Title Models of Psycholinguistic Investigation (An Overview)

Author(s) Troyer, Gene Van

Citation 沖縄短大論叢 = OKINAWA TANDAI RONSO, 5(1): 1-12

Issue Date 1991-03-31

URL http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12001/10628

Rights 沖縄大学短期大学部

Models of Psycholinguistic Investigation (An Overview)

Gene Van Troyer

How children acquire their native language IS a perplexing

problem to psycholinguists. Investigators examine the puzzle from

a variety of angles, but still fail to piece together a satisfyingly

definite solution. After evolving through many phases over the

past two decades, however, psycholinguistic thought IS presently

centered around the processes of transformational-generative (TG)

grammar, particularly that area of Chomskyan TG that has posited

the necessity of a pre-existent-that is to say, " innate " -language

acquisition device (LAD) to account for the amazing ability of

children to learn, without apparent effort, the complex rules of

their language.

In 1968 Chomsky published what could be taken as an unof­

ficial credo for the psycholinguist:

···The tasks of the psychologist·· -divide into several subtasks.

The first 1s to discover the innate schema that characterizes

the class of potential languages··· The second··· is the detailed

study of the actual character of the stimulation and the or­

ganism-environment interaction that sets the innate cognitive

mechanism into operation · · · It is not unlikely that detailed

investigation of this sort will show that the conception of uni­

versal grammar as an innate schematism is only valid as a

first approximation, that, in fact, an innate schematism of a

more general sort permits the formulation of tentative

"grammars "which themselves determine how later evidence is

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to be interpreted · (Chomsky, 1968/1972: p. 88, & fri. 19, p. 89)

This observation roughly outlines the general direction that psy·

cholinguistie inquiry has taken. It also points up the area of greatest

controversy among psycholinguists, namely the nature of the

"innateness" of the human language learning mechanism or LAD. In

order to understand the current stage of ·thought regarding language

acquisition, one must consider its development as well as its present

propositions. This paper will touch upon three possible models of

language acquisition, but will focus upon only two of those models,

one proposed by Chomsky and one by Jean Piaget. The propositions

of these two theorists seem to reflect the basic theoretical differences

m psycholinguistic inquiry as it presently stands.

For many years, discussion about language acquisition consisted

entirely of two opposing viewpoints. On one side were the

"rationalists "and on the other, the " empiricists." Essentially the ra·

tionalists argued that human beings are .endowed with an innate

ability, maturationally controlled, to acquire language. Empiricists, on

the other hand, maintained that language acquisition was simply a

matter of general learning skills, that is, that through reinforcement

and stimulus-response (SR) children learn language in a manner sim­

ilar to the way they learn anything else.

The SR view was the "clean slate" approach posited by B.F.

Skinner in Verbal Behavior (1957), which attempted to account for

language learning under the umbrella of a generalized learning

mechanism (GLM). This mechanism (fig. 1), the empiricists asserted,

mediates the learning of all skills and discriminations by humans.

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fig. 1

Generalized Learning

Mechanism

All skills & Discriminations • Elementary concept

formation • Language • Math • How to tie a shoe

Considering the amount of language to be memorized, generalized,

and associated, this learning theory was dismissed as impractical.

Moreover, as. linguists pointed out, it failed to account for the rule

formation that all children engage in, and which is attested to by

the fact that children produce sentences that they have never before

heard. Additionally, the GLM hypothesis ignored the fact that these

rules are systematically acquired in stages that are related to the

age of the child (Moskowitz, ·pp. 82-96 ).

From the rationalist perspective, what best explains the child's

ability to acquire the complex rules of language at an early age is

the fact that, in order to do so, the child's brain must contain cer­

tain preconditions that allow him to extract structural information

from the language he hears. From the first basic concepts the child's

mind grasps, he is able to abstract and generalize enough informa­

tion to build a functional grammar by which he can generate lan­

guage.

Two models of acquisition present themselves at this point. .The

first of these holds that there are two distinct learning mechanisms

(fig. 2): 1) a GLM which mediates the learning of generalized skills

(holding a pencil, tying a shoe, etc), and 2) a conceptual mechanism

(CM) which mediates the learning of elementary concept formation,

math, and language.

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fig. 2

Generalized Learning

Mechanism

Conceptual Mechanism

GENERAL SKILLS

Elementary Concept Formation Math. Language

The second model (fig. 3 ) holds that humans have three distinct

learning mechanisms: 1) a GLM, 2) a CM which mediates elementary

concept formation and math, and 3) a linguistic mechanism or LAD,

which mediates the learning of language, especially the syntactic and

phonological rules of the language. These two models represent re­

spectively what could be termed the Piagetian and Chomskyan

propositions of language acquisition. To date no direct evidence exists

that firmly establishes one or the other as the most appropriate

model, though indirect evidence, especially from neurolinguistic sci­

ence, seems to favor the existence of an innate LAD. The studies that

have led to this as yet unresolved issue are perhaps the most inter­

esting to preoccupy linguistics for many years.

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fig. 3

Generalized Learning

Mechanism

Conceptual Mechanism

Linguistic Mechanism

GENERAL SKILLS

Elementary Concept Formation Math

Language Learning

Roger Brown and other psycholinguists, particularly Braine,

were interested in the concepts that led to the formation of a

grammatical structure in the child's brain. For example, Braine be­

lieved that children learned grammar from the position of words in

sentences. His theory was that children forming two-word uttrances

selected certain morphemes as pivotal -that is, those morphemes

that cannot change position. The child then attached other mor­

phemes from a larger " open " class to the pivot morphemes, to form

various combinations of words which he tested according to his for­

mutative grammar (Munsinger, p. 318). In Brown's scheme, modifiers

corresponded to Braine 's pivot morphemes. As Brown stated it, a

child formed a rule of syntax in a manner similar to the following:

" In order to form a noun phrase of this type, select first one word

from the small class of modifiers and select, second, one word from

the large class of nouns" (Bellugi and Brown, pp. 133-151). This is a

" generative " rule-that is, a program that would allow the construc­

tion of the type of sentence in question.

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Brown believed· that the idea of parts-of-speech and postion in

the sentence was particularly important both in forming grammati­

cal rules and learning new words. The parts of speech, Brown noted,

usually have distinct semantic characteristics. These characteristics

hold primarily for nouns, verbs, and adjectives- those classes of

words that children conceptualize the earliest. Brown demonstrated

that young children seemed to take the part-.of-speech membership

of a new word as a clue to how that word ~as to be used (1957,pp.

1-5). Brown and Berko, for example, presented children with nonsense

words matched with familiar images in a variety of sentence posi­

tions. In a majority of cases, the children were able to comprehend

the nonsense words (Munsinger, p. 318).

In another experiment, Brown tested preschooLChildren in or­

der to see whether they made a semantic distinction between nouns

and verbs. In comparing lists of adult nouns and verbs with those of

the children's, he found that the nouns first learned by the the latter

were concrete classifiers of person, place, or thing, whereas the

adult's repertoire had a high percentage of abstract nouns such as

"truth" and" love." Children's verbs were action-movement oriented

as opposed to the more passive adult verbs (Brow:n, 1957: p. 1). From

this evidence Brown concluded that children develop " firm and tem­

porarily reliable notions about nouns and verbs." Clearly these find­

ings illustrated the formation of grammar rules along the lines ·of

word position. Further work· by Fodor, Bever, and Garret through

1975 tends to support this observation, though they have modified

Brown's terminology to describe a phrase- structure process of noun­

phrase plus verb (Aitchison, pp. 181-191).

Obviously children tend first to. conceptualize words that :are

concrete rather than abstract. Picturability is an important facet .in

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a child's first conception of meaning in a word (Munsinger, p. 312).

The question is, what is the nature of the process which allows the

child to formulate a grammar of his or her language?· Brown believes

that it is related to TG, particularly that portion which concerns

phrase-structure rules (PSR).

PSR produce the deep . stucture of a sentence-that which pro­

vides the semantic or meaning structure of a sentence, but while

phrase-structure provides semantic content, it does not necessarily

order everything as it appears in the ultimate surface structure

(Brown, 1970: p. 45). Brown sees syntax and semantics as the most

important parts of TG in relation to a child's acquisition of language:

... We operate on the general assumption that the child's ter­

minal state of knowledge is of the kind represented by current

transformational grammars (ibid, p. 104).

For a while, it was believed that children understood deep

structures as they were described in TG, but this is not the case. As

Chomsky and other researchers point out, child grammar is funda­

mentally different from adult grammar, but what is important here

is not the difference, but the mechanism which allows the child to

hypothesize successively more complex stages of grammar until he

arrives at an " adult " level of linguistic competence.

Moreover, once the . fact that a child. acquires language in hier­

archical stages was established (Moskowitz), and that the acquisition­

al order was related to biological maturation, the grammar of that

order became rather academic: a problem of description more than

of fact. The precision with which a child expresses basic sentence re­

lations is obvious, if incompletely described. First Bever, and then

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Fodor, Bever and Garret conducted research m what they termed

"sentoids" -small parts of larger sentences-and their work provides

one of the best descriptions to date of these kinds of relations (in

Aitchison, op. cit.).

Brown has remarked that these relations appear to be univer­

sal in humans, and may " themselves be organizations performed in

the human brain··· an innate pattern requiring only a releaser to

set it into operation " (1970). In fact, nearly all investigators point out

that the observed linguistic data does indeed indicate that some fun­

damental organizing principle is at work in the brain, but disagree­

ment exists as to the nature of how innate this organizing principle

IS.

Chomsky maintains in Language and Mind that possessing a

human language is associated with a specific kind of mental organi­

zation, an initial, innate structure that can be attributed to the

mind (1968/1972, pp. 78-79). He further elaborated in a subsequent

essay that,

···What many linguists call 'universal grammar' may be re­

garded as a theory of innate mechanisms, an underlying bio­

logical matrix that provides a framewor.k within which the

growth of language proceeds (1976, p. 2).

Jn Genetic Epistemology, the psychologist Jean Piaget contends

that the processes which pattern the human way of perceiving reali­

ty, as well as the structures of their languages, are visible in chil­

dren at the pre-linguistic stage of development. It is Piaget 's finding

that at about the end of the first year of life or around the begin­

ning of the second year, the infant develops a " sensory-motor intelli·

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gence having its own logic-a logic of action," which he says consists

of "schemes" of behavior, meaning task-specific behavior that is re­

peatable in appropriate circumstances." At the sensory- motor stage a

scheme is a sort of practical concept, " Piaget observes, and the pro­

cess for arriving at this practical concept is the same as for that

which gives rise to concepts at much later stages of development.

The pre-lingustic child learns to coordinate these schemes into what

Piaget describes as a kind of sensory-motor intelligence that is the

foundation for all mathematical-logical structures. This pracical, sen­

sory-motor intelligence is not at the level of thought, but it allows

the child to act .in space with some sort of orderly competence. Ac­

cording to Piaget, it is between the age of 172' to 7 or 8 years that

the practical logic of sensory-motor intelligence is internalized, taking

shape at the level of representation (Piaget, pp. 41-45).

Language, Piaget insists, is only one form of representation.

Another is semiotic function, which is the ability to represent some­

thing by a sign or a symbol or another object. That language can be

regarded as being but one among many aspects of the semiotic func­

tions-albeit an immensely important one-would appear to be

confirmed by the work of Hans Furth, detailed in his book Thinking

Without Language. In this study Furth finds well-developed logical

thinking in deaf-mute children long before they have developed in

terms of language abilities. In other words, they think without lan­

guage as we are accustomed to understanding it (in Piaget, p. 46). Pi­

aget notes about the eventual appearance of language that " it is

very striking that language dose not appear in children until the

sensory-motor intelligence is more-or-less achieved. "

It is to Chomsky's TG that Piaget is referring m the above

statement. He further remarks that,

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According to Chomsky, logic is not derived from language, but

language is based on a kernel of reason··· Chomsky goes so far

as to say that the krrnel of reason on which the grammar of

language is constructed is innate, that it is not constructed

through the actions of the infant as I have described but is

hereditary and innate (p. 46).

While Piaget would agree that the structures that are available to

the child at the age of 14 to 16 months are the intellectual basis upon

which language develops, he would not go so far as to claim that

these structures are innate (ibid.). Instead he would say that the

kernel of reason is developed as a result of the infant's sensory-mo­

tor intelligence, which in turn has developed through the actions of

the infant upon its environment. Postulating the existence of an in­

nate LAD is unnecessary, in other words, because sensory--motor in­

telligence, which is the function of an innate concept-forming mecha­

nism, will also account for the earliest stages of language acquisition 1

at the deep or elementary phrase-structure level (pp. 21-40).

This bears a strong resemblance to the sentoids of Bever, and

to the perceptual strategies that Fodor, Bever, and Garret propose

that we employ in producing and understanding. language (in Aitchi­

son, Chs. 1Q--11). Piaget 's proposal would also correlate with the ob­

servation that deep-structure clauses actually form perceptual units

in the encoding and decoding of language (ibid.). The Piagetian hy­

pothesis would seem to account for much of the conceptual frame­

work that language use requires.

There are, however, a n1,1mber of problems left unresolved that

tend to indicate that important language functions in the brain are

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independent of a CM in certain ways. Posterior aphasiacs, for in­

stance, retain at least surface level linguistic performance abilities.

Posterior aphasia results from damage to Werneke 's area, and seems

to involve the loss of the individual's ability to conceptually order

linguistic performance. In other words, a sufferer of this disorder

speaks lucidly, but with "unglued" syntax. Anterior aphasiacs, on the

other hand, very often lose their performance abilities. Anterior

aphasia results from damage to Broca's area, which is somehow re­

lated to the sufferer's ability to process deep structure grammar into

surface structure performance (ibid., Ch. 3). While these factors do

not establish the certain existence of an innate LAD, they do suggest

that classifying language as a function of concept formation may

make for an uneasy alliance of various performance capabilities.

Of course, it may be that neither hypothesis is appropriate, or

that both are ultimately complements to each other and that there

is such an intertwining of cognitive and and linguistic skills and func­

tions that a different hypothesis is required. As it stands presently,

there is not enough evidence to declare with certainty which hy­

pothesis accounts most appropriately for the facts.

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Notes

1 Piaget discusses the relationships beween mental operations, structures,

and the " mother stuctures " of the Bourbaki mathematicians ( structures

that are isomorphic among all the various branches of mathematics), those

structures being Algebraic (notion of group), Order (relationship), and Topol­ogical (areas, borders, approaching limits), and the appearance of same in

pre-linguistic children.

References

Aitchison, Jean. The Articulate MammeL New York & London: McGraw­

Hill Book Company. 1976.

Bellugi, Ursula and Brown, Roger. "Three Processes in the Child's Acqui­

sition of Syntax" Harvard Educational Review, 34:2 (1964).

Brown, Roger. " Linguistic Determinism and the Part of Speech:' The Journal

of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 55:1 (July, 1957).

Psycholinguistics-Selected Papers, •• The Child's Grammar

from 1 to 3. " New York: The Free Press. 1970.

Chomsky, Noam. Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

1968 and 1972.

------- . " On the Biological Basis of Language Capacities. " The Neu­rophysiology of Language: Essays in Honor of Eric Lenneberg, R.W.

Rieber, editor. New York & London: Plenum Press. 1976.

Moskowitz, Breyne Arlene. "The Acquisition of Language." Scientific A mer. ican, 239:5 (November, 1978).

Munsinger, Harry. "Language." Fundamentals of Child Development. New

York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc. 1971.

Piaget, Jean. Genetic Epistemology, translated from French by Elenor Duck­

worth. Woodbridge Lecture Series Number Eight. New York & London:

Columbia University Press. 1970.

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