Tracing Chomsky's Legacy in Psycholinguistics A Voyage via the Galilean Investigative Approach

This article examines the profound impact of Noam Chomsky's methodological approach on the field of psycholinguistics, with a particular focus on his endorsement of the Galilean style of inquiry. Through a detailed exploration, it underscores how the Galilean method, characterized by empirical and mathematical investigation, shaped Chomsky's theories and research in psycholinguistics. The discussion extends to Chomsky and Witkowski's analysis of the Galilean style of inquiry, elucidating its contemporary relevance in modern linguistic research. Additionally, the article reflects on the enduring legacy of Chomsky's methodological stance in psycholinguistics and its significant contribution to understanding the inherent linguistic structures and innate cognitive capacities. Through a structured narrative, this article offers a comprehensive insight into Chomsky's influential journey in psycholinguistics, aiming to foster a deeper understanding of the methodological foundations that have propelled the field forward

Islands in the grammar? Standards of evidence

When considering how a complex system operates, the observable behavior depends upon both architectural properties of the system and the principles governing its operation. As a simple example, the behavior of computer chess programs depends upon both the processing speed and resources of the computer and the programmed rules that determine how the computer selects its next move. Despite having very similar search techniques, a computer from the 1990s might make a move that its 1970s forerunner would overlook simply because it had more raw computational power. From the naïve observer’s perspective, however, it is not superficially evident if a particular move is dispreferred or overlooked because of computational limitations or the search strategy and decision algorithm. In the case of computers, evidence for the source of any particular behavior can ultimately be found by inspecting the code and tracking the decision process of the computer. But with the human mind, such options are not yet available. The preference for certain behaviors and the dispreference for others may theoretically follow from cognitive limitations or from task-related principles that preclude certain kinds of cognitive operations, or from some combination of the two. This uncertainty gives rise to the fundamental problem of finding evidence for one explanation over the other. Such a problem arises in the analysis of syntactic island effects – the focu

The role of working memory and contextual constraints in children's processing of relative clauses

An auditory sentence comprehension task investigated the extent to which the integration of contextual and structural cues was mediated by verbal memory span with 32 English-speaking 6- to 8-year old children. Spoken relative clause sentences were accompanied by visual context pictures which fully (depicting the actions described within the relative clause) or partially (depicting several referents) met the pragmatic assumptions of relativisation. Comprehension of the main and relative clauses of centre-embedded and right-branching structures was compared for each context. Pragmatically-appropriate contexts exerted a positive effect on relative clause comprehension, but children with higher memory spans demonstrated a further benefit for main clauses. Comprehension for centre-embedded main clauses was found to be very poor, independently of either context or memory span. The results suggest that children have access to adult-like linguistic processing mechanisms, and that sensitivity to extra-linguistic cues is evident in young children and develops as cognitive capacity increases

Incidentals that build fluency: Optimal word processing and its implications for vocabulary acquisition.

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139797/1/OptimalWordProcessor.pd

Domain General Rule Abstraction in 8-month-old Infants

In language acquisition theory a crucial question centers on the degree of innate specialization for language learning. Over the past decade the importance of the ability to extract statistical information in both linguistic and non-linguistic domains has received considerable attention among linguists and cognitive scientists (Aslin et al. 1998; Saffran et al. 1996; Kirkham et al. 2002). It is also well known that language acquisition must involve more than just extracting co-occurrence frequencies between items. Marcus et al. (1999) propose that there is also a mechanism designed to extract abstract, “algebraic” rules from linguistic data, though to date there has been no published studies examining this mechanism in non-linguistic domains. This study sought to replicate the findings of Marcus et al. with non-linguistic auditory and visual input. Results from three experiments show that 8-month-old infants are able to learn such rules from both linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli. This is taken as evidence that a rule abstraction mechanism of the kind proposed by Marcus et al. is part of the larger repertoire of domain-general learning mechanisms. Advisors: Peter Culicover and Vladimir Sloutsk

Ever decreasing circles: speech production in semantic dementia

We explored the impact of a degraded semantic system on lexical, morphological and syntactic complexity in language production. We analysed transcripts from connected speech samples from eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched healthy speakers. The frequency distributions of nouns and verbs were compared for hand-scored data and data extracted using text-analysis software. Lexical measures showed the predicted pattern for nouns and verbs in hand-scored data, and for nouns in software-extracted data, with fewer low frequency items in the speech of the patients relative to controls. The distribution of complex morpho-syntactic forms for the SD group showed a reduced range, with fewer constructions that required multiple auxiliaries and inflections. Finally, the distribution of syntactic constructions also differed between groups, with a pattern that reflects the patients’ characteristic anomia and constraints on morpho-syntactic complexity. The data are in line with previous findings of an absence of gross syntactic errors or violations in SD speech. Alterations in the distributions of morphology and syntax, however, support constraint satisfaction models of speech production in which there is no hard boundary between lexical retrieval and grammatical encoding

A AQUISIÇÃO DA LINGUAGEM À LUZ DE UM PARADIGMA TEÓRICO DE COGNIÇÃO

Nos estudos de aquisição, é crescente o reconhecimento da relevância de se pensar esse processo a partir de um prisma teórico de cognição. No presente trabalho, desta forma, lançaremos luz sobre dois paradigmas de aquisição. Primeiramente, introduziremos o gerativismo chomskyano, calcado em bases biológicas da aquisição. Dando continuidade, detalharemos o Conexionismo, calcado nos achados das neurociências. Nossa meta, neste trabalho, não é apontar a supremacia de um paradigma específico, mas disponibilizar parâmetros de comparação entre os dois modelos, além de trazer à tona, aos olhos da ciência brasileira, o paradigma conexionista que ainda se encontra às margens dos estudos de aquisição.Palavras-chave: Aquisição da Linguagem. Gerativismo. Conexionismo.AbstractIn the realm of the acquisition studies the relevance of thinking the acquisition process through the light of a theoretical paradigm of cognition is growing. Therefore, in this paper we aim to throw some light on two acquisition paradigms. Firstly, we will introduce the chomskyan generativism, based on the biological basis of acquisition. After that, we will detail connectionism, based on the findings of neurosciences. Our aim is not to point out the supremacy of a specific model, but to provide benchmarks between two models. Besides, we want to bring to light the connectionist paradigm that is left aside in the Brazilian studies on acquisition.Keyword: Language Acquisition. Generativism. Connectionism

Thematic role predictability and planning affect word duration

It is known that acoustic variation is influenced by the predictability of words and the information that they represent. What is unknown is whether acoustic reduction is also influenced by the referential predictability of thematic roles. We tested this question in two production experiments, where speakers heard a sentence with goal/source arguments, e.g., “Lady Mannerly [source] gave a painting to Sir Barnes [goal],” and described a picture of a subsequent action, e.g., “Sir Barnes threw it in the closet.” We analyzed the duration of full NP descriptions used to refer to the pictured character. We found that duration was shorter for references to the goal than the source, but only in Experiment 2, where the timing of the stimuli encouraged the participant to plan their response incrementally, and not Experiment 1, where participants could pre-plan their responses. The strongest finding across both experiments was that response latency predicted duration, and latency was influenced by the predictability of thematic roles: Goal continuations had significantly shorter latencies. Together, these findings suggest that thematic role predictability does affect acoustic duration, and may be related to the time needed for utterance planning

Structural competition in second language production : towards a constraint-satisfaction model

Second language (L2) learners often show inconsistent production of some aspects of L2 grammar. One view, primarily based on data from L2 article production, suggests that grammatical patterns licensed by learners’ native language (L1) and those licensed by their L2 compete for selection, leading to variability in the production of L2 functional morphology. In this study, we show that the idea of structural competition has broader applicability, in correctly predicting certain asymmetries in the production of both the definite article the and plural marking –s by Thai learners of English. At the same time, we recognize that learners’ growing sensitivity to structural regularities in the L2 might be an additional contributing factor, and therefore make a novel proposal for how the L1–L2 structural competition model and the sensitivity-to-L2-structural regularities account could be integrated and their respective contributions studied under the constraint-satisfaction model of language processing. We argue that this approach is particularly suited to studying bilingual processing as it provides a natural framework for explaining how highly disparate factors, including partially activated options from both languages, interact during processing

Produção e percepção oral em l2: os processos de transferência do conhecimento grafo fônico-fonológico do português brasileiro (L1) para o inglês (L2) e o desempenho em listening (L2)

This study aims to establish a connection between L2 speech production and perception by contrasting the findings garnered from English word and nonword naming tasks performed by 156 Brazilian students of English with their scores at the listening section of TOIEC (Test of English for International Communication). The production-perception relationship is approached in an original fashion in this investigation, since data gathered from L2 production in word and nonword naming tasks is compared to the participants’ performance in listening comprehension tasks of longer excerpts of native speech – rather than perceptual tests of phones or words only. First, we investigated the rate of use of nine grapho-phonic-phonological transfer processes among 156 adult Brazilian ESL students according to their level of proficiency during word and nonword naming sessions. The findings showed a steep and significant decrease in the rate of use of processes of transfer as the level during ESL word production as the participants’ level of proficiency increased. However, when reading nonwords, the students’ performance worsened a great deal, that is, the rate of use of most transfer processes increased regardless of the subjects’ levels of proficiency. Second, in order to assert whether there could be connections between the production results and L2 speech perception. We found inverse and significant correlations