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Some Developments In Research
on Larlguage Behavior
MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY
INTRODUCTION
Fifty years ago the study of language was largely a descriptive endeavor,
grounded in the traditions of nineteenth century European philology. The
object of study, as proposed by de Saussure in a famous course of lectures
at the University of Geneva (1906-191 1), was larlgue, language as a system,
a cultural institution, rather than parole, language as spoken and heard by
individuals. In 1933 historical linguists were describing and comparing the
world's languages, tracing their family relations, and reconstructing the
protolanguages from which they had sprung (Lehmann, 19731. Structural
linguists were developing objective procedures for analyzing the sound
patterns and syntax of a language, according to well-defined, systematic
principles (e.g., Bloomfield, 19331. Students of dialect were applying such
procedures to construct atlases of dialect geography (Kurath, 1939), while
anthropological linguists were applying them to American Indian, African,
Asian, Polynesian, and many other languages (Lehmann, 19731. The work
goes on. From it we are coming to understand the origins of language
diversity: not only how languages change over time and space but also how
they and their dialects act as forces of social cohesion and differentiation
(e.g., Labov, 19721.
However, the unfolding of the descriptive tradition and the development
of new methods and theories in the field of sociolinguistics are not my
concerns in this chapter. My concern, rather, is with a view of language
that has emerged from a more diverse tradition. For like the taxonomic
studies of Linnaeus in botany and of his followers in zoology, the great
208
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SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR 209
labor of language description and classification has provided the raw ma-
terial for a broader science, stemming from the work of seventeenth century
grammarians and of such nineteenth century figures as the German physicist
Hermann von Helmholtz, the French neurologist Paul Broca, and the En-
glish phonetician Henry Sweet. The several strands that their works rep-
resent have come together over the past 30 to 40 years to form the basis
of a new science of language, focusing on the individual, rather than on
the social and cultural, linguistic system. Since the new focus is essentially
biological, a biological analogy may be helpful. It is as though we shifted
from describing and classifying the distinctive flight patterns of the world's
eight or nine thousand species of birds to analyzing the basic principles of
individual flight as they must be instantiated in the anatomy and physiology
of every hummingbird and condor. Thus, this new science of language
asks: What is language as a category of individual behavior? How does it
differ from other systems of animal communication? What do individuals
know when they know a language? What cognitive, perceptual, and motor
capacities must they have to speak, hear, and understand a language? How
do these capacities derive from their biophysical structures, that is, from
human anatomy and physiology? What is the course of their ontogenetic
development? And so on.
Such questions hardly fall within the province of a single discipline.
The new field is markedly interdisciplinary and addresses questions of
practical application as readily as questions of pure theory or knowledge.
Linguistics, anthropology, psychology, biology, neuropsychology, neu-
rology, and communications engineering all contribute to the field, and
their research has implications for workers in many areas of social import:
doctors and therapists treating stroke victims, surgeons operating on the
brain, applied engineers working on human-machine communication,
teachers of second languages, of reading, and of the deaf and otherwise
language-handicapped .
The origins of the new science are an object lesson in the interplay
between basic and applied research, and between research and theory. To
understand this, we must begin by briefly examining the nature of language
and the properties that make it unique as a system of communication.
The Structure of Language
If we compare language with other animal communication systems, we
are struck by its breadth of reference. The signals of other animals form a
closed set with specific, invariant meanings (Wilson, 19751. The ultrasonic
squeaks of a young lemming denote alarm; the swinging steps and lifted
tail of the male baboon summon his troop to follow; the "song" of the
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MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY
male white-crowned sparrow informs his fellows of his species, sex, local
origin, personal identity, and readiness to breed or fight. Even the elaborate
"dance" of the honeybee merely conveys information about the direction,
distance, and quality of a nectar trove. But language can convey information
about many more matters than these. In fact, it is the peculiar property of
language to set no limit on the meanings it can carry.
How does language achieve this openness, or productivity? There are
several key features to its design (Hockett, 1960~. Here we note two. First,
language is learned: it develops under the control of an open rather than a
closed genetic program (Mayr, 1974~. Transmission of the code from one
generation to the next is therefore discontinuous; each individual recreates
the system for himself. There is ample room here for creative variation-
probably a central factor in the evolution of language and in the constant
processes of change that all languages undergo (e.g., Kiparsky, 1968;
Locke, 1983; Slobin, 1980~. One incidental consequence of this freedom
is that the universal properties of language (whatever they may be) are
largely masked by the surface variety of the several thousand languages,
and their many dialects, now spoken in the world.
Second, and more crucially, language has two hierarchically related levels
of structure. One level, that of sound pattern, permits the growth of a large
lexicon; the other level, that of syntax, permits the formation of an infinitely
large set of utterances. A similar combinatorial principle underlies the
structure of both levels.
Consider, first, the fact that a six-year-old, middle-class American child
typically has a recognition vocabulary of some 8,000 root words, some
14,000 words in all (Templin, 19571. Most of these have been learned in
the previous four years, at a rate of about five or six roots a day. As an
adult, the child may come to have a vocabulary of well over 150,000 words
(Seashore and Erickson, 19401. How is it possible to produce and perceive
so many distinct signals?
The achievement evidently rests on the evolution in our hominid ancestors
of a combinatorial principle by which a small set of meaningless elements
(phonemes, or consonants and vowels) is repeatedly sampled, and the sam-
ples permuted, to form a very large set of meaningful elements (morphemes,
words). Most languages have between 20 to 100 phonemes; English has
about 40, depending on dialect. The phonemes themselves are formed from
an even smaller set of movements, or gestures, made by jaw, lips, tongue,
velum (soft palate), and larynx. Thus, the combinatorial principle was a
biologically unique development that provided "a kind of impedance match
between an open-ended set of meaningful symbols and a decidedly limited
set of signaling devices" (Studdert-Kennedy and Lane, 1980; cf. Cooper,
1972; Liberman et al., 19671. We may note, incidentally, that a large lexicon
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SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR 211
is not peculiar to complex, literate societies: even so-called primitive human
groups may deploy a considerable lexicon. For example, the Hanunoo, a
stone age people of the Philippines, have nearly three thousand words for
the flora and fauna of their world (Levi-Strauss, 19661.
Of course, a large lexicon is not a language. Many languages have
relatively small lexicons, and in everyday speech we may draw habitually
on no more than a few thousand words (Miller, 19511. To put words to
linguistic use, we must combine them in particular ways. Every language
has a set of rules and devices, its syntax, for grouping words into phrases,
clauses, and sentences. Among the various devices that a language may
use for predicating properties of objects and events, and for specifying their
relations (who does what to whom) are word order and inflection (case,
gender, and number affixes for nouns, pronouns, adjectives; person, tense,
mood, and voice affixes for verbs). An important distinction is also made
in all languages between open-class words with distinct meanings (nouns,
verbs, adjectives, etc.) and closed-class or function words (conjunctions,
articles, verbal auxiliaries, enclitics e.g., the particle "not" in "cannot")
that have no fixed meaning in themselves but serve the purely syntactic
function of indicating relations between words in a sentence or sequence
of sentences. Here again then, a combinatorial principle is invoked: a finite
set of rules and devices is repeatedly sampled and applied to produce an
infinite set of utterances.
I should note that many of the facts about language summarily described
above are already framed from the new viewpoint that has developed in
the past 40 years. Let us now turn back the clock and consider the early
vicissitudes of three areas of applied research that contributed to this de-
velopment.
Three Areas of Applied Research in Language
In the burst of technological enthusiasm that followed World War II,
federal money flowed into three related areas of language study: automatic
machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and automatic reading
machines for the blind. A considerable research effort was mounted in all
three areas during the late 1940s and early l950s, but surprisingly little
headway was made. The reason for this, as will become clear below, was
that all three enterprises were launched under the shield of a behaviorist
theory according to which complex behaviors could be properly described
as chained sequences of stimuli and responses.
The initial assumption underlying attempts at machine translation was
that this task entailed little more than transposing words (or morphemes)
from one language into another, following a simple left-to-right sequence.
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MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY
If this were so, we might store a sizable lexicon of matched Russian, say,
and English words in a computer and execute translation by instructing the
computer to type out the English counterpart of each Russian word typed
in. Unfortunately, both semantic and syntactic stumbling blocks lie in the
path. The range of meanings, literal and metaphorical, that one language
assigns to a word (say, English high, as in "high mountain," "high pitch,"
"high hopes," "high horse," "high-stepping," and "high on drugs")
may be guise different from the range assigned by another language; and
the particular meaning to be assigned will be determined by context, that
is, by meanings already assigned to some in principle unspecifiable sequence
of preceding words. Moreover, the syntactic devices for grouping words
into phrases, phrases into clauses, and clauses into sentences may be quite
different in different languages. This is strikingly obvious when we compare
a heavily inflected language, such as Russian, with a lightly inflected
language with a more rigid word order, such as English. Oettinger (1972)
amusingly illustrates the general difficulties with two simple sentences,
immediately intelligible to an English speaker, but a source of knotty prob-
lems in both phrase structure and word meaning to a computer, programmed
for left-to-right lexical assignment: Time flies like an arrow, and Fruit flies
like a banana. From such observations, it gradually became clear that we
would make little progress in machine translation without a deeper under-
standing of syntax and of its relation to meaning.
The initial assumption underlying attempts at automatic speech recog-
nition was similar to that for machine translation and equally in error (cf.
Reddy, 19751. The assumption was that the task entailed little more than
specifying the invariant acoustic properties associated with each consonant
and vowel, in a simple left-to-right sequence. One would then construct an
acoustic filter to pass those properties but no others, and control the ap-
propriate key on a printer by means of the output from each filter. Unfor-
tunately, stumbling blocks lie in this path also. A large body of research
has demonstrated that speech is not a simple left-to-right sequence of discrete
and invariant alphabetic segments, such as we see on a printed page (e.g.,
Pant, 1962; loos, 1948; Liberman et al., 19671. The reason for this, as we
shall see shortly, is that we do not speak phoneme by phoneme, or even
syllable by syllable. At each instant our articulators are engaged in executing
patterns of movement that correspond to several neighboring phonemes,
including those in neighboring syllables. The result of this shingled pattern
of movement is, of course, a shingled pattern of sound. Even more extreme
variation may be found when we examine the acoustic structure of the same
syllable spoken with different stress or at different rates or by different
speakers. From such observations it gradually became clear that we would
make little progress in automatic speech recognition without a deeper un
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SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR 213
derstanding of how the acoustic structure of the speech signal specifies the
linguistic structure of the message.
Finally, the initial assumption underlying attempts to construct a reading
machine for the blind was closely related to that for automatic speech
recognition and again in error (Cooper et al., 19841. A reading machine is
a device that scans print and uses its contours to control an acoustic signal.
It was supposed that, given an adequate device for optical recognition of
letters on a page, one need only assign a distinctive auditory pattern to each
letter, to be keyed by the optical reader and recorded on tape or played in
real time to a listener a sort of auditory Braille. Once again there were
stumbling blocks, but this time they were perceptual. We normally speak
and listen to English at a rate of some 150 words per minute (wpm), that
is, roughly 5 to 6 syllables or 10 to 15 phonemes per second. Ten to 15
discrete sounds per second is close to the resolving power of the ear (20
elements per second merge perceptually into a low-pitched buzz). Not
surprisingly, despite valiant and ingenious attempts to improve the acoustic
array, even the most practiced listeners were unable to follow a substitute
code at rates much beyond that of skilled Morse code receivers, namely
some 10 to 15 words per minute a rate intolerably slow for any extended
use. From this work, it gradually became clear that the only acceptable
output from a reading machine would be speech itself. This conclusion was
one of many that spurred development of speech synthesis by artificial
talking machines in following years (Cooper and Borst, 1952; Pant, 1973;
Flanagan, 1983; Mattingly, 1968, 1974~. The conclusion also raised the-
oretical questions. For example: Why can we successfully transpose speech
into a visual alphabet, using another sensory modality, if we cannot suc-
cessfully transpose it within its "natural" modality of sound? Why is speech
so much more effective than other acoustic signals? Is there some peculiar,
perhaps biologically ordained, relation between speech and the structure of
language? We will return to these questions below.
I have not recounted these three failures of applied research missions to
argue that money and effort spent on them were wasted. On the contrary,
initial failure spurred researchers to revised efforts, and valuable progress
has since been made. Reading machines for the blind, using an artificial
speech output, have been developed and are already installed in large li-
braries (Cooper et al., 19841. There now exist automatic speech recognition
devices that recognize vocabularies of roughly a thousand words, spoken
in limited contexts by a few different speakers (Levinson and Liberman,
19811. Scientific texts with well-defined vocabularies can now be roughly
translated by machine, then rendered into acceptable English by an informed
human editor.
These advances have largely come about by virtue of brute computational
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MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY
force and technological ingenuity, rather than through real gains in our
understanding of language. This is not because we have made no gains,
for as we shall see shortly, we surely have. However, none of the devices
that speak, listen, or understand actually speaks, listens, or understands
according to known principles of human speech and language. For example,
a speech synthesizer is the functional equivalent of a human speaker to the
extent that it produces intelligible speech. But it obviously does so by quite
different means than those that humans use: none of its inorganic compo-
nents correspond to the biophysical structures of larynx, tongue, velum,
lips, and jaw. Instead, a synthesizer simulates speech by means of a complex
system of tuned electronic circuits, and resembles a speaker somewhat as,
say, a crane resembles a human lifting a weight. We are still deeply ignorant
of the physiological controls by which a speaker precisely coordinates the
actions of larynx, tongue, and lips to produce even a single syllable.
In short, the main scientific value of the early work I have described was
to reveal the astonishing complexity of speech and language, and the in-
adequacy of earlier theories to account for it. One important effect of the
initial failures was therefore to prepare the ground for a theoretical revolution
in linguistics (and psychology) that began to take hold in the late 1950s.
THE GENERATIVE REVOLUTION IN LINGUISTICS
The publication in 1957 of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures began
a revolution in linguistics that has been sustained and developed by many
subsequent works (e.g., Chomsky, 1965, 1972, 1975, 1980; Chomsky and
Halle, 1968~. To describe the course of this revolution is well beyond the
scope of this chapter. However, the impact of Chomsky's writings on fields
outside linguistics philosophy, psychology, biology, for example and
their importance for the emerging science of language has been so great
that some brief exposition of at least their nontechnical aspects is essential.
I should emphasize that Chomsky's work has by no means gone unchal-
lenged (e.g., Givon, 1979; Hockett, 1968; Katz, 19811. My intent in what
follows is not to present a brief in its defense, but simply to sketch a bare
outline of the most influential body of work in modern linguistics.
The central goal of Chomsky's work has been to formalize, with math-
ematical rigor and precision, the properties of a successful grammar. He
defines a grammar as "a device of some sort for producing the sentences
of the language under analysis" (Chomsky, 1957, p. 111. A grammar, in
Chomsky's view, is not concerned either with the meaning of a sentence
or with the physical structures (sounds, script, manual signs) that convey
it. The grammar, or syntax, of a language is a purely formal system for
arranging the words (or morphemes) of a sentence into a pattern that a
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SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR 215
native speaker would judge to be grammatically correct or at least accept-
able. In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky compared three types of grammar:
finite-state, phrase-structure, and transformational grammars.
A finite-state grammar generates sentences in a left-to-right fashion: given
the first word, each successive word is a function of the immediately
preceding word. (Such a model is, of course, precisely that adopted by
B.F. Skinner in his Verbal Behavior (1957), a dernier cri in behaviorism,
published in the same year as the "premier cri" of the new linguistics.)
Chomsky (1956) proved mathematically, as work on machine translation
had suggested empirically, that a simple left-to-right grammar can never
suffice as the grammar of a natural language. The reason, stated nontech-
nically, is that there may exist dependencies between words that are not
adjacent, and an indefinite number of phrases containing other nonadjacent
dependencies may bracket the original pair. Thus, in the sentence, Anyone
who eats the fruit is damned, anyone and is damned are interdependent.
We can, in principle, continue to add bracketing interdependencies indef-
initely, as in Whoever believes that anyone who eats the fruit is damned is
wrong, and Whoever denies that whoever believes that anyone who eats
the fruit is damned is wrong is right.
In practice, we seldom construct such sentences. However, the recursive
principle that they illustrate is crucial to every language. The principle
permits us to extend our communicative reach by embedding one sentence
within another. For example, even a four-year-old child may combine, We
picked an apple and I want an apple for supper into the utterance I want
the apple we pickedfor supper. Thus, the child embeds an adjectival phrase,
we picked (= that we picked with the relative pronoun deleted), to capture
two related sentences in a single utterance (cf. Limber, 19731.
Chomsky goes on to consider how we might formulate an alternative and
more powerful grammar, based on the traditional constituent analysis of
sentences into "parts of speech." Constituent analysis takes advantage of
the fact that the words of any language (or an equivalent set of words and
affixes) can be grouped into categories (such as noun, pronoun, verb,
adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, article) and that only certain
sequences of these categories form acceptable phrases, clauses, and sen-
tences. By grouping grammatical categories into permissible sequences, we
can arrive at what Chomsky terms a phrase-structure grammar. Such a
grammar is "a finite set . . . of initial strings and a finite set . . . of
'instruction formulas' of the form X~Y interpreted: 'rewrite X as Y' "
(Chomsky, 1957, p. 291. Figure 1 illustrates a standard parsing diagram of
the utterance, The woman ate the apple, in a form familiar to us from
grammar school (above), and as a set of "rewrite rules" from which the
parsing diagram can be generated (below).
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MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY
Parsing Diagram
Sentence
Noun Phrase
/ \
Article Noun Verb
Verb Phrase
-
Noun Phrase
/\
the woman ate Article Noun
the apple
Rewrite Rules
(1) Sentence ~ Noun Phrase+ Verb Phrase
(2) Noun Phrase - Article ~ Noun
(3) Verb Phrase - Verb + Noun Phrase
(4) Article -~ the, a }
(5) Noun ~ ~ woman, apple...
(6) Verb ~ { ate, seized }
FIGURE 1 Above, a parsing diagram dividing the sentence The woman ate the apple
into its constituents. Below, a set of rewrite nobles that will generate any sentence having
the constituent structure shown above.
Notice, incidentally, that rewrite rules are indifferent to meaning. They
will generate anomalous utterances such as The chocolate loved the clock,
no less readily than The woman ate the apple. Moreover, many native
speakers would be willing to accept such anomalous utterances as gram-
matically correct, even though they have no meaning. This hints at the
possibility that syntactic capacity might be autonomous, a relatively in-
dependent component of the language faculty. This is a matter to which
we will return below.
An important point about a set of rewrite rules is that it specifies the
grouping of words necessary to correct understanding of a sentence. The
sentence Let's have some good bread and wine is ambiguous until we know
whether the adjective good modifies only bread or both bread and wine.
The distinction may seem trivial. But, in fact, the example shows that we
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SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR 217
are sensitive (or can be made sensitive) to an ambiguity that could not have
arisen from any difference in the words themselves or in their sequence.
Rather, the origin of the ambiguity lies in our uncertainty as to how the
words should be grouped, that is, as to their phrase structure. A correct (or
incorrect) interpretation of their meaning therefore depends on the listener
(and a fortiori the speaker) being able to assign an abstract phrase structure
to the sequence of words.
Whether a complete grammar of English, or any other natural language,
could be written as a set of phrase-structure rules is not clear. In any event,
Chomsky argues in Syntactic Structures that such a grammar would be
unnecessarily repetitive and complex, since it does not capture a native
speaker's intuition that certain classes of sentence are structurally related.
For example, the active sentence Eve ate the apple and the passive sentence
The apple was eaten by Eve could both be generated by an appropriate set
of phrase-structure rules, but the rules would be different for active sentences
than for their passive counterparts. Surely, the argument runs, it would be
"simpler" if the grammar somehow acknowledged their structural relation
by deriving both sentences from a common underlying "deep structure."
The derivation would be accomplished by a series of steps or "transfor-
mations" whose functions are to delete, modify, or change the order of
the base constituents Eve, ate, apple.
An important aspect of transformations is that they are structure depen-
dent, that is, they depend on the analysis of a sentence into its structural
components, or constitutents. For example, to transform such a declarative
sentence as The man is in the garden into its associated interrogative Is the
man in the garden?, a simple left-to-right rule would be: "Move the first
occurrence of is to the front." However, the rule would not then serve for
such a sentence as The man who is tall is in the garden, since it would
yield Is the man who tall is in the garden? The rule must therefore be
something like: "Find the first occurrence of is following the first noun
phrase, and move it to the front" (Chomsky, 1975, pp. 30-311. Thus, a
transformational grammar, no less than a phrase-structure grammar, pre-
supposes analysis of an utterance into its grammatical (or phrasal) constit-
uents. We may note, in passing, that children learning a language never
produce sentences such as Is the man who tall is in the garden? Rather,
their errors suggest that, even in their earliest attempts to frame a complex
sentence, they draw on a capacity to recognize the structural components
of an utterance.
However, here we should be cautious. Chomsky has repeatedly empha-
sized that " . . .a generative grammar is not a model for a speaker or hearer"
(1965, p. 9), not a model of psychological processes presumed to be going
on as we speak and listen. The word "generative" is perhaps misleading
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MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY
in this regard. Certainly, experimental psychologists during the 1960s de-
voted much ingenuity and effort to testing the psychological reality of
transformations (for reviews, see Cairns and Cairns, 1976; Fodor et al.,
1974; Foss and Hakes, 1978~. But the net outcome of this work was to
demonstrate the force of Chomsky's distinction between formal descriptions
of a language and the strategies that speakers and listeners deploy in com-
municating with each other (cf. B ever, 1970~.
At first glance, the distinction might seem to be precisely that between
langue and parole, drawn by de Saussure. However, for de Saussure,
langue, the system of language, "exists only by virtue of a sort of contract
signed by the members of a community" (de Saussure, 1966, p. 14~: it is
a kind of formal artifice or convention, maintained by social processes of
which individuals may be quite unaware. By contrast, for Chomsky the
"generative grammar [of a language] attempts to specify what the speaker
actually knows" (1965, p. 81. What a speaker knows, his competence in
Chomsky's terminology, is attested to by "intuitive" judgments of gram-
maticality. What a speaker does, performance (parole), is linguistic com-
petence filtered through the indecisions, memory lapses, false starts,
stammerings, and the "thousand natural [nonlinguistic] shocks that flesh
is heir to." Thus, even though a theory of grammar is not a theory of
psychological process, it is a theory of individual linguistic capacity.
In Chomsky's view, the task of linguistics is to describe the structure of
language much as an anatomist might describe the structure of the human
hand. The complementary role of psychology in language research is to
describe language function and its course of behavioral development in the
individual, while physiology, neurology, and psychoneurology chart its
underlying structures and mechanisms.
Whether this shark distinction between language as a formal object and
language as a mode of biological function can, or should, be maintained
is an open question. What is clear, however, is that it was from a rigorous
analysis of the formal properties of syntax (and later of phonology: see
Chomsky and Halle, 1968) that Chomsky was led to view language as an
autonomous system, distinct from other cognitive systems of the human
mind (cf. Fodor, 1982; Pylyshyn, 19801. His writings during the late 1950s
and 1960s brought an exhilarating breath of fresh air to psychologists in-
terested in language, because they offered an escape from the stifling be-
havioristic impasse, already noted by Lashley (195 1) and others (e.g., Miller
et al., 19601.
The result was an explosion of research in the psychology of language,
with a strong emphasis on its biological underpinnings. Whatever one's
view of generative grammar, it is fair to say that almost every area of
language study over the past 25 years has been touched, directly or indi
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MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY
tested (e.g., [b] versus [p], [d] versus [g], [m] versus [n]) (Aslin et al.,
1983; Eimas, 1982~. There is also evidence that infants begin to recognize
the function of such contrasts, to distinguish words in the surrounding
language, during the second half of their first year (Werker, 1982~. (For
fuller review, see Studdert-Kennedy, l9XS.)
In terms of sound production, Oiler (1980) has described a regular pro-
gression from simple phonation (0-1 months) through canonical babbling
(7-10 months) to so-called variegated babbling (1 1-12 months). The pho-
netic inventory of babbled sounds is strikingly similar across many lan-
guages and even across hearing and deaf infants up to the end of the first
year (Locke, 1983~. These similarities argue for a universal, rather than
language-specific, course of articulatory development.
However, around the end of the twelfth month, when the child produces
its first words, the influence of the surrounding language becomes evident.
From this point on, universals become increasingly difficult to discern,
because whatever universals there may be are masked by surface diversity
among languages. In this respect, the development of language differs from
the development of, say, sensorimotor intelligence or mathematical ability
(cf. Gelman and Brown, this volume). Nonetheless, we can already trace
some regularities across children within a language and, to some lesser
extent, across languages.
The most heavily studied stage of early syntactic development, in both
English and some half-dozen other languages, is the so-called two-
morpheme stage. Brown (1973) divides early development into five stages
on the basis of mean length of utterance (MLU), measured in terms of the
number of morphemes in an utterance. The stages are "not . . . true stages
in Piaget's sense" (Brown, 1973, p. 58), but convenient, roughly equi-
distant points from MLU = 2.00 through MLU = 4.00. The measure
provides an index of language development independent of a child's chro-
nological age.
Of interest in the present context is that no purely grammatical description
of Stage I (MLU = 2.00, with an upper bound of 5.00) has been found
satisfactory. Instead, the data are best described by a "rich interpretation,"
assigning a meaning or function to an utterance on the basis of the context
in which it occurs. Brown lists eleven meanings for Stage I constructions,
including: naming, recurrence (more cup), nonexistence (all gone egg),
agent and action (Mommy go), agent and object (Daddy key), action and
location (sit chair), entity and location (Baby table), possessor and pos-
session (Daddy chair), entity and attribute (yellow block). Brown (1973)
proposes that these meanings "derive from sensorimotor intelligence, in
Piaget's sense . . . [and] probably are universal in humankind but not . . .
innate" (p. 2011.
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SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH ON GAGE BEHAVIOR 239
We should emphasize that these Stage I patterns reflect semantic, not
grammatical, relations even though they may be necessary precursors to
the grammatical relations that develop during Stage II (MLU = 2.50, with
an upper bound of 7.001. Brown (1973) traced the emergence of 14 gram-
matical morphemes in three Stage II English-speaking children. The mor-
phemes included: prepositions (in, on), present progressive (l am playing),
past regular (Jumped), past irregular (broke), plural -s, possessive -s, third
persons -s (he jumps), and others. The remarkable finding was that all three
children acquired the morphemes in roughly the same order (with rank order
correlations between pairs of children of 0.86 or more). This result was
confused in a study of 21 English-speaking children by de Villiers and
de Villiers (19731.
However, unlike the meanings and functions of Stage I, the more or less
invariant order of morpheme acquisition of Stage II has not been confirmed
for languages other than English. Perhaps we should not expect that it will
be. Languages differ, as we have seen, in the grammatical devices that
they use to mark relations within a sentence. The devices used by one
language to express a particular grammatical relation may be, in some
uncertain sense, "easier" to learn than the devices used by another language
for the same grammatical relation. Slobin (1982) has compared the ages at
which four equivalent grammatical constructions are learned in Turkish,
Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and English. In each case, the Turkish children
developed more rapidly than the other children. If these results are valid
and not mere sampling error, the "studies suggest that Turkish is close to
an ideal language for early acquisition" (Slobin,1982, p. 145~.
Unless we suppose that Turkish parents are more attentive to their chil-
dren's language than Italian, Serbo-Croatian, and English parents, we may
take this result as furler evidence that "selection pressures" (reinforce-
ment) have little role to play in language learning. Brown and Hanlon
(1970) showed some years ago that parents tend to correct the pronunciation
and truth value, rather than the syntax, of their children's speech. Indeed,
one of the puzzles of language development is why children improve at all.
At each stage, the child's speech seems sufficient to satisfy its needs. Neither
reinforcement nor imitation of adult speech suffices to explain the improve-
ment. Early speech is replete with forms that the child has presumably
never heard: two sheeps, we goed, mine boot. These errors reflect not
imitation, but over-generalization of rules for forming plurals, past tenses,
and possessive adjectives.
We come then to a guiding assumption of much current research: Learning
a first language entails active search for language-specific grammatical
patterns (or rules) to express universal cognitive functions. The child may
be helped in this by the relative "transparency" (Slobin, 1980) of the speech
OCR for page 240
240
MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY
addressed to it" either because the language itself, like Turkish, is trans-
parent and/or because adult speech to the child is conspicuously well foxed.
Several studies (e.g., Newport et al., 1977) have shown that the speech
addressed to children tends not to be "degenerate." Yet the speech may
be "meager" in the sense that relatively few instances suffice to trigger
recognition of a pattern (Roeper, 19821. Such rapid learning would seem
to require a system specialized for discovering distinctive patterns of sound
and syntax in any language to which a child is exposed.
Finally, it is worth remarking that all normal children do learn a language,
just as they learn to walk. Western societies acknowledge this in their
attitude to children who fail: we regard them as handicapped or defective,
and we arrange clinics and therapeutic settings to help them. As Dale (1976)
has remarked, we do not do the same for children who cannot learn to play
the piano, do long division, or ride a bicycle. Of course, children vary in
intelligence, but not until I.Q. drops below about 50 do language difficulties
begin to appear (Lenneberg, 19671. Children at a given level of maturation
also vary in how much they talk, what they talk about, and how many
words they know. Where they vary little, it seems, is in their grasp of the
basic principles of the language system-its sound structure and syntax.
CONCLUSION
The past 50 years have seen a vast increase in our knowledge of the
biological foundations of language. Rather than attempt even a sampling
of the issues raised by the research we have reviewed, let me end by
emphasizing a point with which I began: the interplay between basic and
applied research, and between research and theory.
The advances have come about partly through technological innovations,
permitting, for example, physical analysis of the acoustic structure of speech
and precise localization of brain abnormalities; partly through methodolog-
ical gains in the experimental analysis of behavior; partly through growing
social concern with the blind, the deaf, and otherwise language-handi-
capped. Yet these scattered elements would still be scattered had they not
been brought together by a theoretical shift from description to explanation.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the development is its unpredictability.
Fifty years ago no one would have predicted that formal study of syntax
would offer a theoretical framework for basic research in language acqui-
sition, now a thriving area of modern experimental psychology, with im-
portant implications for treatment of the language-handicapped. No one
would have predicted that applied research on reading machines for the
blind would contribute to basic research in human phonetic capacity, lending
experimental support to the formal linguistic claim of the independence of
OCR for page 241
SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN RESEARCH ON LANGUAGE BEHAVIOR 241
phonology and syntax. Nor, hmally, would anyone have predicted that basic
psycholinguistic research in Amencan Sign Language would provide a
unique approach to the understanding of brain organization for language
and to testing the hypothesis, derived from linguistic theory, that language
is a distinct faculty of the human mind.
Presumably, continued research in the areas we have reviewed and in
related areas that we have not (such as the acquisition of reading, the motor
control and coordination of articulatory action, second language learning),
will consolidate our view of language as an autonomous system of nested
subsystems (phonology, syntax). Beyond this lies the further task of un-
folding the language system, tracing its evolutionary and ontogenetic origins
in the nonlinguistic systems that surround it and from which, in the last
analysis, it must denve. We would be rash to speculate on the diverse areas
of research and theory that will contribute to this development.
* * *
I thank Ignatius Mattingly for comments and advice.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
sign language
