemes; these arguments contribute nothing to our know-ledge of the degree of abstractness in internalized grammars, sincethey all have to do entirely with achieving the most general analy-sis possible. Harms (1973) argues against the validity of the infe-rences that Hyman made from his borrowing data. This is preciselythe kind of debate that is important in a psychological phonology,since the task of that field is to make valid inferences about mentalorganization from appropriate data. This is precisely the kind ofdebate that is important in a psychological phonology, since thetask of that field is to make valid inferences about mental organiza-tion from appropriate data. As it is not obvious a priori which in-ferences are reasonable and which are not, issues of this kind mustbe debated by researchers in the field. Other parts of Harms' paper,however, have nothing to do with psychological phonology, as theyare devoted to demonstrating that Hyman's data can be generatedwith equally general rules without absolute neutralization, and toarguing that one of Hyman's rules doesn't work, and presenting asolution that does.

In summary, valid psychological evidence is treated by mostwriters on abstractness as, at best, just one more type of argument onthe issue, on the same footing with arguments based on generalityand simplicity.

Other examples of this same confusion in the work of psy-chologically-oriented phonologists are as follows: Fromkin (1975)maintains that certain linguistic hypotheses, such as the cycle, ex-trinsic ordering of rules, and segments being regarded as compositesof features, should not be abandoned whether or not they are cur-rently testable, because, without them, generalizations would bev

obscured. She fails to recognize that the goal of a psychologicalphonology is to discover what generalizations speakers make fromphonological data, not what generalities linguists can discover byanalyzing such data in accordance with the principle of maximalgeneralization.

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72 Cathy J. Wheeler

Kenstowicz and Kisseberth (1977) point out, quite rightly,that 'external' evidence is needed in order to find out what kind ofphonological analyses speakers have internalized; until such data isavailable, they say, we cannot fully accept the internal evidencethat linguists appeal to (a striking understatement). Nevertheless,they claim that they are 'forced' to use arguments such as genera-lity to support their analyses because adequate external evidenceis lacking. So> instead of contributing to our fund of 'external'evidence, these two phonologists proceed to write an entire bookin which supposedly psychologically real analyses are supportedalmost exclusively by so-called 'internal' evidence. Their com-ments and behavior illustrate a common, but usually more covert,assumption made by most phonologists, which is that their taskis to produce phonological analyses no matter what. This beliefwill be discussed in more detail in sections 3.3 and 3.4.

In Kiparsky (1972), he assumes that Greek had a general'zero-grade' rule that deletes the root vowel /e/ in certain morpho-logical environments, in order to account for surface alternationssuch as leip/lip and also for the relationship between the allomorphsderk/drak. In forms of the latter type, the rule applies as an inter-mediate step in the derivation of the second form and a is insertedby a later rule. (i.e. derk -* drk ^ drak). The motivationfor this analysis is apparently to have as general a 'zero-grade' ruleas possible. Of course, it is not known whether speakers wouldactually posit such a rule, given data of this kind.

In arguing that a prehistoric sound change in Sanskritcalled 'second palatalization' became morphologized, Vennemann(1972) assumes that Sanskrit speakers had a reduplication rulewhich copies initial consonants of roots onto the beginnings ofwords. To account for reduplicated forms like ca+kar+a andja+garn+a, with a reduplicated palatal instead of the 'expected'velar, he posits a rule that changes reduplicated velars to palato-

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alveolars in the correct morphological environment. As in Kiparsky'sGreek example, this analysis presupposes that we know that spea-kers would posit the most general reduplication rule possible, andthen adjust any segments as necessary. But this is not in fact knownor suggested by any evidence. In the same paper, Vennemann claimsthat there is no motivation in modern English for the past tense mor-pheme to have the underlying form /d/ with a rule of syncope todelete the /£/ in the appropriate environment, on the basis of theexistence of forms such as insipid and rabid, where syncope doesn'tapply. The only motivatable description, in his view, is underlying/d/ with a rule of epenthesis to insert fol in the proper environment.His reasoning, which he doesn't present explicitly, is that a rule ofsyncope would have exceptions such as valid, rabid, etc., while arule of epenthesis would have no exceptions and hence be moregeneral. But we have no evidence that speakers would avoid po-siting a rule with some exceptions. It is precisely the task of apsychological phonology to find out whether speakers have inter-nalized a rule at all for a given pattern, and if so, to discover whatits form is, not to assume that these things are already known.

Examples of this type are very common. Even if an actualconfusion between generality as a psychological hypothesis andgenerality as a principle of description is not present in all suchcases there is no doubt that, at best, phonologists tend to assumethe psychological validity of this hypothesis rather than testingit. And there is only a very fine line between assuming that a psy-chological hypothesis of maximal generalization is true, even thoughthere is little or no evidence to support it, and behaving as if gene-rative phonology makes no mentalist claims at all. These examplesalso demonstrate that even phonologists who take the theory ofgenerative phonology seriously as a theory of internalized grammarsthat must be tested, tend to present arguments and analyses basedon maximal generalization. In some cases, they are the very peoplewho have challenged the psychological reality of this particular hy-

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74 Cathy J. Wheeler

pothesis by presenting evidence on the form of internalizedgrammars that is inconsistent with it. It is important that phonolo-gists recognize and understand this inconsistency and its deleteriouseffect on progress in the field.

Finally, an issue that ought to be debated is whether it isa worthwhile endeavor to work on characterizing the phonologi-cal systems of natural languages as parsimoniously as possible,which means, of course, without reference to psychological rea-lity. This is an especially important issue in view of the fact thatmost of the phonological work done so far contributes much moreto this goal than to the goal of understanding the nature of inter-nalized grammars. In any case, it should be clear that progress inphonology will be held back, if not halted, to the extent that thetwo goals are confounded and no difference is seen between them.

ASSUMPTIONS, SPECULATIONS, ARGUMENTS

3.1 This section will focus on a serious problem in therelationship between phonology and psychology that appears pri-marily in the work of the psychologically-oriented phonologists.To a degree not found among cognitive psychologists in their ownareas of investigation, nearly all of these phonologists make assump-tions about the nature of internalized grammars, other than, or inaddition to, that of maximal generalization, the validity of whichneeds to be investigated rather than assumed to be true. The causeof this problem lies, I believe, in the failure of phonologists torealize that the Chomskian revolution entails the rejection of a ba-sic tenet of pre-Chomskian linguistics, namely that a linguist's taskis to come up with structural analyses of large bodies of languagedata, and that such analyses can in themselves tell us somethingabout the adequacy of the theory within which they are formu-lated.

Although the more psychologically-oriented linguists haveemancipated themselves, at least to some degree (but see section

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2.6), from the idea that maximal generalization must be a charac-teristic of internalized grammars, they frequently make other as-sumptions about the general nature of these grammars, or about theforms of specific rules or underlying forms in them, that are equallycounterproductive to progress in psychological phonology, and thatreveal a misunderstanding of what the mentalist revolution in lin-guistics really means.

The theory of generative phonology, given its claim toreflect psychological reality, is a general hypothesis about the struc-ture of internalized grammars. An analysis of data from a languagedone within the framework of this theory (or within the frameworkof any other theory, for that matter, if it makes mentalistic claims)is a hypothesis about specific rules, underlying forms, and morpho-logical segmentations that native speakers have come up with toaccount for a subset of the data of their language. If the claim ofpsychological reality is to have any meaning at all, every analysis,i.e. hypothesis, that linguists propose must be tested empirically.More generally, research must be done to find out what kind ofrules, underlying forms, etc. speakers internalize and how proper-ties of the language data (such as the transparency of a pattern, orthe number and type of exceptions to a pattern) influence thenature of such internalizations. Specific analyses of language dataproposed by phonologists have little interest in themselves as theyprovide no evidence at all about the accuracy of any psychologicaltheory. They are useful only as hypotheses about internalizedgrammars that are intended to be tested in some way. For example,one reasonable way to do research on internalized grammars mightbe to propose several alternative analyses of some subset of data,and then figure out the different empirical consequences of eachanalysis, i.e. the different language behaviour that can be expectedof speakers if they have internalized each one of these. The nextstep is to find one or more of these empirical consequences inactual language behavior, for example, in language change orborrowing in cases for which we are fortunate enough to have

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76 Cathy J. Wheeler

such data, or to create the opportunity for such behavior by desig-ning and carrying out an experiment.

Most psychologically-oriented phonologists have fallenfar short of seriously carrying out research to test their hypothesesabout internalized grammars. Rather, their work generally exhi-bits a mixture of a small amount of empirical data on internalizedgrammars along with many assumptions about them. Furthermore,there is no sign that they clearly recognize the difference in vali-dity between these two types of content. The advantage of theseassumptions is that they make it possible to formulate specific ana-lyses of phonological data, as in the pre-generative grammar tradi-tion, and this is precisely how such assumptions are used in thephonological literature. This situation seems to reflect a (presu-mably unconscious) desire on the part of phonologists to regardphonological theory as a psychological theory without having todo much in the way of psychological research. The fact is that thefield of phonology is only at the very early stages of investigatinginternalized grammars. We are therefore very far indeed from beingable to say that we know, or can extrapolate to, such things aswhat rules are in speakers' grammars, how they are ordered, whatunderlying representations are like, how morphemes are segmented,etc. Therefore, any analysis made under these circumstances canbe nothing more than a speculation, one of many possible analysesspeakers might make of the same data.

3.2 In the following sections, a number of examples fromthe phonological literature illustrating these assumptions and howthey are used will be presented and discussed. The first assumptionto be examined is one about the general nature of internalized grammars, namely that all speakers of the same dialectof the same language have essentially identical grammars. Thisassumption is very widespread among generative phonologists;

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those few who have questioned it, or suggested otherwise, have doneso only tentatively and superficially. There seems to be a generalresistance to seriously accepting and exploring the possibility thatspeakers might differ significantly in their grammars.

It is not easy to provide obvious examples of this assump-tion in the literature because it is generally implied rather thanexplicitly stated. A quote from Skousen (1975:128) from his dis-cussion of consonant gradation in Finnish will illustrate the in-direct manner in which the assumption is usually expressed: '... wenoticed that there is a lot of surface evidence for a gradation ruleoperating within a closed syllable; nonetheless, speakers are notable to perceive this environment.' The implication is that allspeakers are unable to perceive the environment. However, thetype of evidence on internalized grammars generally used by pho-nologists, primary language change (as in Skousen's work), can atbest inform us that some speakers did or did not have a rule of acertain form. Language change data allows us to infer somethingabout the grammars of the innovators of a change, but not nece-ssarily about the grammars of contemporary speakers of the samelanguage.

The identical-grammar assumption is unwarranted be-cause we don't actually know whether speakers differ in their in-ternalized grammars and, if so, how extensive such differencesare. This is an important question to which a psychological pho-nology ought to address itself. There is a range of possibilities :speakers might turn out to have grammars that differ in nearlyevery respect, or they might differ only in some respects, perhapsonly in cases where the phonological patterns are ambiguous orrelatively difficult to recognize. Of course, it could also be truethat speakers have different grammars (e.g. M. Ohala, 1974, andWheeler and Schumsky, 1979).

For adherents of the standard theory, the possibility that

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78 Cathy J. Wheeler

speakers might differ significantly in their grammars is seriously un-dermining, since that theory is centered on the hypothesis thatspeakers construct maximally general grammars consistent with thedata. If this hypothesis is correct, individual differences in grammarscan be expected to be small, caused only by somewhat different ex-posures to the less common, or more learned, forms of the language.The only way out of the different-grammars problem is to take seri-ously the proposal in SPE that the analyses phonologists make are in-tended to reflect only the competence of idealized speakers who ac-quired their language instantaneously, and, presumably, thoroughly.Interestingly, however, when phonologists, adherents or not of thestandard theory, explicitly discuss problems of psychological reality,including this one, they quietly drop this idealistic assumption, andtreat the theory as if it were a straightforward set of hypothesesabout the internalized grammars of real speakers. This is under-standable in view of the fact that to take this idealization seriouslymeans effectively removing the theory from the possibility of empi-rical falsification (there aren't any idealized speakers to produce lan-guage behavior), making it the logical equivalent of describing lan-guages with maximum parsimony without making any mentalisticclaims.

Another reason for clinging to the identical-grammar as-sumption, one that applies this time both to the adherents of, andthe challengers to, the standard theory, is that to drop it means thatit is no longer possible to come up with 'the' analysis of a corpus ofdata that represents psychological reality. Of course, it is an illusionthat any analysis can in itself be regarded as reflecting psychologicalreality, but most phonologists have failed to recognize this. There-fore, the prospect that speakers might have different grammars is afrightening one, as is illustrated in a discussion of the subject inLightner (1971). He claims that if speakers differ in their underly-ing representations, the underlying form of nonalternating palatalsin Russian (and, by implication, many other underlying forms aswell), would be 'indeterminate', which for him seems to mean that it

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would be impossible to ever find out what the underlying representa-tion should be. To avoid this problem he suggests that a grammarshould be viewed as reflecting the competence that a speaker mighthave rather than speakers' actual competence. This 'solution' to theproblem reflects the actual situation in most phonological work,which amounts to nothing more than a set of speculations about thecompetence that speakers might have, i.e. it is the solution adoptedby most phonologists not just to avoid this particular problem, butto avoid really investigating internalized grammars, without havingto reject outright the mentalist claims of generative phonology.

It is true that some phonologists have made tentative sug-gestions that grammars might differ, but, to my knowledge, they arenot following up on these suggestions with actual investigations. Forexample, Hooper (1976) says that via rules may not be learned by allspeakers. McCawley (1976) suggests that morpheme boundaries andidentifications are non-deterministic, but that they depend on eachchild's acquisitional history. The most wholehearted embrace of thehypothesis that grammars differ is found in King (1976) in which heuses it to explain some data from language change.

A refusal to even entertain the possibility that internalizedgrammars can differ means that valid research results will be interpre-ted in an overly simplistic way, as I believe has already happened. Ifinternalized grammars differ significantly, it is not possible, for ex-ample, to regard a few examples from language change as necessarilyproviding much empirical support for absolute constraints on, say,the degree of abstractness in underlying forms. What such examplescan provide, and have provided, is interesting evidence on actual rulesthat have been internalized by some speakers, which, in many cases,have turned out to be quite different from the predictions made bythe standard theory. (See, for example, Skousen, 1975 and Hooper,1976). But that is all.

Another consequence of assuming that speakers have ident-

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80 Cathy J. Wheeler

ical grammars is that when subjects perform differently from one an-other in phonology experiments, it must be interpreted as necessari-ly due to interference from factors in the experimental set-up, ratherthan as due to differences in competence. The result will be that ex-periments producing such data will be automatically discounted,something that phonologists are very prone to do with experimentson other grounds, as discussed in section 2.5 above. Thus, furtherexploration of the hypothesis of different grammars will be cut off.

3.3 Let us turn now to examples of other types of assump-tions made by phonologists about internalized grammars. Such as-sumptions are, unfortunately, abundant in the phonological litera-ture. They include beliefs about the general organization of internal-ized grammars, as well as assumptions that specific rules, underlyingforms, and morphological segmentations have been internalized byspeakers. They are not presented as hypotheses that have been, orare going to be, tested, but as if they were already well-establishedaspects of our knowledge of internalized grammars from which stillother aspects may be inferred. In this section, two such examplesfrom articles in phonology will be presented. In the following sec-tion, some examples of research in cognitive psychology will be pre-sented to serve as illustrations of what empirical investigation meansin psychological research. A book on phonological theory, Hooper,1976, chosen as being representative of much psychologically-orient-ed phonological work, will be contrasted with this research in psy-chology.

The two examples drawn from the phonological literaturearc as follows: Zimmer (1975) assumes that language learners do theminimum amount of work possible in analyzing the language; it fol-lows that he also assumes that we know what the concept 'minimumwork' means in reference to the construction of internalized gram-mars. In fact, of course, nearly nothing is actually known aboutwhat kind of work speakers do on language data and whether it can

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be meaningfully regarded as minimum. He concludes from these as-sumptions that Turkish speakers probably do not posit an abstractunderlying /g/ to account for a klff alternation found in some Turk-ish nouns, but instead have a rule deleting morpheme-final /k/ inmulti-syllabic words. The idea of 'minimum work' might be an in-teresting hypothesis if it were made explicit and empirically tested.But Zimmer regards it only as an argument to be used against a moreabstract analysis of Turkish data. But such use of the idea renders itmerely unfruitful speculation. Furthermore, he believes that it isonly other analyses not based on this vague principle that must haveempirical support before they are accepted; his principle is, for someobscure reason, excused from needing such support, and thus can beused without testing as the basis for any and all analyses and argu-ments. Interestingly, he does refer very briefly to some experimentalevidence that supports the psychological reality of the specific rulehe proposes for Turkish. This is the only argument in the paper thatis of any worth, but it is obvious that he considers his speculations tobe of far greater importance.

In their discussion of the child's acquisition of morpho-phonemics, Kiparsky and Menn (1977) assume that far more isknown about the existence, form, and ordering of rules than is thecase. Their illustrative examples include a number of rules of speci-fic form for which no empirical evidence is given. Furthermore, theyassume that children have underlying forms identical to those ofadults, in spite of the fact that we know next to nothing about eitherchildren's or adults' underlying forms, and that it is certainly a rea-sonable possibility that children's underlying forms only graduallybecome isomorphic with adults'. The authors use these assumptionsto 'show' that rules are extrinsically ordered, and that language learn-ers prefer rules in unmarked order to rules in marked order. Itshould be clear that these conclusions are not based on evidence, buton mere assumptions about various aspects of internalized grammars.

3.4 It will be of value to phonologists, I believe, to be ex-

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posed to a summary of some work in cognitive psychology, a field inwhich empirical testing of hypotheses about human knowledge is ofcentral importance, and in which assumptions and speculations ofthe type under discussion are generally absent. (Of course, thisdoesn't mean that the field doesn't have shortcomings of its own).What is important for phonologists is not the specific content of theideas in these works, but in how they are treated by those who pro-pose them; the summaries will therefore be presented accordingly.The three works selected for discussion were chosen on the basis thattheir approach to research is similar to that found in linguistics in thefollowing important way: the research was carried out, at least to alarge extent, using rationalist methodology, as is the case with mostlinguistic research. This methodology involves starting with the for-mulation of a theory or set of hypotheses that is based primarily onthe intuitions, speculative ideas, and reasoning of its creator. Suchtheories or hypotheses are then related to the phenomena with whichthey are concerned through empirical testing. As much, if not most,research in cognitive psychology has been done using empiricistmethodology, i.e. building up gradually to a theory from empiricaldata, the methodology used was an important consideration in sel-ecting examples for presentation. The problem in phonology lies inthe second part of the rationalist approach, which involves empiricaltesting. Phonological hypotheses are either tested against the wrongkind of data, i.e. language data instead of data on how speakers haveorganized linguistic facts, or not tested at all, but speculated aboutand used as arguments against other analyses, as is being illustratedin this section. To show where phonological research fails to proceedcorrectly, it must be compared to methodologically sound researchthat is similar to it in approach up to phonology's point of failure.Furthermore, the choice of such examples from psychology will de-monstrate that my complaints about phonological research are notbased on an objection to rationalist methodology, a possible, but in-accurate, interpretation of the arguments made in this paper. I be-lieve that most phonological research represents a misuse of rational-ist methodology, not an indictment of that approach itself.

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The first article to be discussed is Gelman (1978), a study ofthe development in children of the ability to count an array of ob-jects. She hypothesizes that this ability is dependent on the know-ledge of five distinct principles, and she makes it explicit that the as-sumption behind this proposal is that learning to count is not an all-or-none process; children may have mastered some counting princi-ples, but not others. For example, her first principle is the one toone principle, which says that items in an array are ticked off withdistinct ticks such that one and only one tick is used per item. Thisprinciple has two components: 1) partitioning, which is the main-tenance of two categories of items, those which have been countedand those which have not. Items must be transferred one at a timefrom the latter to the former set. 2) Tagging, which means that adistinct tag for each item must be withdrawn from the set of tags andset aside; once used, it cannot be used again.

Having presented this principle, she immediately makessome empirical predictions about the counting behavior to be expect-ed of a child who has failed to master all, or part, of this principle.For example, such a child might err in the tagging process by usingthe same tag twice for different items. Her presentation of the otherfour principles is similar. The discussion of each includes some possi-ble empirical consequences of the failure of a child to have masteredthe principle in question. The rest of the paper reports on a numberof studies done by the author and her associates to test the variousaspects of this model; they provide evidence on whether the propos-ed principles are really learned separately, and whether children mas-ter them at different stages of development.

Siegler (1978) is a study of the development of scientificreasoning in children. He proposes four rules which represent thedifferent types of knowledge children might have that they could ap-ply to the solution of balance scale problems. These rules are alsohypothesized to be analogous to those used in the solution of someother types of 'scientific' problems, the only difference being in what

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specific variables are relevant. For example, Rule I says that only thenumber of weights on each side of the fulcrum on a balance scale isrelevant in a balance scale problem. If the number of weights onboth sides is the same, a child using this rule would predict that thescale will balance; otherwise, the side with the greater number ofweights will go down. Rule II is the same as Rule I except that if thenumber of weights on both sides is equal, the child will consider therelative distance of the weights from the fulcrum. Rule III involvestaking both weight and distance into account under all circums-tances , etc. Siegler then discusses the different empirical conse-quences of a person's having each of the four rules in the form ofsome carefully worked-out sets of problems for which the predictedpatterns of correct and incorrect answers would differ sharply de-pending on which rule the person is using to solve them. The rest ofthe paper consists of a presentation of the results of a series of expe-riments designed to test this model using these sets of problems.

Anderson and Bower (1973), perhaps even more than thetwo previous examples, resembles the approach in linguistics, especi-ally that of works which present general theories, such as SPE, andHooper (1976) to be discussed below. This work is a long and am-bitious book that proposes a comprehensive model of human me-mory. The model is called HAM. It is mostly concerned with mem-ory for linguistic materials that are input to the system in sentenceform, but it is also applicable to perceptual materials. HAM includesa way of representing human knowledge that is a hypothesis abouthow it is stored in memory. The basic unit of knowledge in HAM isthe proposition, which is stored in a 'deep structure' having the formof a binary branching tree. The system has a linguistic parser that ac-cepts a rather small subset of English syntactic structures and con-verts them into this representation. The system also has a way ofrecognizing that incoming material is already in memory through aprocess of finding the best matching tree in memory correspondingto the input tree. HAM can not only retrieve facts directly stored inmemory, but can, to some degree, answer questions that require inf-

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erences to be made from stored information. The theory includes astochastic (probabalistic) model for sentence learning from whichcan be drawn detailed predictions about patterns of sentence recall.

This theory resembles theories in linguistics such as genera-tive phonology in that it covers a broad area of human psychology,and many of its parts are worked out in detail. Furthermore, as inmodern linguistics, much attention is given to formalizing the model,in this case, at least partly because some aspects of it were simulatedon a computer. But unlike models in artificial intelligence, HAM is apsychological model, the goal of which, therefore, is not only to beable to successfully encode information in memory, retrieve facts,and answer questions, but to do so in a way that corresponds tohuman psychological reality. It is here that this research can providea model for work in phonology, which also claims psychological rea-lity. Much space in this book is devoted to a discussion of experi-ments with human subjects that test the predictions made by the mo-del. Many of them were designed by the authors explicitly to testvarious aspects of HAM. Experimental results are reported for allits major facets. For example, the chapter on the recognition pro-cess in HAM includes detailed reports of five different experimentsconducted by the authors or their associates to test the predictionsmade by this part of the model (plus two relevant experiments doneby someone else). Furthermore, the authors relate their model toearlier experimental results in the field of memory, such as psycho-linguistic research on semantic memory, and the extensive literatureon verbal learning, interference, and forgetting. For those resultsthat the authors consider sound, they attempt to show that HAMalso predicts them, and, in some cases, that it can even explain them.

In summary, the creators of the three psychological modelspresented in this section maintain at all times a close connection bet-ween their models and empirical data on human psychology that cansupport or falsify them. All the authors translate their data into theform of testable hypotheses. They then figure out some empirical

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consequences, i.e. predictions about human behavior, that can bedrawn from these hypotheses, and use them as a basis for testing themodel. The piling up of assumptions that are used, without testing,to make inferences about other phenomena is avoided. Speculations,when present, as they are at times in Anderson and Bower, are clear-ly labelled as such.

These works in the field of psychology will now be contrast-ed with Hooper (1976) as an example of the usual approach of psy-chologically-oriented phonologists. This work was not chosen forpresentation here because it is worse than most in failing to test hy-potheses or report on already-tested hypotheses, or in speculatingand making unfounded assumptions. If anything, this work is betterthan average in citing empirical support for the proposals beingmade, and certainly in showing an understanding of the importanceof empirically testing psychological hypotheses. However, it does ex-hibit the drawbacks listed above to a significant degree, making itrepresentative of the work of most psychologically-oriented phonolo-gists.

Like the psychological research which has just been present-ed, Hooper's book presents a model, in this case a model of phonolo-gy that is being proposed as an alternative to the standard theory ofgenerative phonology. Both the preface and first chapter demon-strate Hooper's committment to psychological phonology, and herunderstanding of the need for empirical psychological support forphonological hypotheses. Furthermore, all of the third chapter is de-voted to empirical evidence from language change supporting the mo-del's strong constraints on abstractness. It is clear that one of hermajor objections to the standard theory is that there is evidenceagainst its psychological reality. However, as early as the preface,considerations and problems irrelevant to a psychological phonologyare given equal weight. Her other major objection to the standardtheory is that its generative apparatus is too powerful because it iscapable of describing systems that are not possible human languages.

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From the point of view of psychological phonology, this objectionhas no relevance, given our present lack of knowledge about inter-nalized grammars. We have as yet no idea whether rules interna-lized by speakers are of a form that could not be used to gene-rate any other system. There is no a priori reason why speakers'internalized rules must be so constrained. This is something thatcan be determined only after much research on internalized ruleshas been carried out and we know something of their nature.

Although Hooper mentions empirical testability and falsi-fication at various points throughout the book, her main interestas is that of most phonologists, is in arguing against other propo-sals in phonological theory as well as earlier analyses of Spanishphonology, without benefit of empirical evidence on internalizedgrammars. To do this, she has to make all kinds of assumptions,none of which are tested or even presented as testable hypotheses.Let us examine some examples.

In order to present an analysis of some aspects of Spanishmorphology, she has to 'decide' which words are generated byrule, and which are listed in the lexicon. She does this by presen-ting several criteria for determining whether a suffix is productive.One such criterion, for example, is that a suffix is productive ifthe meaning of the stem plus suffix is entirely predictable from themeaning of the two parts separately. She gives no indication at allthat these criteria are hypotheses about how speakers handle lexi-cal items in their internalized grammars. They could, of course,be regarded as such and tested, but that is not what Hooper doeswith them. Rather, she uses them as arguments in themselves fora particular analysis, i.e. they provide her with a means for claim-ing that certain Spanish words are lexicalized and others generated,from which she can 'conclude' that Spanish speakers have both amorphophonemic rule and an identical via rule for diphthongi-zation. This is nothing more than pure speculation.

In the same chapter, Hooper rejects Brame's proposal for

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a constrained cycle in phonology on the basis that all his cases ofcyclic rule application can be accounted for without the cycle bymaking two 'plausible' assumptions. Again, no evidence is givenfor these assumptions, nor is there even a discussion of the pos-sible empirical consequences in language behavior if these assump-tions are true. Their importance here seems to be entirely to pro-vide a basis for an argument against another proposal. Of course,in a psychological phonology, the only type of valid 'argument' isevidence about how internalized grammars are actually constructed.

The chapter on rule ordering is not based at all on empi-rical evidence, as Hooper herself points out. Its entire purpose isto examine the consequences for phonological analyses of theextrinsic rule ordering principle of the standard theory versus theNo-Ordering Condition of natural generative phonology. There isno discussion at all of the different possible empirical consequencesof the two hypotheses. It is of no use to a psychological phonologyto spend time and effort pointing out such differences in analysesf the results of the comparison are not going to be used to cons-uct tests of the psychological reality of the two principles. Un-

fortunately, all too many phonologists think that such compari-sons are worthwhile in themselves. Furthermore, the fact thatthere is as yet no empirical evidence at all on rule ordering in in-ternalized grammars does not prevent Hooper from assuming laterthat the No-Ordering Condition is correct and using it as a basisfor still other analyses, and for making inferences about the natureof underlying representations.

Hooper's analysis of the morphophonemics of Spanishverbs in Chapter 8 will provide a final set of examples. By herown admission, the analyses are tentative, and many arbitrarychoices have had to be made in them. It is these very cases* shesays, that must be 'studied' further in order to develop a theoryof morphology that has psychological validity. However, Hooper'sown discussion makes no contribution to the development of sucha theory. Once again, what is important to her, as to so many other

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phonologists, is to present a supposedly psychologically real ana-lysis of language data no matter what is known or unknown aboutinternalized grammars. If analyses of this kind are going to bepresented at all in a psychological phonology, they can be justi-fied only if the assumptions made in them are carefully stated astestable hypotheses about internalized grammars, and preferablyaccompanied by some evidence resulting from testing them. How-ever, this was not done at all in this chapter, nor is it done in mostof the work produced by psychologically-oriented phonologists.

For example, Hooper states that there is a choice in howthe environment of her general rule for inserting theme vowels canbe stated. She decides for one of the alternatives on the basis that'one of the functions of the theme vowel is to fill out the syllablebetween the stem and the tense-mood marker ... Thus, the themevowel has a partially phonological function.' For this reason, shechooses an environment that is stated partially in phonologicalterms, not just in morphological terms. What kind of hypothesisis being tacitly asserted here about how speakers perceive andformulate environments of rules? Perhaps the hypothesis is that,in such cases (and what 'such cases' means must also be definedin order to have a testable hypothesis), speakers notice the gene-ral phonological distribution of the form in question as well as itsmorphemic distribution. This is perhaps still too vague a formula-tion to be really useful for testing, and not only because of the'such cases' problem. It will probably not be easy to translatespecific ad hoc proposals of this type into clear, testable hypo-theses about general principles of internalized grammars. Ofcourse, it is much easier to understand what this proposal is hy-pothesizing about this one particular phenomenon in Spanish pho-nology. Apparently, theme vowels in Spanish verbs never occurbefore vowels, but only before consonants and word-finally. Thehypothesis is that Spanish speakers know this distribution, as wellas the facts of theme vowel distribution according lo conjugationclass, tense, mood, etc. It should be noted that the very formula-

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tion of this hypothesis (as well as that of some others in this chapter)presupposes that yet another tacit assumption is true, namely thatSpanish speakers make the same morphological segmentation oftheme vowel and personal ending that Hooper's does. It is certainlynot given a priori that Hooper's is the psychologically real segmen-tation. (See Wheeler (1975) and (In preparation) for psychologicalevidence from language change that stem formatives in noun declen-sions, usually single vowels, are not always analyzed as morphemesseparate from case endings).

Another example of the failure to formulate explicit hy-potheses occurs in Hooper's analysis of vowel alernations in thestems of Spanish verbs. Again, her desire to present an analysisforces her to make decisions that are not even deducible from theconstraints proposed by her theory, much less based on empiricalevidence, about the conditioning factor and the basic alternant ofthe two-way alternations o/we and e/ye found in some verbs.The diphthongs always occur under stress, while the simple vowelsalways occur when stress is absent. Therefore either one could bethe conditioned or the 'elsewhere' alternant in the rule. To decidewhich is which, she uses 'evidence' from other Spanish verbs whichhave a three-way alternation ilc/yc. In such verbs, both the high andmid vowels may occur in unstressed syllables, while the diphthongoccurs under stress. She comments that 'this fact suggests that it is[+stress] which is associated with diphthongs rather than [—stress]which is associated with mid vowels.' On this basis, she conditionsthe diphthongs with [+stress] and makes the original mid vowelsin the two-way alternations the 'elsewhere' alternants. She thenexpands the original rule to include the three-way alternation aswell. This analysis is based entirely on language-data, i.e. non-psychological, evidence, and it makes a number of assumptionsabout how speakers have constructed their grammars. One is thatthey have formulated the environment of the rule such that onlyone alternant has a specified environment, while the other one isdisjunctively ordered after it without a specified environment.

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Another is that Spanish speakers connect together verbs with bothtwo-way and three-way alternations and treat them as manifestingone process. Behind this hypothesis and other analyses in the bookis a more general assumption that speakers make certain kinds ofgeneralizations, although her theory rejects the notion of maximalgeneralization of the overall grammar. However, it is never clearjust what hypothesis of generalization is guiding her analyses. Myguess is that she didn't have a specific hypothesis in mind, only avague feeling that certain things ought to be connected in gram-mars. Obviously, vague feelings like this will not contribute to ourunderstanding of internalized grammars.

In summary, this book does contain some empirical data,and certainly includes a number of interesting ideas that couldserve as fruitful hypotheses for testing. But the dominant concernis with speculative analysis and argument. Assumptions are piledon assumptions and are then used in making inferences about stillother phenomena. There is not even a loose adherence to the three-step approach found in the cognitive psychology research presentedabove of proposing the model, discussing the expected empiricalconsequences of the model in behavior, and reporting relevantempirical data resulting from the testing of the model. In this,it is very typical of the psychologically-oriented phonological li-terature.

CONCLUSION

Ample demonstration has been provided in this paper ofhow phonologists continue to behave like describers of languagedata rather than investigators of speaker's internalized grammars.There has also been some discussion of how the supposed psycholo-gical revolution in linguistics can actually be brought to fruition inphonological research. It has not been possible, of course, to touchon all the ways in which phonologists avoid doing research on in-ternalized grammars. But hopefully the clarification offered here

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on some of the problems in the relationship between phonology andpsychology has been sufficient to, at the very least, make it moredifficult in the future for phonologists to continue on the schizo-phrenic path of proclaiming that their theories and analyses repre-sent psychological reality, while avoiding entirely, or at best,carrying out only halfheartedly, the research necessary to find outabout it. It is necessary to draw a sharp line between phonolo-gists' characterization of language data and speakers' characteri-zation of it. A mixture of the two, such as is so often found inthe phonological literature, will only hamper progress in the pur-suit of both endeavors.

FOOTNOTES

1. I wish to thank Daniel D. Wheeler and Donald A.Schumsky for their help with the sections of this paper concernedwith research in cognitive psychology. Any examples from psycho-logy that are cited without a reference to the literature come fromone, or both, of them.

2. This point and many others that will be made in thispaper are undoubtedly applicable to syntax as well as phonology.However, I have not attempted to bring syntax into the discus-sion because I believe that it also differs from phonology in sig-nificant ways in its relationship to psychology. (See, for example,fn. 4). Furthermore, the issue of psychological reality has beentreated quite differently in the literature of these two subfields oflinguistics.

3. In this paper, the term 'psychological phonoloy' willbe restricted to mean phonology that is concerned with the formand content of speakers' internalized grammars. In a broadersense, however, psychological phonology should also includesuch things as speech perception and the articulatory 'programs'that speakers learn, and how these affect the nature of naturallanguages.

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4. What I am calling 'characterization of a system' of whichordinary humans have knowledge is probably equivalent to whatKiparsky (1968a) means by the substance, as against the form, ofcompetence. It could be argued, then, that all work done withinthe framework of generative phonology has to do at least with thesubstance of competence, and hence is validly psychological. Fur-thermore, if phonologists' interests are restricted only to the sub-stance of competence, it is perfectly proper for them to beconcerned only with phonological data, since any system that cangenerate such data will reflect the substance, although not the form,of phonological competence.

However, whenever phonologists are genuinely concernedwith psychological reality, they are clearly referring to form. Un-doubtedly, this is because the problem in phonology is never howto manage to generate the correct phonological forms of a language,but, rather, how to choose which of many possible ways of gene-rating these forms corresponds to the form of speakers' phonolo-gical knowledge. In other words, characterizing the substance ofcompetence is usually easy in phonology (although it is often achallenge to figure out how to do so in the most parsimonious man-ner). There are, however, some systems for which to account forthe substance of competence is a great challenge in itself. In suchcases, achieving an adequate characterization of the system is per-haps a legitimate part of the psychological investigation of thatsystem as a necessary first step in investigating the form. Syntaxmay well be one such system. It is far from easy to generate allthe grammatical sentences of a natural language and no ungram-matical ones, quite apart from the issue of what exactly speakers'knowledge of syntax consists of and how it is represented.

5. Modus ponens is: If p then q. p. Therefore q. Modustollens is: If p then q. Not-q. Therefore not-p.

6. It should be noted that later works by Kiparsky mani-

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fest a somewhat more positive attitude towards experiments.Kiparsky (1975) is still negative, but not to experiments in general.His criticisms have to do only with particular types of experimentsand interpretations of the data obtained from them. In Kiparsky andMenn (1977) more space than is usual in the phonological literatureis devoted to reviewing phonological experiments, and one of the ex-periments cited is described positively. Hopefully, this increasinglypositive attitude towards experiments will be a trend among otherphonologists as well.

7. Obviously, asking speakers directly about their linguisticknowledge would be a poor method of investigating some aspects ofinternalized grammars, particularly those about which speakers havehad extensive school learning, something which would presumablycontaminate their responses. However, where school learning or itsequivalent is lacking, this method can be used to advantage.

8. Experimental data may well prove to be the best sourceof evidence on differences in internalized grammars.

9. Another view is found in Anderson and Bower (1973).After reviewing theories of human memory that exemplify bothrationalist and empiricist methodologies, they conclude that theoriesconstructed by rationalist methods have the problem that they neverobtain 'a broad, elaborated, and firm empirical foundation.' Doesthis sound familiar? Apparently they see the type of problem discus-sed in this paper as arising from the very nature of rationalist theoryconstruction. They also point out the weakness of empiricistmethodology, that it 'never gets beyond low-level theories.' In fact,from my own experience, I can say that sometimes psychological re-search exhibiting empiricist methodology is done without referenceto the testing of any theory at all. Rather, the interest seems to besolely in obtaining a collection of empirical facts about a small sub-set of a more general field of inquiry.

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10. The power problem is perhaps relevant to the goal ofdescribing phonology as a system with maximum parsimony, sincethe principle of economy would presumably dictate that the propos-ed generative apparatus should not be more powerful than necessaryfor describing this type of data.

11. Hooper has adopted a form of underlying representa-tion in which all alternants are represented. For example, the under-lying form of the Spanish verb contar would be /k{o/we}nt/. Phonolo-gical rules distribute these allomorphs according to the environmentsin which they occur as follows: {we/o} {we/o[+ stress/elsewhere}.Theissue discussed here is most closely equivalent in the standard theoryto that of which alternant should be the underlying form and whichderived by rule.

REFERENCES

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Chomsky, Noam. 1972. Language and mind. Enlarged edition.New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc.

Chomsky, Noam and Morris Halle. 1968. The sound pattern ofEnglish. New York: Harper and Row.

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Gelman, Rochel. 1978. Counting in the preschooler: what does anddoes not develop. In Siegler, ed., 213-241.

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Harms, Robert T. 1973. How abstract is Nupe? Lg. 49.439-446.

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Documents

On the relationship between phonology and psychology