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and production team. A number of anonymous reviewers provided invaluable suggestions for improvement of the original manuscript. Dianne Bradley, Chuck Cairns, Dana McDaniel, Lucia Pozzan, and Irina Sekerina have provided guidance in a number of areas. We have also benefited from being part of the psychoIinguistics community in and around the CUNY Graduate Center and Queens College. We are fortunate to have students and colleagues with expertise in some of the languages we have used in examples throughout the book. For their help with these, we thank Yukiko Koizumi, Ping Li, Shukhan Ng, Irina Sekerina, Amit Shaked, IgIika Stoyneshka, and F. Scott Walters. Our primary. goal is not to provide our readers with a great many facts about language acquisition and use. As in all healthy empirical fields, data change with ongoing investigations. Instead, we hope to convey to our readers the amazing story of the unconscious processes that take place as humans use language.
Eva Fernandez HelenCaims
1 Beginning Concepts
The Creativity of Human Language 2 Language as Distinct from Speech. Thought, and Communication 3 Some Characteristics of the Linguistic System 6 The Distinction between Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar 7 The Universality of Human Language 10 lmplications for the Acquisition of Language 10 How Language Pairs Sound and Meaning 11 Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance 15 The Speech Signal and Linguistic Perception 17 Origins of Contemporary Psycholinguistics 20 How This Book Is Organized 22 New Concepts 23 Study Questions 23
Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study in which the goals are to understand how people acquire language, how people use language to speak and understand one another, and how language is represented and processed in the brain. PsychoIinguistics is primarily a sub-discipline of psychology and linguistics, but it is also related to developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, and speech science. The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to some of the central ideas, problems, and discoveries in contemporary
2 BEGINNING CONCEPTS 3
psycholinguistics. In this chapter, we explore key concepts about language that serve to distinguish it from related aspects of human behavior and cognition, and we identify the basic characteristics of language as a system. We also provide a brief account of how psycholinguistics emerged as a field of inquiry.
- The Creativity of Human Language
A good place to begin is by thinking about some of the unique features of human language. Language is a system that allows people immense creativity. This is not the same creativity of people who write essays, fiction, or poetry. Instead, this is the linguistic creativity that is com monplace to every person who knows a language. The creativity of human language is different from the communication system of any other animal in a number of respects. For one, speakers of a language can create and understand novel sentences for an entire lifetime. Consider the fact that almost every sentence that a person hears every day is a brand new event not previously experienced, but which can be understood with little difficulty. Similarly, when speaking, people con stantly produce novel sentences with no conscious effort. This is true for every person who speaks or has ever spoken a language. We can extend this observation to every person who uses a signed language to produce and comprehend novel sentences. This remarkable ability to deal with novelty in language is possible because every language consists of a set of principles by which arbi trary elements (the sounds of speech, the gestures of sign language) are combined into words, which in tum are combined into sentences. Everyone who knows a language knows a relatively small number of principles, a small number of sounds put together to create words, and a large but finite vocabulary. This finite knowledge provides the person who knows a language with infinite creativity. The set of possible sen tences for a given language is infinite. Everyone who has ever lived and known a particular language has produced and heard a miniscule subset of that infinite set. Knowledge of language confers upon every person the creativity to produce an infinite number of novel sentences. When that knowledge is shared with others in a given language com munity, speakers and hearers are able to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of novel sentences. A second important kind of creativity humans possess is that we can use language to communicate anything we can think of. No other animal communication system affords its users such an unlimited range
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of topics. Many mammals have complex sets of calls and cries, but they can communicate only certain kinds of information, such as whether danger is coming from the ground or the air, who is ready to mate, where food is located, and so forth. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, "No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you his parents were poor but honest" (Gleason and Ratner 1993: 9). Language is so flexible that it not only allows people to say anything they can think of; it also allows people to use language for a vast array of purposes. Language is used to communicate, to interact socially, to entertain, and to inform. All cultural institutions - schools, communi ties, governments - depend upon language to function. Written and audio-recorded language allows people to communicate and convey information - as well as interact and entertain - across vast spans of space and time. It is probably the case that human dominance of the planet has been possible because of the power of human language as a medium for transmitting knowledge (Dennett 2009).
- Language as Distinct from Speech, Thought,
and Communication
Language is the primary communication system for the human species. In ordinary circumstances it is used to convey thoughts through speech. It is a special system, however, that functions inde pendently of speech, thought, and communication. Because one of the main themes of this book is to identify the unique aspects of the human lingUistic system, it might be helpful to distinguish between language and the other systems with which it usually interacts: speech, thought, and communication. Before we discuss those other systems, let us emphasize that here and throughout this book our discussion of human language includes the signed languages of the deaf, unless explicitly noted. Sign languages are just as structured as any spoken language and are just as capable of conveying an unlimited range of topics (as discussed in the previous section). Sign languages also operate under principles distinct from thought and communication. What differs between signed and spoken languages is the transmission mode: gestural for the former and articu latory-phonetic (speech) for the latter. Speech ought not to be confused with language, though speech is indeed the most frequent mode for transmitting linguistic information. Other modes for transmission include the gestures used in sign lan guage and the graphic representations used in writing. Later in this
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Language is the primary communication system for human beings, but it is not the only way to communicate, so language can be distinguished from communication in general. Many forms of communication are not linguistic; these include non-verbal, mathematical, and aesthetic com munication through music or the visual arts. Frequently, language is not used to communicate or transfer information; language can be used aesthetically (consider poetry or song lyrics) or as a means to negotiate social interactions (consider how Yo, whassup/ might be the preferred greeting in some contexts but quite inappropriate in others). One of the wonderful things about language is that it can be studied in many dif ferent ways. Its social, cultural, and aesthetic characteristics can be ana lyzed independently of one another. In psycholinguistics, however, researchers are primarily concerned with the underlying structure of language as a biologically based characteristic of humans, derived from the human neurolOgical organization and function; we come back to this topic in greater detail in Chapter 3. Human language is unique to human beings and its general Structure is universal to our species. All and only humans have human language. These facts have profound implications for the way language is acquired by infants (see Chapter 4) and for the way that language is produced (Chapter 5) and perceived (Chapters 6, 7, and 8).
- Some Characteristics of the LingUistic System
Language is a formal system for pairing signals with meanings (see Figure 1.1). This pairing can go either way. When people produce a sentence, they use language to encode the meaning that they wish to convey into a sequence of speech sounds. When people understand a spoken sentence, language allows them to reverse the process and decode a speaker's speech to recover the intended meaning. Obviously, these activities depend upon the speaker and hearer sharing a common language: both must have the same linguistic system for pairing sound and meaning. The linguistic system that enables sound and meaning to be paired contains a complex and highly organized set of principles and rules. These rules are ultimately the source for the infinite creativity of language because they describe (or generate) anyone of an infinite set of sentences. The set of rules that creates sentences in a language is a language's grammar, and the words of a language are its lexicon. Notice that this way of defining language is very specific about what it means to know a language. Knowing a language involves knowing its
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w
Meaning Signal
F1sure 1.1 Language is a system that connects signals (the sound wave on the right, symbolizing speech) and meanings (the light bulb on the left, symboliz Ing an idea). In the figure, the signal is acoustic, a speech sound. The signal ('ould take on other forms (it could be written, it could be gestural).
grammar and lexicon. Knowledge of such a system will give a speaker the ability to organize ideas into words and sentences, and sentences Into sequences of sounds. This special kind of knowledge is called tacit (or implicit) knowledge, to distinguish it from explicit knowledge, such AS your knowledge of a friend's telephone number. Tacit knowledge is represented in the brain and is put to use, in this case, in the production And comprehension of sentences, but is not consciously available to the Individual who possesses it.
- The Distinction between Descriptive
and Prescriptive Grammar
The term grammar means something different to linguists than what it means to language teachers. People who teach language are interested In teaching a standardized use of language, the form of a language that is accepted in academic and business circles. We can refer to this type of language as conforming to prescriptive grammar. Knowing how to ndapt to the standard (prescribed) way of speaking or writing is very useful for people conducting a job interview or producing a formal piece of writing. People who study language, in contrast, are interested in what is called descriptive grammar, that is, the language system that underlies ordinary use. This is not an easy concept to grasp, so some examples are in order. Many people who speak English - especially young people or people talking in informal contexts - will say sentences like the following:
(1 ) Me and Mary went to the movies. (2) Mary and me went to the movies.
8 BEGINNING CONCEPTS^9
These sentences are generated by a person's internalized grammar of English, which licenses those constructions, but which would not gen erate an ungrammatical sentence like the following:
(3) *Me went to the movies.
(The asterisk, *, indicates that the sentence is badly formed.) The use of me in subject position is possible in English only with a compound sub ject (me and Mary or Mary and me), not with a singular one. A person who can say (1) and (2) but not (3) has a particular kind of grammar that a linguist would want to be able to describe. English teachers are not interested in describing the properties of people's underlying grammars; they want instead to make sure that their students know that certain ways of saying things are not consid ered "correct English." The prescriptive rules of English grammar require that I be used in subject position, whether it is singular (I went to the movies) or compound (Mary and I went to the movies). (English teachers would further object to (1) because it is considered impolite to place oneself before others.) Similarly, students are told that they should say It is I and This is she rather than It's me or This is her. However, most people - including the occasional English teacher, in casual speech - say It's me and This is her. The grammar that people develop during language acquisition is the (colloquial) grammar of other members of their language community. In fact, when people are acquiring the bulk of their linguistic ability in their first language (or languages) - a process that lasts from birth until a child is around 5 or 6 years of age - they have not even heard of linguistic correctness. There can be many differences between the sentences generated by that colloquial grammar and those sentences dictated by prescriptive grammar. For example, many people will answer the telephone with It's me or This is her, rather than It is I or This is she. It is interesting to note that learning the prescribed rules of usage for a particular lan guage is often a tedious and difficult process, and one that requires a great deal of conscious attention as well as explicit instruction, in con trast to the ease with which children acquire (implicitly and without instruction) the rules for the language or languages they acquire early on in life. The issue of correctness also arises when one considers dialectal variation. English, like most languages, takes on many different forms; the language varies geographically, by class, and by ethnicity. People from different English-speaking countries, from different areas within these countries, and from different racial and ethnic
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groups not only pronounce words differently, but also have profound and highly systematic lexical and syntactic differences from the transnational standard version of English, or from regional stand ards, like Standard American English or Standard British English. For instance, people from the south of the United States use the word l1!lrse, whereas people from the north use the word pocketbook to refer to the same thing. A feature of Southern American Vernacular English is "modal stacking/' such that it is perfectly grammatical to say the sentence in (4), in which the two modal verbs might and should are stacked.
(4) We might should pay our bills tonight.
Different dialects - their distinguishing properties, their origins, and their development over time - are of great interest to linguists. So-called "standard" English, spoken by people like network news casters who have been trained to use it, is considered to be the ideal form of the language, but it is actually spoken by very few people. The fact is that most people speak some sort of non-standard variety of English, some coming closer than others to the idealized standard form. Linguists do not take a position on whether there should be a standard version of a language or on what form the prescriptive rules of the grammar should take. Yet language with prescriptive grammar guiding usage in formal contexts is a fact of life in modem society. Since business and professional communities ascribe to the ideat most people would be well advised to become consciously aware of the dif ferences between the colloquial version of English acquired naturally by children (the language that linguists are interested in describing) and the standardized form of the language that will get someone a good job or an A+ on an essay exam. It is a mistake, however, to believe that there is anything inherently better about the set of sentences acceptable based on the prescriptive grammar of a language compared to those sentences generated by the grammar acquired naturally and unconsciously. Unfortunately, non-standard varieties of English are generally stigmatized, even by the very people who speak those varie ties (Preston 1998), and are often mistakenly seen as reflecting lack of intelligence or education. Yet all human languages have variations that extend across their speakers, so if one considers a naturally occur ring linguistic characteristic to be good, any deviations from the lin guistic norm are wonderful or at the very least, normal. The point is that linguists are interested in describing people's grammars and dia lects, and psycholinguists are interested in understanding how those
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of speech. Morphological rules and syntactic rules are involved in creating the structural organization of words and sentences, that is, the relationships between words and phrases in sentences. (Chapter 2 describes the basic operations of these various rule systems, as well as the organization of the lexicon.) It^ is a fundamental concept in^ psy~ cholinguistics that the meaning of a sentence is a function of the meaning of individual words and how those words are organized structurally. People are consciously aware of many^ elements of^ lan~ guage - like consonants or vowels, syllables, and words - but they tend not to be aware of sentence structure. When one reads in the pop ular press that some subculture, like teenagers or video gamers, has a different "language," it usually turns out that this "language" differs from English only in that it has some special vocabulary items or some specialized pronunciation features. People are probably not as aware of sentence structure as they are of sounds and words, because sentence structure is abstract in a way that sounds and words are not. The acoustic signal of a recorded sentence has properties that reflect the consonants and vowels it carries (more on this phenomenon in Chapter 5). Also, though they are not usually pronounced in isolation, words are generally written with spaces around them in most of the world's writing systems. In contrast to sounds and words, syntactic structure is not represented in the spoken or written signal. At the same time, sentence structure is a central aspect of every sentence. Though it has no physical reality, sentence structure has psychological reality: it must be represented by the speaker and recovered by the hearer in order for the meaning of a sentence to be conveyed. In other words, the meaning of a sentence depends on the structural organiza tion of the sentence's words. When a person sets out to learn a new language, something usually done in school, the task is frequently conceptualized as memorizing new vocabulary. Language learners quickly realize, though, that struc ture is just as important a feature of a new language as is its vocabulary. Indeed, bilinguals usually have a better sense of language structure than monolinguals, because they are accustomed to noticing that ambi guities in one language are not parallel in the other, for example, and that word-by-word translations usually do not work. All of this makes bilinguals more consciously aware of sentence structure than are mono linguals. We can appreciate the importance of sentence structure by looking at examples within a single language. For instance, in English, the same set of words can convey different meanings if they are arranged in dif ferent ways. Consider the following:
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(5) The senators objected to the plans proposed by the generals. (6) The senators proposed the plans objected to by the generals.
The meaning of the sentence in (5)^ is^ quite different from that of (6), even though the only difference is the position of the words objected to and proposed. Although both sentences contain exactly the same words, the words are structurally related to each other differently; it^ is those differences in structure that account for the difference in meaning. The same ten words could be combined in such a way that they would have no structure and no meaning:
(7) The to plans senators objected proposed the by generals the.
An unstructured collection of words does not convey meaning, and the same collection of words can mean different thingS depending upon their organization. A person who knew only a lexicon, without a prin cipled system to combine the words into sentences, could get some ideas across, but would lack a system of sufficient precision to convey more than just some simple thoughts. Another way to get a sense of how meaning depends upon sentence structure is to see how the same string of words in the same linear order can convey two different meanings, depending upon the abstract structure assigned to them. Consider the structurally ambiguous sentence in (8):
(8) The man saw the boy with the binoculars.
The sentence can mean either that the man saw the boy by means of the binoculars or that the man saw a boy who had the binoculars. Thus, with the binoculars is associated either with the verb saw or with the noun boy. Figure 1.2 illustrates the structural differences associated with each of the two meanings of (8), using tree diagrams to spell out the struc tural (hierarchical) relationships between the words for the two mean ings of the sentence. In the top tree in Figure 1.2, with the binoculars is a prepositional phrase (PP) completely separate from the noun phrase (NP) that contains the noun boy. In contrast, in the bottom tree, the PP with the binoculars is grouped inside the NP that contains boy. The struc tures illustrated in Figure 1.2 reflect the difference in meaning that dis tinguishes the two interpretations of the sentence, namely, with the binoculars tells us the instrument used by the man to see the boy (top tree),
14 BEGINNING CONCEPTS 15
(a) S
NP VP
{r,~ The man saw Oat N P NP I I I ~ the boy with Det N I I the binoculars (b) ~
NP /' "vp ~ ~ ~ ~p
De'i r.~ I uw" ~ The man / '" P NP
OJ i I ~ the boy (^) with Del N I I the binoculars
Figure 1.2 Abstract structures associated with the two meanings of the struc turally ambiguous sentence The man saw the boy with the binoculars. Focus on the different location for the prepositional phrase (the shaded node labeled PP), with the binoculars, in each of the two structures.
or conveys information about which boy was seen, namely the one with binoculars (bottom tree). The crucial difference is that the node labeled PP (which dominates the prepositional phrase, with the binoculars) attaches directly to the VP node in the top tree, but to the NP node in the bottom tree. The structures in Figure 1.2, like the ones that will appear elsewhere in this book, are not constructed with the type of detail a linguist would use. When linguists draw representations of the structures of a sen tence, such theoretical objects take on a level of detail- like a drawing of a molecular structure by a biochemist - that goes well beyond our needs in this book. We will use simplified graphic representations, illustrating only the particular aspects of sentence structure that need to be focused on. The structural elements in Figure 1.2 will be described in more detail in Chapter 2.
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- linguistic Competence and linguistic
Perfonnance
A grammar and a lexicon are those components of language that allow sounds and meanings to be paired. When people know a lan guage, they know its grammar and its lexicon. This knowledge is called linguistic competence. Linguistic competence is a technical term, different from the usual meaning of the word competence. Being competent at something usually means that a person has adequate abilities to perform an action with skill, but that is not what is meant by linguistic competence. Linguistic competence has no evaluative connotation; it simply refers to the knowledge of language that is in a person's brain (or mind), knowledge that provides a system for pair ing sound and meaning. Linguistic performance, in contrast, is the use of such knowledge in the actual processing of sentences, by which we mean their production and comprehension. Typically, linguists are concerned with deSCribing linguistic competence and psycholin guists are concerned with describing linguistic performance. Beyond basic sentence processing, psycholinguists are also concerned with the actual use of language. After a sentence is processed, it is stored in memory and combined with other sentences to form conversations and narratives. The description of how language is actually used is called pragmatics, a topic we address in Chapter 8. It is important to distinguish between the grammatical and pragmatic aspects of a par ticular linguistic event. For example, let us return to the structurally ambiguous sentence in (8). The sentence can have two distinct mean ings, each of which is described by a different structural representa tion, like those shown in Figure 1.2. These two structures are made available by the grammar and conform to a number of syntactic rules. If this sentence is actually used by a speaker and understood by a hearer, only one of the two meanings will be the one intended by the speaker and only one of the two meanings (hopefully the same one!) will be recovered by the hearer. Which meaning is intended or recov ered will be a purely pragmatic issue, determined by the situation, the participants in the conversation, the function of the communica tive exchange, and so on. The grammar is completely indifferent to the speaker's intent or to the hearer's recovery of the message. The grammar simply provides structures that are available for the encoding of meaning in sentences. The actual use of those sentences in conversation is a function of encoding and decoding processes and pragmatics.
18 BEGINNING^ CONCEPTS^19
J,l1idII 0'0' •. 1I!<oo!t 11Ij<. oo'::'':' ..~ cc ..o_ ......._:n!<IbdY ... . .. .o ........... _.
Figure 1.4 Wavefonn for the sentence Linda loves the melody, illustrating graphically the continuous nature of the speech signal. The superimposed ver tical lines mark the approximate locations for word boundaries. The word boundaries are not particularly salient, and neither are the boundaries between the consonants and vowels that make up the words.
In fact, even the phonological representation of a sentence is far removed from the properties of the acoustic signal. The phonological representation can be thought of as an idealization of the physical speech sounds. The abstract representation is made up of discrete phonological units (consonants and vowels, syllables, and higher order rhythmic units, like prosodic words and intonational phrases). The physical signal itself is very different, however. The portions that correspond to abstract phonological units overlap, and the words run together; this is illustrated in Figure 1.4, which shows that the wave form for an utterance is continuous. The speaker may be speaking rapidly and with an unfamiliar accent, with chewing gum in her mouth and with a radio playing in the background, all of which will affect the signal, making it measurably different from a signal for the same sentence produced slowly by a native speaker with no gum in her mouth and in a quiet room. The relationship between the continu ous (and perhaps very noisy) physical signal the hearer receives and the neatly structured units of the idealized phonological representa tion he must reconstruct is not at all direct. A complex set of mental processing mechanisms must consult the hearer's grammar and lexi con in order to reconstruct a series of linguistic representations, result ing in the recovery of the speaker's meaning. Researchers think that those mental processes are executed by neurophysiological opera tions that are specialized for the perception of speech as a linguistic object. In every modality people make the distinction between the actual stimulus (the physical signal) that impinges on our eyes or ears and the percept that the brain constructs when we interpret that stimulus.
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I I I I I I I II ( ) :( );
~
I I
< (^) I kI I , II ,I II
Figure 1.5 Muller-Lyer illusion. In the figure on the left, two horizontal lines appear to be different lengths, the one on the bottom seeming longer than the one on the top. On the right, the exact copy of that figure demonstrates that the two horizontal lines are in fact of identical length.
A stimulus is never consciously available to us; what we are aware of is the mental percept that the stimulus gives rise to. An example of this process can be illustrated by viewing optical illusions, like that shown in Figure 1.5. With the Muller-Lyer illusion (Muller-Lyer 1889), in the left panel of the figure, the stimulus that actually falls on our retinas contains two horizontal lines of equal length, but we perceive the bottom line to be longer than the line on the top. The percept of relative length depends not just on the actual length of the lines, but also on the context in which they occur. The fact that these lines are adjoined by angles pointing in different directions affects our perceptual interpreta tion of their length. Perceiving a linguistic representation based on the stimulus of a speech signal requires the hearer to have linguistic competence. Knowledge of language is necessary for a person to reconstruct, and therefore perceive, the phonological representation for the speech signal, which then unlocks the sequence of words and in tum gives way to building the syntactic structure for the sentence. Without lin guistic knowledge, a hearer would be unable to perceive anything other than a jumble of disorganized sounds. For example, dogs can be excel lent communicators, but they have no knowledge of language, so when they hear speech, they may recognize the acoustic signal associated with their names and a number of familiar commands, but that is all. Animals "understand" what we say to them through our tone of voice, body language, and gaze. For humans, understanding a sentence involves very different processes: the organization of sounds, words, and ultimately sentences derives from human knowledge of language and takes on the form of mental representations reconstructed, quite indirectly, from the physical speech signal.
1.0 ""I'IINNINO CONfI'PTS^21
- Origins of Contemporary Psycho1inguistics
Contemporary psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field combin ing the two disciplines of linguistics and experimental cognitive psy chology. Obviously, this union will be successful only to the extent that the two subfields have compatible views of language. When the field of psycholinguistics was first developed, this compatibility was indeed the case, just as it is now. What is interesting is that those views have changed dramatically over the last few decades. The inception of the field of psycholinguistics occurred in the summer of 1951 when, at a meeting of the Social Science Research Council at Cornell University, a committee on Linguistics and Psychology was formed, with Charles Osgood as its chairman (Kess 1992). Subsequently, in the summer of 1953, a seminar was held at Indiana University in conjunction with the Linguistic Institute. This seminar formed the basis of the first book with psycholinguistics in its title, Psycholinguistics: A Survey o/Theory and Research Problems (Osgood and Sebeok 1954). At that time linguists focused on a taxonomic analy sis of languages, which meant that they had as their primary goal the classification of observable aspects of language. When linguists of that era approached a new language, their method of analysis was to listen to the speakers of the language, figure out what the phonological units were, and then classify them further into higher-level categories. This method fit in well with the view of language held by psychologists, which was that speech was simply a type of motor behavior exhibited by people. The behaviorist psychology of that day took the domain of psychology to be behavior (of people or animals), rather than mental operations of any kind. They believed that all behaviors could be explained as associated (linked) chains of smaller behaviors. Thus, speech was regarded as behavioral units of sound combined into words, which were then associated to form phrases, and so on. Acquisition in the child was thought to be the process by which cor rectly associated speech behaviors were built up by rewarding the desired ones and failing to reward the undesired sequences. Behaviorists believed that this system of learning, known as conditioning, was common to all organisms, and that all organisms learned everything the same way. All learning consisted of the acquisition of behavioral routines, and all behavioral routines were acquired by the same princi ples of leaming. The common thread that bound linguistics and psy chology at the middle of the twentieth century, then, was the view that everything interesting about language is directly observable in the
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physical speech signal. This view of language was later determined to be fundamentally flawed, and is diametrically opposed to the view of language presented in this book. There were, of course, linguists and psychologists who saw difficul ties with the traditional view. The famous linguist Edward Sapir wrote a paper entitled "The psychological reality of phonemes," suggesting that the mental representation of language should be addressed rather than focus exclusively on its physical representation (Sapir 1949). The psychologist Karl Lashley wrote the now-classic paper "The problem of serial order in behavior," questioning the explanatory power of associa tive chaining (Lashley 1951). The general view of linguists and psy chologists at this time, however, was of language as a system of discrete behaviors that could be observed, classified, and understood in the individual as chains of associated behaviors, created by conditioning in childhood. These principles of conditioning were taken to be general principles of learning for all organisms. This view oflanguage was challenged, beginning in the late 1950s, by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Noam Chomsky, who proposed an entirely new way to think of human language, an approach that has been adopted by contemporary linguists and psy chologists, and scholars in related fields, and is essentially the view adopted in this book. Chomsky (1959) said that speech should not be the object of study for those who want to understand human lan guage. Instead, the object of study should be the set of rules - in the mind (which is really an abstract term to refer to the brain) - that create sentences and underlie observable speech. This is the gram matical system, and it is not observable in the same way that speech is observable (Chomsky 1975). Nonetheless, it is possible to test hypotheses about the properties of the grammatical system and thereby discover the set of rules that constitute people's knowledge of their language. Children acquire language as effortlessly as they do, not because there are any general principles ofleaming that apply to all organisms (as argued by behaviorist psychologists), but because this internal system of rules is biologically based in the human spe cies (Chomsky 1975). Obviously, the Chomskyan conception of language was totally incompatible with the behaviorist view. A few psychologists, includ ing George Miller (1965), were instantly aware of the implications of Chomsky'S ideas to the psychological study of language and its acqui sition. These psychologists were primarily responsible for bringing those ideas to the attention of the psychological community. In 1961, the linguist Sol Saporta published a volume sponsored by the Social
