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CHAPTER I
The Psychology of Language
S. JAY SAMUELS*
In the three years since the previous REVIEW,we have witnessed continued
efforts by linguists to describe the knowledge which a native speaker has
about the structure of his language and by psychologists to describe how
that knowledge described by linguists is acquired and utilized. This period
has also been one of continued evaluation of theories of language acquisition, controversy regarding the relative contribution of heredity and learning to language acquisition, added understanding of developmental sequences in language learning, and application of findings from the
psychology of language to problems of school learning. An old survey
of theory and research literature has been reprinted (Osgood and Sebeock,
1965), two reviews of recent research literature have been prepared
(Diebold, 1964; Ervin-Tripp and Slobin, 1966), and a characterization
of the new field has been given in nontechnical language by one of its
founders (Miller, 1964).
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OF LANGUAGE
Psycholinguistics
Brown (1966) and Brown and Bellugi (1964) described three processes
in the acquisition of syntax. In imitation and reduction, the child imitates
what the parent says but systematicallyreduces the length of the utterance.
The constraint on length seems to be related to the child's limited memory
span. Adults stress high-information-carryingwords in speaking, such as
nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and these are retained in imitation. Words
which communicatelittle information, such as inflections, auxiliary verbs,
articles, prepositions, and conjunctions, are not stressed and are not
retained in imitation. Thus, the child is helped in focusing his efforts on
learning the essential features of the utterance.
A second process is imitation and expansion. Here the mother imitates
the child's utterance but expands and corrects it. For example, the child
says, "There go one"; the mother says, "There goes one." The child may
then imitate the mother's corrected version of his sentence. Although the
adult often speaks ungrammatically, in expanding, the parent uses simple,
short, grammatical sentences, the kind the child will use in a year.
Although McNeill (1966) suggested that the slower rate of linguistic
development of lower class children may result from the fact that lower
class parents expand their child's speech less often than do middle class
parents, there is no evidence that expansions are necessary for learning
grammar. Cazden (1965) did not find expansion training superior to
other forms of verbal feedback in improving the language of culturally
deprived children.
The third process involves the induction of the underlying structure
of the language. Certain errors (foots, digged) reflect the child's attempt
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to induce regularities from the speech of adults. Menyuk (1964) emphasized that novel sentenceswhich childrengenerateindicate their use of rules.
According to Bellugi (1965) the best (and classic) indicator of linguistic development is sentence length. Bellugi divided early language
acquisition into three stages. In Stage One, sentences averaged two morphemes in length by approximatelythe second birthday. Braine (1963b)
and Miller and Ervin (1964) described the child's first grammatical twoword sentences. The initial word is called a pivot and consists of a small
class of frequently used words (e.g., see, that) whose position has been
learned. The class of words immediatelyfollowing (e.g., pretty, baby, arm)
is called an open class and consists of the child's entire vocabulary minus
some pivots. This same construction predominates in early speech of
Russian, German, Japanese, and Polish children (Slobin, 1967). Weir
(1962) and Slobin (1965) noted that English- and Russian-speakingchildren "practice" speaking by holding the pivot constant and substituting
words from the open class. Development of syntax, in part, consists of
setting up new classes of pivots using words which previously were in the
open class. Bellugi (1965) found that during the first stage of linguistic
development the child asks questions by means of rising intonation (see
hole?) and the use of wh-words (who that? why? why not?). At this stage
the child can neither produce nor respond appropriatelyto questions which
refer to the object of the verb (e.g., what did you hit?).
Bellugi (1965) found that children at Stage Two had a mean age of 29
months and produced sentences of an average length of 2.6 morphemes.
Pronouns, articles, modifiers, as well as some inflections were present.
Questions were introduced by wh-words (why not? who is it? what me
fold?) with pronouns present. With regard to comprehension, children
answered appropriatelyto most questions, including wh-object questions
(what do you hear? hear a duck.). Miller and Ervin (1964) noted that
mistakes during this period could be attributedto omissions (I'll turn ----water off), overgeneralizations(foots, digged), and use of doubly marked
forms (mine's).
At Stage Three, children had a mean age of 31 months and an average
utterance length of 3.6 morphemes (Bellugi, 1965). They were using
auxiliaries, noun and verb inflections, the regular past, and were not
limited to simple sentences. In constructing yes/no interrogatives, question intonations with inverted auxiliaries operate (I am silly. Am I silly?).
In asking wh-questions, the inverted auxiliary was not used (what the
words are doing?). The child was able to comprehend more complex
questions than in Stage Two. By age three, Russian- (Slobin, 1965) and
English-speaking children (Menyuk, 1963, 1964; McNeill, 1965) were
using all of the basic syntactic structures used by adults.
Conflicting reports of children's ability to comprehend, spontaneously
produce, and imitate sentences stem from differences in age of subjects
and length of sentences used. Fraser, Bellugi, and Brown (1963) used
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Clifton, Kurcz, and Jenkins (1965) used generalization of a motor response as an indicator of sentence similarity. They found that response
generalization occurred more frequently for sentences analyzed as being
closely related grammatically than for sentences not so closely related.
This work was elaborated for eight sentence types by Clifton and Odom
(1966), who showed that syntactic variables had similar systematic effects
in generalization, recall, and judged similarity.
The relationship between the syntactical form of a sentence and speed
of comprehensionwas investigated by Gough (1965) and Slobin (1966).
Both found that comprehensionlatency ran from shorter to greater in the
order: simple declarative, passive, negative, negative-passive. However,
by making sentences nonreversible (i.e., "Bill hit the door," as opposed to
"Bill hit Mary") so that it was clear which noun was subject and which
was object, Slobin found that reaction time was about as fast for passive
as for simple declarative and for negative-passive as for negative. The
interaction, in the Gough and Slobin studies, between a semantic component (true-false) and a syntactic component (affirmative-negative)emphasized the importanceof both factors in comprehension.
Other investigations focused on the role of syntactic variables on sentence recall. Mehler (1963) demonstratedthat when subjects were asked
to recall sentences upon which grammatical transformations had been
performed, they recalled simple declarative sentences best. Savin and
Perchonock (1965) investigated the amount of memory storage capacity
used in memorizing sentences of different syntactical form and found that
the least amount was used by simple declarative sentences while negatives
and passives required larger amounts. In both papers the authors suggested that in learning a sentence for recall, the semantic content of the
sentence is encoded in the simple declarative form plus a tag, the tag
indicating the original syntactical structure of the sentence.
Marks and Miller (1964) and Miller (1964) found that subjects could
recall meaningful sentences better than anomalous but syntactically correct
sentences, and syntactically correct sentences better than scrambled forms
of these sentences. They concluded that semantic and syntactic factors are
separate variables in verbal recall. Mehler and Miller (1964) studied
transfer effects in the learning of lists of sentences. They used a design in
which the subject learned list A, then list B, and was tested on list A. If
the interpolated list (B) was semantically similar to list A, the recall of
the semantic content of list A was facilitated. If list B was syntactically
dissimilar, it interfered with the recall of the syntactic structure of A.
They proposed a two-stage hypothesis for sentence learning. In Stage One
the semantic component is learned and in Stage Two the syntactical form
is acquired.
A series of studies by Rosenberg (1965) focused on the effect of grammatical and associative habits on incidental recall. When subjects were
required to recall adjective-noun, noun-adjective, adjective-adjective, and
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THE PSYCHOLOGY
PSYCHOLOGY OF
OF LANGUAGE
LANGUAGE
THE
noun-noun word pairs, recall was superior for adjective-noun and nounadjective pairs. In a second study where adjective-noun pairs which
varied in word-associationstrength had to be recalled, he found that word
pairs which had stronger associations were recalled better. Rosenberg
concluded that associative habits contributed to the greater ease of recall
of meaningful adjective-nounpairs.
Psychology
of Language
and School
Learning
Voiwne XXXVll,
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Volume
No. 2
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intelligence. Carroll (1965) claimed that when an individual has approximately equal proficiency in two languages, there is no good evidence that
such bilingualism retards intellectual development. Furthermore, according to Carroll, reports of scholastic retardation associated with bilingualism may usually be explained by the fact that the bilingual had been
instructed in a language he had not adequately mastered.
A Few Concluding
Comments
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LANGUAGE
THE PSYCHOLOGY
PSYCHOLOGY
OF
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