Pieces of Minds in Psycholinguistics: Steven Pinker,Kenneth Wexler,and Noam Chomsky A Series of Interviews Conducted by Jean A. Rondal

This is the third of a series of interviews featuring Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, and Kenneth Wexler, three giant figures in the fields of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science. The first two interviews appeared in earlier issues of this journal (Vol. 28, Issue 4, pp. 459–480; Vol. 29, Issue 1, pp. 85–104). Kenneth Wexler teaches and does his experimental work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is well known for his innovative work on language learnability (i.e. the problem of how correct linguistic representations can be attained given the limited data available to the child), which has led to considerable changes in linguistic and psycholinguistic theories and research orientations. More recently, Professor Wexler (in association with Hagit Borer) developed what they call a maturation theory of syntax, suggesting basically, in opposition to the continuity hypothesis, that the formal principles available to the child to fix his grammar mature (i.e. different principles are available at different stages of development). In the interview, Kenneth Wexler speaks about his learnability work, its origins, and how he sees linguistic and psycholinguistic research and theories today. He comments on questions about his maturational point of view in syntax development. The interview took place in Irvine (California) in May of 1988, and was subsequently revised. I am very grateful to Ken Wexler for his kind collaboration. Along with the text of the interview, the reader will find some information on Professor Wexler's background as well as a selected list of his publications.     

Gatekeepers and the “Chomskian revolution”

The widely believed folk history of the confrontation between an established neo-Bloomfieldian generation and the revolutionary advances of transformational grammarians bears little relation to the open access to publication that Noam Chomsky encountered in the 1950s. Although a rhetoric of revolutionary conflict appeared, it cannot be attributed to attempts by the established generation to suppress new ideas, as in Thomas Kuhn's morphology of scientific revolutions. The central neo-Bloomfieldian gatekeeper, Bernard Bloch, fostered the diffusion of Chomsky's ideas and promoted the careers of Chomsky and Robert Lees. Other prominent neo-Bloomfieldians, regarding Chomsky as continuing the work of his teacher Zellig Harris, were sympathetic to his ideas and ready to concede his advances in syntactic theory. Nonetheless, Chomsky and his followers adopted an aggressive stance, denying the value of preceding work in structuralist linguistics. Although the case is anomalous for Kuhn's theory, it fits a sociological theory of scientific revolutions.     

Are rules and modules really necessary for explaining language?

Over the past few years Steven Pinker has argued that although some aspects of language may be more associational, and therefore properly modeled in connectionist networks, for the most part human language is still best characterized as a modularized set of rulesymbol systems. In support of his claim, Pinker garners a broad array of clinical, experimental, and observational data from neurology, psychology, and linguistics. Those data, unfortunately, are not compelling because they do not support his position uniquely. In this paper, I show how each of his arguments is compatible with alternative interpretations. I argue, moreover, that in focusing on certain details of connectionist models Pinker and his colleagues actually overlooked both the most serious deficiencies of the connectionist approach and its most significant theoretical contribution. I conclude by sketching briefly some emerging alternatives to connectionism which avoid those deficiencies while retaining its strengths over the rule-symbol systems of linguistic theory.This research was funded in part by University of Idaho Seed Grant 681-Y304.     

Exploring Habermas’s Critical Engagement with Chomsky

This article explores Jürgen Habermas’s critical employment of Noam Chomsky’s insights and the philosophical assumptions that motivate or justify Habermas’s early enrichment of his universal pragmatics with material drawn from generative linguistics. The investigation of the influence Chomsky’s theory has exerted on Habermas aims to clarify what Habermas means by universalism, reason embedded in language and the universal core of communicative competence—away from various misinterpretations of Habermas’s rationalist commitments and from reductive, conventionalist readings of his notion of consensus. Much against hasty and unexamined incriminations of Habermasian pragmatics, a turn to a neglected and scantly researched topic such as the philosophical affinity of some Chomskian and Habermasian themes (and to the philosophical justification of the points where Chomsky and Habermas part company) will retrieve the kind of depth and nuance that may lead us beyond facile and simplistic understandings of what discursively reaching consensus might mean from a Habermasian point of view.     

从使动句加工的功能性磁共振成像看中文句法加工的独立性

大脑中的句法加工模式是神经认知科学研究的重要课题, 而句法加工是否存在独立性一直是研究者争论较多的问题。有形态标记的英语等印欧语语言的句法可以通过形态变化表现, 而汉语不具备与印欧语有明确对应关系的形态变化, 因此汉语的句法变化几乎不能通过外在形态标记。通过3T场强功能性磁共振成像, 以汉语语义等值使动句为研究材料, 对不依赖形态变化来标记句法变化的汉语句法加工的独立性进行了初步研究。结果显示, 大脑左侧额叶对于汉语句法加工具有重要的作用, 尤其是大脑左侧额叶中回的BA44区和额叶下回的BA47区都对汉语句法加工较为敏感, 这表明即使不通过形态改变来标记句法变化, 汉语句子加工中的句法加工仍然可以被分离, 句法独立性的加工主要由大脑左侧额叶中回及大脑左侧额叶下回等脑区承担, 大脑左侧颞叶并未参与汉语句法的独立性加工。     

Against Thatcherite Linguistics: Rule‐following,Speech Communities,and Biolanguage

According to Chomsky and his followers, language as a biological phenomenon is a property of individual minds and brains; its status as a social phenomenon is merely epiphenomenal and not a proper object of scientific study. On a rival view, the individual's biological capacity for language cannot be properly understood in isolation from the linguistic environment, which it both depends on for its operation and—in collaboration with other speakers—builds and shapes for future generations. I argue here for the rival view by demonstrating firstly its greater consonance with several themes in current biological theory, and secondly its ability to answer two well‐known philosophical challenges to generative linguistics due to Quine and Kripke.     

Swimming and Speaking Spanish

The dominant view of the status of knowledge of language is that it is theoretical or what Gilbert Ryle called knowledge-that. Defenders of this thesis may differ among themselves over the precise nature of the knowledge which underlies language, as for example, Michael Dummett and Noam Chomsky differ over the issue of unconscious knowledge; however, they all agree that acquisition, understanding and use of language require that the speaker have access to a theory of language. In this paper, I argue that this view is mistaken. Knowledge of language is properly seen as practical knowledge, knowledge-how. My target is Michael Dummett’s treatment of theory of meaning in The Seas of Language. If my argument goes through, underlying assumptions about the nature of cognition as computational must be adjusted to allow for other forms of knowledge, which are arguably more basic, and which underlie knowledge-that.     

Sources of History for “A Psychology of Verbal Communication”

There is a standard version of the history of modern mainstream psycholinguistics that emphasizes an extraordinary explosion of research in mid twentieth century under the guidance and leadership of George A. Miller and Noam Chomsky. The narrative is cast as a dramatic shift away from behavioristic principles and toward mentalistic principles based largely on transformational linguistics. A closer view of the literature diminishes the historical importance of behaviorism, shows a prevailing “written language bias” (Linell in The written language bias in linguistics: Its nature, origins and transformations, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 4) in psycholinguistic research, and elevates some theoretical and empirical thinking of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries on language and language use to a far more important role than has heretofore been acknowledged. In keeping with the theoretical and methodological perspective of the present article, it is particularly appropriate that the German philologist Philipp Wegener be “given his due in the annals of linguistic sciences” (Koerner 1991, p. VI*). In his (1885/1991) Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (Investigations regarding the fundamental questions of the life of language; our translation), he began his philological research with the investigation of actual speaking in everyday settings rather than with analyses of purely formal structure. Moreover, he emphasized understanding language and localized this function in the listener. Compatible with Wegener’s own investigations is another aspect of speaking that has been most seriously neglected throughout the history of research on the psychology of verbal communication. For him, as well as for Esper (In C. Murchison [Ed.], A handbook of social psychology, Clark University Press, Worchester, MA, 1935), the basic and primary genre of dialogical discourse was not ongoing conversation, but the occasional use of speech in association with other activities. Both Bühler (Sprachtheorie, Fischer, Stuttgart, 1934/1982) and Wittgenstein (Philosophische Untersuchungen/Philosophical investigations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1958) have also emphasized the importance of the genre of occasional speaking. The article concludes with a discussion of historical shifts in the relationship between psychology and linguistics.     

Speaker intuitions

I compare the tasks that Noam Chomsky and W. V. Quine assign the grammarian and point out that in many cases where Chomsky sees a question of fact Quine sees only a question of convenience. I argue that these differences are attributable, at least in part, to a difference in view concerning the data. Chomsky relies mostly on a speaker's reports of his linguistic intuitions. Quine finds this source methodologically moot. I develop a series of arguments that draw on Quine's theory of radical translation to defend Quine's doubts.     

James Astor in conversation with Warren Colman

In this interview with Warren Colman, James Astor speaks about his development as a Jungian analyst from his own experience of personal analysis in the 1960s to his recent retirement from clinical practice. The discussion covers his long association with Michael Fordham, the child analytic training at the SAP, the infant observation seminars with Fordham and Gianna Henry through which Fordham was able to make new discoveries about infant development, his experience of supervision with Donald Meltzer and the development of his own thinking through a series of papers on the analytic process, supervision and the relation between language and truth. The interview concludes with reflections about the legacy of Michael Fordham and the future of analytic work.     

A Difference of Some Consequence Between Conventions and Rules

Lewis’s view of the way conventions are passed on may have some especially interesting consequences for the study of language. I’ll start by briefly discussing agreements and disagreements that I have with Lewis’s general views on conventions and then turn to how linguistic conventions spread. I’ll compare views of main stream generative linguistics, in particular, Chomsky’s views on how syntactic forms are passed on, with the sort of view of language acquisition and language change advocated by usage-based or construction grammars, which seem to fit better with Lewis’s ideas. Then I will illustrate the interest of Lewis’s perspective on the dissemination of conventions with a variety of linguistic examples.     

Parallel constraint-based generative theories of language

A re-evaluation of the goals and techniques of generative grammar since the mid-1960s suggests that its mentalistic/biological program for describing language is still sound and has been borne out by subsequent developments. Likewise, the idea of a generative system of combinatorial rules has led to a tremendous expansion of our understanding of linguistic phenomena. However, certain fundamental features of the versions of generative grammar based on Chomsky’s work prevent the theory from making deep liaisons with related fields such as language processing and neuroscience. Perhaps the most prominent of these is the assumption that all creative aspects of language stem from syntactic structure. In this article, I propose a model of generative grammar that generalizes features of several, alternative, non-Chomskyan generative frameworks. In this model, language is seen as composed of three independent generative components (phonological, syntactic, and semantic/conceptual structure), whose respective structures are placed in correspondence by ‘interface components’. Besides being able to incorporate a host of purely linguistic facts, this view leads to a more direct relationship between the theory of grammar and the theory of lexical and grammatical processing.     

The other comes to teach me: A review of recent Levinas publications

This review was begun as a cooperative effort with the late Professor Steven S. Schwarzschild, of Washington University. Although he had left it in my hands several months before his untimely death, I am sure that I could not have written it without his criticism and help. I dedicate it to his memory.     

试论乔姆斯基对认知心理学发展的重要贡献

乔姆斯基是当代著名的语言学家和公共知识分子,但他对认知心理学的贡献,却很少为学术界所研究。实际上,乔姆斯基是两次认知革命的代表性人物。他对斯金纳行为主义的批评为认知心理学的发展扫除了障碍;他所提出的哲学思想和语言学理论已成为认知心理学的一个重要理论源头;而其创立的转换-生成语法理论,为揭示人类的心智和语言能力的形成提供了一种理想的解释框架。在两次认知革命的学术转型历程中,乔姆斯基的理论一直影响着认知科学家们不断地探索前行。     

The evolution of the language faculty: clarifications and implications

In this response to Pinker and Jackendoff's critique, we extend our previous framework for discussion of language evolution, clarifying certain distinctions and elaborating on a number of points. In the first half of the paper, we reiterate that profitable research into the biology and evolution of language requires fractionation of "language" into component mechanisms and interfaces, a non-trivial endeavor whose results are unlikely to map onto traditional disciplinary boundaries. Our terminological distinction between FLN and FLB is intended to help clarify misunderstandings and aid interdisciplinary rapprochement. By blurring this distinction, Pinker and Jackendoff mischaracterize our hypothesis 3 which concerns only FLN, not "language" as a whole. Many of their arguments and examples are thus irrelevant to this hypothesis. Their critique of the minimalist program is for the most part equally irrelevant, because very few of the arguments in our original paper were tied to this program; in an online appendix we detail the deep inaccuracies in their characterization of this program. Concerning evolution, we believe that Pinker and Jackendoff's emphasis on the past adaptive history of the language faculty is misplaced. Such questions are unlikely to be resolved empirically due to a lack of relevant data, and invite speculation rather than research. Preoccupation with the issue has retarded progress in the field by diverting research away from empirical questions, many of which can be addressed with comparative data. Moreover, offering an adaptive hypothesis as an alternative to our hypothesis concerning mechanisms is a logical error, as questions of function are independent of those concerning mechanism. The second half of our paper consists of a detailed response to the specific data discussed by Pinker and Jackendoff. Although many of their examples are irrelevant to our original paper and arguments, we find several areas of substantive disagreement that could be resolved by future empirical research. We conclude that progress in understanding the evolution of language will require much more empirical research, grounded in modern comparative biology, more interdisciplinary collaboration, and much less of the adaptive storytelling and phylogenetic speculation that has traditionally characterized the field.     

A TRINITARIAN GRAMMAR OF SIN

This essay offers a critical reading of David Kelsey's hamartiology in Eccentric Existence. I elucidate Kelsey's “trinitarian grammar of sin,” which charts how human lives characteristically “miss the mark” of God's creating, consummating, and reconciling ways of relating to us. Kelsey uses this dynamic pattern of divine relating to illuminate the appropriate responses of the Christian life—faith, hope, and love—and their fundamental distortions. I commend three major contributions of Kelsey's hamartiology: his parsing of the relationship between sin and moral evil, his overturning of modernity's anthropocentric paradigm of sin, and his reconstruction of original sin. I conclude with three clusters of questions relating to: first, Kelsey's root paradigm of sin as idolatry, second, his use of impurity and stain language to describe original sin, and third, what is at stake in crafting theological anthropology in the analytical style of Eccentric Existence.     

An overview of the controversial issues in the psychology of language and thought

This article is an overview of the most important controversial issues in the field of psycholinguistics. Seven questions were posed in a dialogue interview to each of the following distinguished scholars in the field: Noam Chomsky, Charles Osgood, Jean Piaget, Ulrich Neisser, and Marcel Kinsbourne. The authors have provided a critical discussion of the issues as well as a summary of the different points of view of each of the above mentioned individuals. The complete dialogues will be published together in a forthcoming book entitledDialogues in the Psychology of Language and Thought.This paper was originally written in collaboration with G. Voyat for and will appear as the introduction of a forthcoming book entitledDialogues in the Psychology of Language and Thought, R. W. Rieber, ed. (Plenum, New York, 1981). The reader should consult the above-mentioned book for a complete picture of the dialogues discussed in this paper.     

Acquisition, learning, or development of language? Skinner's "Verbal Behavior" revisited

In 1957, Skinner, in his "Verbal Behavior", proposed an explanation on how a language is learned. In 1959, Chomsky strongly argued the non-learnability of language, establishing in the field of developmental psycholinguistics the substitution of the term "learning" for that of "acquisition". Currently, the constructivist models describe language acquisition as a process of ontogenetic, gradual, complex, and adaptive change. This new theoretical framework has been especially useful for rereading Verbal Behavior because it facilitates recovering the Skinnerian learning mechanisms. This can be observed in the recent research trends that recapture reinforcement and imitation (echoic responses), although they are now located in the initial phases of the process and are included in a cognitive dynamic that, by gradually increasing its complexity, can achieve grammar. The new constructivist theoretical framework, by retrieving the functional and referential aspects of language, can also take advantage of the classic Skinnerian proposal about the pragmatic types of verbal behavior, providing it with new meaning.     

SCIENCE AS SALVATION: GEORGE LAKOFF AND STEVEN PINKER AS SECULAR POLITICAL THEOLOGIANS

This article critically analyzes two leading cognitive scientists, George Lakoff and Steven Pinker, as competing secular political “theologians”. The idea of Science as savior is at the heart of the set of stories modernity tells about itself. The modern world, it is assumed, has left the age of religion and reached the age of Science. Lakoff and Pinker, who advocate opposing moral and political worldviews, make their claims on the basis of their scientific work, but it is implicit narratives and ontologies that give force to their broader views about morality and politics.     

Lexical derivation

A recent point of controversy in linguistics has been the correct treatment of derived nouns such asrefusal, destruction, andeageness. Two positions, the transformationalist approach and the lexicalist approach, have been proposed to account for the relationship between these nouns and their base forms (refuse, destroy, eager). The two approaches differ over how they resolve an incompatibility among the basic assumptions of transformational grammar. Positive linguistic arguments given by Chomsky (1970) favor the lexicalist account. Empirical predictions are suggested from the application of the two approaches to psycholinguistic situations. Experimental findings are reviewed, including those from a research program contrasting lexical derivation and the attributes of imageability and concreteness. The results fail to support either position, and throw doubt upon the idea that there is a genuine phenomenon to be investigated. This gives rise to a dilemma over the relationship between linguistics and psychology, which may be resolved either by rejecting the conception of linguistics as the explanation of linguistic intuitions or by rejecting the notion of a direct link between linguistics and psychology.