Introduction
Linguistics, the scientific study of the structure of language, is a field in its own right, but it makes contact with psychology at every turn. Linguists address speech perception, language development, and language comprehension, while cognitive psychologists (psychologists who study human thought) study memory for exact wording, the relationship of language and thought, and language disorders, among other topics.
The work of linguists (especially that of Noam Chomsky
in the 1960s) has been instrumental in launching American cognitive psychology
by drawing attention to the importance of abstract rules that characterize behavior, the distinction between performance and competence, and the distinction between “surface” behaviors and the “deep” structural basis of those behaviors. It might be said that, before Chomsky, the best theory of language structure had amounted to the art of drawing diagrams of sentences.
The best psychological account of how people learn language had been B. F. Skinner’s behaviorist account. The behaviorists refrained from theorizing about invisible processes within the mind, so they limited their accounts to physically observable events, namely imitation, practice, and reinforcement. They used general principles of learning to account for all behaviors, so their theories applied to mice and pigeons as well as to humans.
Chomsky’s Theory
Chomsky developed a theory of grammar that changed these assumptions forever. Linguistics no longer consisted of mere structural descriptions, but a set of rules with the (theoretical) capacity to generate all and only well-formed utterances of any given human language; linguists hoped to discover rules that were accurate reflections of the process of using language. Chomsky set the standard of “explanatory adequacy” for a linguistic theory, by which he meant that the theory could account for actual psychological processes in the use of language, not merely describe what language is like. Thus, Chomsky’s revolutionary ideas about linguistics were also revolutionary ideas about psychology.
He argued that the rules of language are so complex that humans could not possibly learn them, especially not young children with no training in linguistic theory, who are exposed to confusingly faulty examples of language every day. Yet normal four-year-old children across the world effortlessly master all the basic complexities of their native languages, despite the lack of formal (or even much informal) language training. If children do not consciously learn the rules they master, they must have those rules programmed into their brains by genetics.
Chomsky did not claim that any particular language is programmed genetically into human beings. Rather, he claimed that all human languages are more similar to each other than they seem at first glance. All languages share a common core of principles, and it is this core grammar, or set of “linguistic universals,” that is thought to be genetically programmed. He suggested that language (in its full complexity) is uniquely human, and the only reason humans are capable of it is that they have genetically engineered language modules in their brains (presumably, he was referring to the famous Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas in the left cerebral cortex).
Chomsky’s claims made a dramatic impact on American psychology. Chomsky’s arguments against Skinner’s behaviorist account of language learning through imitation, practice, and reinforcement were seized by the scientific community and have become the generally accepted view of language acquisition. Although learning through imitation, practice, and reinforcement can pretty well account for vocabulary acquisition (though there are many who would claim that behaviorism fails in even that area), the acquisition of syntactic structure (correct word order) and of morphology (word formation, such as past tenses and plurals) cannot be understood without referring to the abstract rules underlying those abilities. Research confirms the claim that rule discovery, not rote imitation, and internal organization, not external reinforcement, best account for how young children develop language skills.
Although developmental psychologists have for the most part joined hands with linguists in rejecting behavioral accounts of language learning, the claims that Chomsky made about a genetically programmed core grammar have not fared as well in mainstream cognitive psychology. Most (but not all) psychologists working in the area suggest that what humans have genetically programmed is not anything so rigid as a core grammar, but rather a set of strategies for learning language. Psychologists also cite Katherine Snow’s discovery that toddlers are not exposed to confusingly faulty examples of language (as Chomsky claimed), but that, in fact, parents generally use simplified, overly clear and correct language when addressing their young ones. Thus, language is learned through well-designed social interactions (an idea with which the great Russian scholar Lev Vygotsky would have been quite comfortable).
There has been considerable enthusiasm in efforts to disprove Chomsky’s claim that language is unique to humans. In fairness to Chomsky, he never claimed that other animals could not communicate, only that those communications were not based on the complex, abstract, unlearnable, genetically programmed core grammar of human language. No one has ever challenged that version of Chomsky’s claim. Researchers have, however, trained chimpanzees and gorillas to communicate with American Sign Language (ASL) or other artificial, rule-based language systems. Primates have had much more success with these systems than most people would have anticipated. They have learned vocabularies of several hundred words and have used those words in sentences for personal communication in ways that are unarguably “linguistic.” The success has been so impressive and surprising that it is occasionally overlooked that there remain many serious differences between chimp language and human language, not the least of which is the level of complexity: All chimp language has been easily learnable, and no human language is.
The debate between Chomsky and his critics rages on. Chomsky still has some points about language complexity and universals that have been by and large ignored rather than improved on by current psychological theory. Chomsky in his turn has never felt compelled to modify his theory in the face of psychological research. In many ways, mainstream cognitive psychologists have lost contact with the person who won them their license to defy behaviorist theory.
Basic Linguistic Concepts
Linguistic theory has come to make several basic distinctions among the various aspects of language that can be studied. Each aspect is a system of rules. The job of each rule system is to create. The rules create (or generate) all the possible (well-formed) utterances of a language. Any structures that cannot be generated by the rules are not well formed and are therefore considered illegal or anomalous. These rules are not the kind one goes to school to learn. Rather, they are the rules that every speaker of the language already knows. Every time one says something, one uses these rules without even thinking about them, or realizing they are there. In fact, people are so unaware of these rules, which they all use, that it takes a great deal of clever effort for linguistic researchers to figure out what the rules are, and there still is not agreement on the subject.
Phonology
Phonology refers to the system of distinctive sounds (or phonemes) used in a language. Phonemes are not to be confused with letters of the alphabet. A letter may stand for a sound (a phoneme), but then a letter may stand for several different phonemes (the letter c stands for at least three: cat, ceiling, and ancient) and several different letters can stand for the same phoneme (cat, kite, quiche). Every language has a somewhat different set of phonemes. Not many languages other than English have the phonemes for th (either, ether), but then English lacks the trilled r that is common in other languages.
The various sounds of a language can be categorized by their distinctive features, that is, by the characteristics they have that make them recognizably different from other sounds of the language. For example, linguists use the term “plosive” to refer to consonants that are abrupt (such as b, d, and k) or not smooth (such as m, s, and w), and they use the term “labial” to describe phonemes made with the lips (such as b, m, and w) and “velar” to describe phonemes made at the back of the throat (such as k and g). Where English distinguishes between only two labial plosives (b and p) some languages distinguish between four (they have two different b’s and two different p’s). That means, where English has only two possible rhymes with the word dig that begin with a labial plosive (big and pig), there are other languages that could have four different rhymes.
Not only does a language’s phonology determine which sounds are and are not legal (and distinctive) in the language, but also it determines how sounds can be combined to make syllables. For example, even though all of the sounds in the syllable ngoh are completely legal in English, at least in isolation, English phonology does not allow ng at the beginning of syllables, nor h at the end (though there are languages that allow both).
Morphology
Morphology refers to the system of morphemes, (that is, root words, prefixes, and suffixes). Morphemes such as “book,” “hate,” “-ful,” and “anti-” are the smallest units of language that have meaning. (Phonemes are smaller, but they do not have any particular meaning.) Morphemes are not to be confused with words, because some morphemes (prefixes and suffixes) are less than words, and some words (such as “homework” and “uncooked”) consist of several morphemes.
Morphological rules govern how morphemes may be combined to form words. For example, English morphology requires that the past tense morpheme “-ed” not stand on its own, but must appear at the end of a verb (never a noun: talk/talked but not apple/appled). Morphology also specifies exceptions to the rules (such as “make” + “-ed” = “made”). Morphophonemics are rules that govern how sounds change when morphemes are combined (“leaf” + “s” = “leaves”).
Syntax
Syntax is the language’s system of word combination. Syntax governs what words must appear together and what words cannot, as well as the order in which they must appear. Syntax is close to what most people mean by the word “grammar.” The syntax of English allows “The door opened” but not “Opened door the.” Syntax does not simply allow and disallow certain word orders; it also specifies the relationship among those words. However, there is not always agreement among theorists about exactly how syntax does this.
For instance, “I opened the door with the key” and “The key opened the door” and “The door opened” refer to essentially the same event, even though all three sentences have a different subject (“I,” “the key,” and “the door” each take turns “opening”). Some theories of syntax (such as case grammars) attempt to account for these relationships and some theories ignore these relationships as coincidental, or at least as the job of semantics, not of syntax.
Other theories consider the relationships between such sentences as “I kicked the ball” (active voice), “The ball was kicked by me” (passive voice), and “Did I kick the ball?” (yes/no question) to be the responsibility of syntactic theory. Such theories (for example, Chomsky’s earlier theories of syntax) suggest that all three of these sentences are derived from the same kernel sentence (or deep structure), namely, “I kick+ed the ball.” According to such theories, the deep structure is then transformed into one of the three (surface) sentences by different rules of transformation. Thus, there would be a transformational rule for passive voice, a transformational rule for forming questions, and even a very simple transformational rule for forming active sentences. Chomsky’s more recent theories have abandoned relating these three sentences to each other (and so have abandoned the related transformations), yet he uses newly defined transformational rules to account for other things, such as the placement of “did” in “Did I kick the ball?” and “whom” in “Whom shall I give the money to?”
Although the details are still controversial, most syntactic theories claim that word order is governed by at least two kinds of rules: phrase structure rules and transformational rules. The phrase structure rules determine how the deep structure (kernel sentence) is organized, and the transformational rules determine how these deep phrase structures are rearranged to form surface structures (what is actually said out loud). People are not aware of using any of these rules; they just do it.
What is the point in a theory claiming that one or the other set of transformational rules is used by the language? It is hoped that once linguists have settled on the correct set of rules, they will be able to explain such oddities as why, as a person thumbs through Mary’s pictures of her children, saying “Who is that a picture of?” is syntactically acceptable, but “Who is that Mary’s picture of?” is not. So far, no theory has been able to account for all such examples of acceptable versus unacceptable utterances. This is despite decades of research by the best minds the field of linguistics has to offer. Yet every normal four-year-old speaker of English knows these rules—though they cannot state these rules, they can follow them to create a natural-sounding sentence. How is it that average four-year-olds can do effortlessly in a few years what teams of brilliant professionals cannot do in many decades? No wonder Chomsky believed these rules are not learned, but genetically programmed.
Semantics and Pragmatics
Semantics is the meaning system of a language. This includes the meaning both of individual words (for example, “father” means “male parent”) and of sentences (take a list of word meanings from a sentence and come up with the point of the statement). Semantic rules state that sentences such as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” are nonsense (not well formed). Theories of semantics are fundamental to psychological theories of concept formation and text comprehension and memory.
Pragmatics is the system of whatever rules of language are not covered by the other systems. It includes the rules of language usage and style. Some sort of pragmatic rule tells us that “Howdy, my lord” is not acceptable, even though it is syntactically and semantically well formed. Conversational rules are pragmatic rules. When a person wishes to end a phone conversation, it is acceptable to say, “Gosh, look at the time” or “Well, it sure has been nice talking to you. Do call again,” but it appears as rude to say simply, “Please stop talking.” Evidently, yet another rule of pragmatics is at work.
H. P. Grice suggests that pragmatic rules allow more to be said than is actually spoken. According to Grice, anyone who engages in a conversation must agree to be conversationally cooperative, even if one’s purpose is to be oppositional and uncooperative. One can be uncooperative in dozens of other ways, but if one is conversationally uncooperative, the conversation simply ends. By conversationally cooperative, Grice means that people try to be clear, succinct, relevant, and (except where they are purposely trying to deceive) truthful. Grice points out that any time people say something that obviously violates this cooperative principle, by being flagrantly unclear, wordy, irrelevant, or untruthful, they are sending an implied message. Sarcasm, for example, is accomplished by saying something obviously false, such as “I simply love being publicly humiliated.” This sarcastic comment breaks the cooperative principle of truthfulness. By so doing, it not only lets the hearer know that the speaker hates being humiliated, but it does so better than does the corresponding nonsarcastic statement “I simply hate being publicly humiliated.” Grice suggests that when people make such obvious violations of the cooperative principle, the hearer can infer that they did it on purpose, for effect, and can usually even figure out for what effect it was done. By counting on their listeners to figure out why they have done this, speakers can get a point across without coming right out and saying it.
The Significance of an Utterance
The meaning of a person’s statement is not purely a matter of semantics, but of pragmatics as well. Linguists have identified a variety of types of meaning conveyed by language.
Propositional content is the set of claims made by a declarative sentence (and if the sentence is a question or command, the claims made by the corresponding declarative sentence). Thus “You eat cake,” “Do you eat cake?” and “Eat cake!” all have the same propositional content, namely the claim that “eating” is performed by “you” on an object of the type “cake.” There can be multiple propositions in a single sentence: “The tall, dark stranger thought the statement I made was clever” includes the propositions that (1) the stranger is tall; (2) the stranger is dark; (3) I made a statement; (4) the statement was clever; (5) the stranger thought so.
The speaker is not committed to the truthfulness of every proposition in the utterance. The stranger may have thought the speaker’s statement was clever, but the speaker need not agree. Furthermore, each proposition constitutes a description of some part of the common universe. One of the jobs of semantic theory is to determine the conditions under which such a description would be true (these are called truth conditions). Propositions are understood in terms of their truth conditions and in terms of their relationships to other propositions.
Thematic structure is a specification of which parts of a conversation are new, or to be emphasized, and which parts are old (given) information that the speaker can safely assume is already understood by the listener. To communicate, the speaker must use both old and new information: new, to tell listeners something they did not already know; old, to help listeners figure out where the new information fits in with what they already know, so they can relate to it. In the following examples, the same sentence is used, but a different word is emphasized. The emphasis indicates that the emphasized material is new, perhaps even unexpected, whereas the unemphasized material is treated as old, already known material.
John ate the cake. (Answers the question, Who ate the cake?)
John ate the cake. (Answers the question, What did John do to the cake?)
John ate the cake. (Answers the question, What did John eat?)
John ate the cake. (Answers the question, Which cake did John eat?)
Presupposition is an assumption that one must make before one can understand the proposition being stated. The assumption is not directly stated, but the statement makes no sense if the presupposition is not made. For example, “Did you ever stop beating your wife?” presupposes that “you” have been beating “your wife,” whether the answer to the question is yes or no, and “You left your car unlocked” presupposes “you” have a car.
Entailment is a logical conclusion that must be drawn if the stated proposition is taken to be true. The entailment is not directly stated, nor is it presupposed, but once one accepts the proposition, one must accept the entailment if one is to be logical. “Marty has ten dollars” entails that Marty has more than three dollars.
Implicature is the conclusion one draws when the speaker conveys it by flagrantly breaking Grice’s cooperative principle.
Illocution is the form of a sentence, whether it is declarative (a statement), imperative (a command), or interrogative (a question). Illocutionary force is the direct or implied impact of a statement, regardless of its illocution. For example, the sentence “Could you open the window?” has the illocution of a question, but it has the illocutionary force of a request (something akin to “Please open the window”).
Speech Acts and Indirect Speech Acts
Sometimes an utterance is more than just an utterance: It actually does something. When the justice of the peace says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the very words cause the couple in question to become husband and wife. When a person says “I promise to stop,” that person thereby makes a promise. Any time an utterance does the thing it says it is doing, whether it be promising, commanding, asking, refusing, or whatever, that is a direct speech act. If an utterance accomplishes the same thing, but without coming right out and stating that it is doing so, that is an indirect speech act. “I won’t do it again” is an indirect promise, since the speaker never actually said it was a promise.
There are many more kinds of meaning attached to utterances, but these serve as an introduction to the variety that linguists have identified.
Evidence for Evaluating Linguistic Theory
Both linguists and psychologists have debated about the nature of human language and language processes for decades. Linguists and psychologists use different kinds of data for testing their claims about language. For the most part, linguists use language judgments (of whether a given utterance is acceptable or not) to confirm or refute a proposed rule or rule system. That is, they ask native speakers of a language to judge whether this or that utterance is well formed. Linguists focus on the idealized competence of a speaker and try to avoid performance issues (such as whether an otherwise perfectly good utterance is too difficult to produce or comprehend).
Psychologists, on the other hand, use subjects’ performance at perceiving, remembering, interpreting, and utilizing language as clues about human language abilities. They tend to consider idealized rules that overlook actual performance to be less satisfying.
Nonetheless, psychologists are indebted to linguists for proposing an impressive array of linguistic structures and abilities, which psychologists have then taken and tested, using their own methods. Often this endeavor is referred to as testing the psychological reality of a linguistic construct. Basically, the psychology researcher is trying to find out if the rules and structures that linguists have come up with using linguistic research methods will actually make a difference in how long a subject takes to react or how accurately a subject perceives or how well a subject remembers various words, phrases, sentences, or paragraphs. If the pattern of reaction times or of memory errors is consistent with the proposed linguistic rule (or structure), then that rule (or structure) is said to have demonstrated psychological reality.
Some linguistic rules (such as phrase structure rules) have had demonstrable psychological reality. When researchers presented clicks in the middle of a sentence, participants heard the clicks as if they happened between phrase structure boundaries (say, between the subject and predicate of a sentence) even when the clicks occurred well before (or after) the actual boundary. The fact that people’s hearing is altered by the presence of phrase structure boundaries shows that those phrase structures are actually influencing their behavior and are thus psychologically real.
On the other hand, some linguistic rules (such as the passive transformation) have failed to demonstrate any psychological reality. Sentences that were more complex (because they included an extra transformation) took participants no longer to process than simpler sentences. This finding suggests that the so-called complex sentence was not in fact more complex, as far as the research participants were concerned. The supposed extra transformation had no impact on the participants and is thus concluded to have no psychological reality.
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