Psycholinguistics: Psychology, Linguistics, and the Study of Natural Language

398 Pages·1992·39.728 MB·

by  Joseph F. Kess

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa)
Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board
Henning Andersen (Los Angeles); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles)
Thomas V. Gamkrelidze (Tbilisi); John E. Joseph (College Park, Md.)
Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin); Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E. Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.); Danny Steinberg (Tokyo)
Volume 86
Joseph F. Kess
Psycholinguistics
Psychology, Linguistics, and the Study of Natural Language
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
PSYCHOLOGY, LINGUISTICS, AND
THE STUDY OF NATURAL LANGUAGE
JOSEPH F. KESS
University of Victoria
Victoria, B.C., Canada
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1992
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence
of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kess, Joseph F.
Psycholinguistics : Psychology, linguistics, and the study of natural language /
Joseph F. Kess.
p. cm. (Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. Series IV,
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, issn 0304-0763 ; v. 86)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Psychohnguistics. I. Title. II. Series.
P37.K48 1992
401’.9--dc20 91-37929
isbn 978 90 272 3583 1 (EUR) / 978 1 55619 141 1 (Us) (Hb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 3584 8 (EUR) / 978 1 55619 142 8 (Us) (Pb ; alk. paper)
isbn 978 90 272 7748 0 (Eb)
© 1992 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Contents
Preface xiii
Chapter 1 : Introduction 1
Introductory Comments 1
Comprehension 6
Production 8
Acquisition 10
Summary 11
Chapter 2: A History of Psycholinguistics 13
Early Signposts: Syntactics, Semantics, and Pragmatics 13
An Historical Overview 15
The Four Major Periods 16
Formative Period 17
Linguistic Period 19
Cognitive Period 21
Psycholinguistic Theory, Psychological Reality, and 22
Cognitive Science
Summary 27
Chapter 3: Speech Perception and Production 31
Articulatory Phonetics vs. Acoustic Phonetics 31
Articulatory Phonetics 31
Phonetic Feature Specifications 33
Acoustic Phonetics 34
Speech Perception 36
Stages in Speech Perception 38
Auditory Stage 38
Speech Recognition and Speech Synthesis by Machines 41
Phonetic Stage 42
Categorical Nature of Speech Perception 44
VI Contents
Categorical Perception by Infants 47
Phonological Stage 48
Lexical, Syntactic, and Semantic Stage 49
Continuous Speech 50
Syllables, Rhythm, and Stress-Patterning 52
Findings from the Non-continuous Speech of Nonsense Syllables 54
Speech Errors and Speech Production 55
Pausing and Hesitations 56
Constituent Size and Placement of Pauses 56
Will vs. Skill 57
Slips of the Tongue 58
Speech Errors and Higher Levels of Planning and Production 60
'Freudian Slips' and Psychological Explanations for Speech Errors 62
Speech Production and Speech Perception Interface? 63
Support for a Production/Perception Interface 64
Criticisms and Conclusions on the Production-Perception Interface 64
Sound Symbolism 65
Primary Onomatopoeia 66
Secondary Onomatopoeia 66
Cross-linguistic Evaluative Similarities for Restricted Sets 67
Language-specific Sound Symbolism 68
Summary 69
Chapter 4: Morphology and the Mental Lexicon 73
Introductory Comments to the Study of Morphology 73
Grammatical Morphemes and Conceptual Structure 75
Inflectional Morphology and Derivational Morphology 76
Inflectional Morphology 76
Schemas in Irregular Inflectional Morphology 77
Derivational Morphology 80
Degrees of Morphological Relationship 81
Productivity in Derivational Morphology 81
Developmental Productivity of Derivational Morphology 82
Historicity and Orthography Affect Derivational Knowledge 82
Morphological Structure, Word Recognition, and the Mental Lexicon 86
Written-Word Recognition 87
Spoken-Word Recognition 93
Parsing Strategies in Word Recognition 94
Evidence from Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomena and Malapropisms 95
The Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon 95
Contents vii
Spontaneous Malapropisms 96
Summary 97
Chapter 5: Syntax 99
Introductory Comments to the Study of Syntax 99
Structuralism 100
Transformational Generative Grammar 105
Introductory Remarks on the Generative Approach 105
Basic Assumptions of Generative Grammar 107
Early 1957 Chomsky and "Syntactic Structures" 110
Chomsky's 1965 Standard Theory from "Aspects" 111
Extended Standard Theory or Interpretive Semantics 113
Traces 114
Government and Binding 115
Other Grammatical Theories 116
Generative Semantics 117
Case Grammar 118
Lexical Functional Grammar, Generalized Phrase Structure 119
Grammar, and Relational Grammar
Sentential Relationships and the Derivational Theory of Complexity 120
Sentence Processing and Sentence Comprehension 125
Negatives and Negation 125
Inherent Negatives 128
Negatives and Plausible Denials 128
Passive Sentences 128
Questions and Answering Questions 131
Semantic Expectations Influence Sentence Processing 132
Syntactic Ambiguity 133
Single Reading or Multiple Readings? 134
Parsing Strategies 136
Modularity vs. Interactionism 140
Memory and Sentence Recall 141
Short-term and Long-term Memory 141
Memory for Form vs. Memory for Gist 141
Imagery 142
Temporal vs. Syntactic Sequencing 143
Propositional Content 144
Inference 144
Sentence Production 148
Summary 148
viii Contents
Chapter 6: Discourse 151
Discourse and Discourse Analysis 151
Speech Act Theory and Discourse 152
Information vs. Intention in Production and Perception 156
The Force of Speech Acts 156
A Taxonomy of Direct Speech Acts 157
Performatives 159
Indirect Speech Acts 160
Responding to Indirect Speech Acts 162
Indirect Speech Acts in Isolation and in Discourse Context 163
Conventions, Conversational Postulates, and Conversational 165
Implicatures
Criticisms and Modifications of the Gricean Principle 169
Textual and Conversational Cohesion 171
Conversational Cohesion 172
Denials 174
Conversational Turn-Taking 174
Attention and Selective Listening 178
Memory for Form vs. Memory for Gist 179
Discourse Structures 180
Mental Models 187
Culture-specific Discourse Structures 188
Inference 189
Ambiguity Resolution and the Influence of Discourse Context 192
Knowledge as Context 192
Discourse as Context 194
Reasoning from Discourse 199
Reasoning across Languages 203
Document Design and Discourse Design 204
Summary 205
Chapter 7: Semantics 209
The Nature of Meaning and The Nature of Semantic Inquiry 209
Philosophical Background to the Study of Meaning 209
Units of Semantic Analysis 210
Models of Semantic Analysis: Lexical Semantics 211
Referential Theory of Meaning 211
Denotation vs. Connotation 211
Contents ix
Semantic Differential 212
Word Associations 212
Semantic Fields 214
Feature Theory 215
Prototype Theory 218
Categorial Networks 221
Spreading Activation Models 223
Lexical Ambiguity and the Notion of Spreading Activation 223
Models of Semantic Interpretation: Compositional Semantics 225
Earlier Semantics-based Grammars 225
Earlier Case Grammars 226
The Compositionality Principle 227
Mental Models Again ! 229
Metaphor 230
Semantic Considerations in Sentence Processing and Production 232
Memory and Information Processing 232
Marked vs. Unmarked 234
Summary 236
Chapter 8: Language and Thought 239
Introductory Comments on Language and Thought 239
Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis 240
Matching Linguistic Structures with Cognitive Structures 243
Vocabulary 243
Grammatical Categories and Mode of Inflection 246
Manner of Sentence Formation 247
Part of Speech Designations 248
The Language of Experience 249
Language and National Character 249
Linguistic Universais 250
Perceptual Categories and Folk Taxonomies 251
Naming Objects 252
Ethnoscience and the Lexicon 252
Basic Color Terms in the Lexicon 257
Focal Colors 258
Conclusions on the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis 259
Piaget and Vygotsky 261
Piaget 261
Vygotsky 262