Cognitive Development and Acquisition of Language

308 Pages·1973·15.72 MB·English

by  Timothy E. Moore (Auth.)

CONTRIBUTORS
MELISSA BOWERMAN
EVE V. CLARK
HERBERT H. CLARK
SUSAN ERVIN-TRIPP
OLGA K. GARNICA
JEAN BERKO GLEASON
JOHN LIMBER
TIMOTHY E. MOORE
BREYNE ARLENE MOSKOWITZ
GARY M. OLSON
THOMAS ROEPER
ELEANOR H. ROSCH
H. SINCLAIR-DEZWART
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AND
THE ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE
Edited by
Timothy E. Moore
Department of Psychology
Glendon College
York University
Toronto, Canada
ACADEMIC PRESS 1973
A Subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
New York London Toronto Sydney San Francisco
COPYRIGHT © 1973, BY THE RESEARCH FOUNDATION OF
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED OR
TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC
OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPY, RECORDING, OR ANY
INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT
PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER
ACADEMIC PRESS, INC.
111 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003
United Kingdom Edition published by
ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. (LONDON) LTD.
24/28 Oval Road, London NWI
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 72-7690
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
83 84 85 9 8 7 6
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Numbers in parentheses indicate the pages on which the authors' contributions begin.
MELISSA BOWERMAN (197), Bureau of Child Research and Department of
Linguistics, University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas
EVE V. CLARK (65), Committee on Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford,
California
HERBERT H. CLARK (27), Department of Psychology, Stanford University,
Stanford, California
SUSAN ERVIN-TRIPP (261), Department of Rhetoric, University of California,
Berkeley, Berkeley, California
OLGA K. G ARNICA (215), Committee on Linguistics, Stanford University,
Stanford, California
JEAN BERKO GLEASON (159), Department of Psychology, Boston University,
Boston, Massachusetts
JOHN LIMBER (169), Department of Psychology, University of New Hamp-
shire, Durham, New Hampshire
TIMOTHY E. MOORE (1), Department of Psychology, Glendon College, York
University, Toronto, Canada
BREYNE ARLENE MOSKOWITZ (223), Department of Linguistics University of
California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California
GARY M. OLSON (145), Department of Psychology, Michigan State Univer-
sity, East Lansing, Michigan
X List of Contributors
THOMAS ROEPER (187), Department of Psychology, University of Chicago,
Chicago, Illinois
ELEANOR H. ROSCH (111), Department of Psychology, University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, Berkeley, California
H. SINCLAIR-DEZWART (9), Ecole de Psychologie et des sciences de l'éduca-
tion, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
PREFACE
The relationship between cognitive development and language acquisi-
tion has intrigued and puzzled psychologists for several decades. In the past,
language has been treated as a product or consequence of cognitive develop-
ment—with relatively little attention directed toward the question of how
language emerged from the concurrently developing cognitive structures of
the child. Lately, however, language development has been recognized as a
phenomenon worthy of investigation in its own right; and discovering the
nature of the connection between linguistic and cognitive ability appears to
be crucial to the understanding of language acquisition.
This book is the product of a conference on developmental psycho-
linguistics, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, and held at the
State University of New York at Buffalo, August 2-5, 1971. The conference
was planned and organized by Dr. David G. Hays, grant director, and Dr.
Timothy E. Moore, associate director. The purpose of the conference was to
review current work, identify new directions, facilitate reconceptualization,
and orient and stimulate newcomers to this rapidly expanding field. This is
an essential book for any linguist, psychologist, or anthropologist interested
in cognition and linguistic development.
The original papers in this volume attempt to describe some of the ways
in which cognitive growth is reflected in, and interacts with, the development
of language. Language learning is examined in light of a number of cognitive
capacities, including the acquisition of semantic categories, memory pro-
cesses, and speaking styles. In addition, three papers discuss possible strate-
gies through which syntactic structures are perceived and used by the child.
A chapter relating Piaget's theory of intellectual development to modern
grammatical theory, and two experimental studies on phonology acquisition
make this volume unusual among its kind.
The introduction provides abrief overview of generative transformational
grammar, and presents some of the methodological problems inherent in the
study of language acquisition. The last chapter contains an integrative
Xll Preface
review of the latest research on language development and suggests some
ways in which cognitive development and language acquisition are inter-
dependent.
Most of the original papers presented at the conference were subsequently
modified and expanded as a result of the interactions and discussions among
participants. Preparation of this volume was assisted by a grant from the
National Science Foundation (GS 28589). I am grateful to the authors, their
colleagues, and the students who helped make this venture a success. I am
also indebted to David Hays for making the conference, and this book,
possible, and to John Lyons for helpful advice before and during the confer-
ence.
INTRODUCTION
TIMOTHY E. MOORE
York University
During the last decade and a half there has been a dramatic increase in
psychological studies of grammar and language acquisition. Developments
within the fields of information theory (Shannon, 1948), computer simula-
tion (Reitman, 1965), and linguistics (Chomsky, 1957; 1965) have resulted
in new approaches and new modes of thought, which are supplanting neo-
behavioristic S-R attempts to explain cognitive processes—including those
of language. Each field has provided a formalism for operating upon symbolic
entities—lending fresh conceptual properties, as well as rigor, to psycho-
logical hypotheses about language behavior. Undoubtedly, the most influ-
ential and dynamic position is that of Chomsky. The proposed system is
fundamentally different from the structural or descriptive linguistics pop-
ular 20 or 30 years ago. A detailed rationale of the new approach will
not be given here (but see Katz, 1964; Chomsky, 1965, 1966; Bever, 1968;
McNeill, 1968). Suffice it to say that a transformational grammar (TG) of the
type suggested by Chomsky concerns itself with and at least attempts to
account for aspects of natural language which, heretofore, have been either
inadequately explained or completely ignored. A TG attempts to: (1) assign
to each sentence it generates a deep and a surface structure, and (2) provide
a systematic description of the relations between the two. "Generative"
here, refers to a system of rules which can explicitly assign structural descrip-
tions to sentences. The term comes from formal logic where it is typically
used to indicate the elaboration of a set or series from a single base. When we
consider that any speaker of English is capable of uttering an infinite variety
of sentences, the applicability of the term becomes obvious. If the generative
2 Timothy E. Moore
rules are valid, only grammatical sentences will be derived, and no un-
grammatical ones. Chomsky (1965) takes some pains to point out that a
generative grammar is not a model of how a person might actually produce
or understand a sentence. "When we say that a sentence has a certain deriva-
tion with respect to a particular generative grammar, we say nothing about
how the speaker or hearer might proceed, in some practical or efficient way
to construct such a derivation. These questions belong to the theory of
language use—the theory of performance [pp. 8-9]."
The introduction of deep and surface structures constitutes one of the
most important contributions of TGs. The deep structure determines the
semantic interpretation of a sentence, while the surface structure is phono-
logically interpreted. Such a distinction is necessitated by the fact that there
is a considerable amount of information about a sentence which is abstract,
and not contained directly in the superficial string of words composing the
sentence. For example, in
They are drinking glasses.
They are drinking companions.
the two sentences do not differ on the basis of their surface structure; thus
syntactic theory must do more than describe surface groupings.
The syntactic component of Chomsky's system contains two different sets
of rules: phrase structure rules, and transformational rules. The latter permit
changes only in the structural description of a sentence, while leaving the
meaning unchanged. Transforming an active sentence to a passive would be
an example. While transformational rules take into account the derivational
history of the elements involved, phrase structure rules operate blindly upon
fixed strings of symbols, by rewriting a single symbol as a new string. For
example:
S >NP+VP
VP >Verb + NP
NP >T + N
It is these two syntactic components which allow us to make the distinction
between the deep and surface structures of a sentence. Transformational
rules operate upon the output of the phrase structure rules, and map the
abstract deep structures onto actual phonetically interpretable sequences.
Thus, many different actual sequences have a common underlying structure.
In:
John hit the ball.
The ball was hit by John.
It was John who hit the ball.
INTRODUCTION 3
the deep structure descriptions differ only in minor ways, if at all. That is,
the relationship between the actor (John), the action (hit), and the recipient
of the action (ball), is the same in each sentence, and it is the deep structure
which reflects this identity. Linguistic theories of the past have usually as-
signed less importance to the role played by deep structures in linguistic des-
cription, than do contemporary TGs. Chomsky's system clearly differs from
a taxonomic approach which views syntactic structure as being determined
solely by segmentation and classification techniques.
In 1959 Chomsky provided a devastating critique of Skinner's (1957)
Verbal Behavior. Fodor (1965) later extended the argument to encompass
mediational models. Still more recently an attempted formal refutation of
any associationistic account of language has been advanced by Bever,
Fodor, and Garrett (1968). While these investigators were demonstrating the
insufficiencies in traditional empiricist accounts of language behavior,
others were attempting to apply Chomsky's new system to psychological
studies of language comprehension. Experimenters were hopefully seeking
psychological relations between sentences which would reflect the number
of rules required by the grammar to generate those sentences. They wanted
evidence that people process or evaluate sentences by going through the
steps in their grammatical derivations. Such an approach assumed that
performance mirrored in some relatively straightforward way, the under-
lying competence described by the grammar (Miller, 1962; Miller & McKean,
1964; Savin & Perchonock, 1965). It now appears that this assumption was
unwarranted; in fact Chomsky (1964) cautioned that "the attempt to
develop a reasonable account of the speaker has been hampered by the
prevalent and utterly mistaken view that a generative grammar in itself
provides or is related in some obvious way to a model for the speaker."
Many of the earlier studies have proved irreplicable, and the derivational
theory of complexity is no longer adhered to.1 Garrett and Fodor (1968) and
Hayes (1970) provide critical reviews of this literature.
Even though a variety of syntactic manipulations have been shown to have
an effect upon the cognitive processing of sentences (Wales & Marshall,
1966), any direct, one-to-one correspondence between grammatical rules
and sentence processing has yet to be discovered. Chomsky (1961) reflects
that "... the important question is to what extent significant aspects of the
use and understanding of utterances can be illuminated by refining and
generalizing the notions of grammar [p. 385]." Six years later, Fodor and
Garrett (1967) suggest that "... the most profound problem in psycho-
1 Brown and Hanlon (1970) have rejuvenated this concept within a developmental context—
asking whether derivational complexity can be related to the order of acquisition of various
grammatical constructions.