Ragnar Rommetveit

On the Architecture of Intersubjectivity

The Harvard-M.I.T. brand of psycholinguistics came into being as the love child of generative grammar and individual (as opposed to social) cognitive psychology. And transformational-generative linguistics, it was argued, represented a return to a prepositivistic view of science (Fodor and Garrett, 1966). Based on this philosophy, the idea of linguistic competence came to resemble the idea of ideal physical events (e.g., bodies falling freely through perfect vacua).

Focus of attention in recall of active and passive sentences

An attempt was made to manipulate the voice in which sentences were remembered by varying the focus of the childs attention both at the time of sentence storage and at the time of sentence retrieval. The storage and retrieval pictures were pictures of the actor element, the acted-upon element, and a picture of the total sentence content. The pictures, both those presented at storage and those presented at retrieval, tended to be effective in manipulating the voice of the sentence recalled. The retrieval-picture effect, however, tended to be stronger than the storage-picture effect. When the picture on which the child focused his attention was congruent with the subject of the original stimulus sentence, correct recall was facilitated; on the other hand, when the picture on which the child focused was incongruent with the sentence subject (but congruent with the object), sentences tended to be transformed into the opposite voice in recall.

Meaning, Context, and Control:Convergent trends and controversial issues in current Social‐scientific research on Human cognition and communication

A survey of a wide range of social‐scientific disciplines reveals a definite convergence of theoretical interest in human cognition and communication as situated, concerned, and embedded in social commitment. Recent contributions within situation semantics and cognitive science explicitly reject some of the constraints inherent in their shared philosophical heritage and prepare novel ground for dialogues between fields as far apart as formal semantics and ‘dialogical’ text theory. Issues such as purely cognitive versus motivational aspects of human situatedness, and the relationship between models of individual information processing, on the one hand, and hermeneutic‐dialectic assumptions about social and collective features of meaning and mind, on the other, are thus made topics of cross‐disciplinary discussions. These are some of the many problems in need of further clarification if we want to explore the possibility of bridging and/or transcending the gulf between analytic‐rationalist and hermeneutic‐d...

ON "EMANCIPATORY" SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY

The aim of the present paper is not to contribute toward increased social psychological knowledge, but rather to increase our uncertainty with respect to the nature of such knowledge. There seems to be among us an almost unanimous discontent with current “minitheories”; yet at the same time there appears a surprising complacency with respect to tradition-bound philosophical premises for research and theory construction. The novelty of presumedly novel paradigms is hence largely restricted to proposals for improvements and/or eclectic integration of already established theoretical models, and partial empirical corroboration of such minimodels is interpreted as evidence that we are, after all, on the right track. Why shouldn’t we, then, continue our trade along the paths we have pursued so far, with sharpened methodological tools and refined theories, yet with an attitude of agnostic innocence or proud independence toward rebels who question its philosophical foundation?

Model construction in psychology: a defense of “surplus meanings” of psychological concepts

Summary The present paper represents a critique of a current trend in theoretical psychology culminating in a demand for unequivocal empirical anchoring of concepts as a superordinate norm for psychological research. We have tried to point out certain serious consequences of such a programme. Firstly: By searching for the “meaning” of a given concept exclusively in terms of explicit rules coordinating concept to observations we fail to take into consideration that part of its “meaning” may be syntactic, i. e., pertaining to rules formally relating the concept to other concepts within the same model. Secondly: A residual area of ambiguity may constitute a means whereby highly useful pre-scientific psychological experiences can be transformed into fruitful scientific research.

Some Halo Effects in Perception of Geometrical Patterns

SUMMARYThe present article contains a report on an experimental study, in which subjects were requested to judge specific characteristics of a complex geometrical pattern. By a systematic variation of a number of specific geometrical characteristics of the stimuli, we were able to examine the extent to which the subjects judgments of one specific stimulus characteristic was systematically influenced by irrelevant aspects of the pattern. A number of such halo effects were found. In short, some subjects were “misled” by the curvature of a line when judging length, others were “misled” by length when judging curvature, etc. The observed individual differences present, according to the authors, an interesting point of departure for a functionalistic approach to certain geometrical illusions, and appear to be in some respects roughly analogous to halo effects in perception of personal attributes examined in previous experimental studies.

WORDS AND WORD MEANINGS

Words are strange things. They are essential, yet insufficient as ingredients of verbal messages. They are apparently easily identified by laymen, in spite of the fact that linguists mostly prefer to leave them undefined. This does not at all seem to affect their utility as stimulus and response entities whose “meanings” one may try to assess in the psychological laboratory by, for example, word association and semantic differential responses. Spoken words are temporal strings of phonemes, and written English words are spatial strings of graphemes. Within traditional stimulus-response psychology, words are first of all particular sound sequences or visual forms. However, most often some non-stimulus entity is implicitly or explicitly assumed as a link intervening between the initial pattern of stimulation—the word form—and subsequent “meaning responses.” Thus, students of word associations maintain that the stimulus word always elicits itself as an “association” or “representational response.”

SCOPE AND PERSPECTIVES OF PSYCHOLINGUISTIC INQUIRIES

This chapter discusses the scope and perspectives of psycholinguistic inquiries. Language is the meeting ground of scholars from a variety of different disciplines. Therefore, to a large extent, the scope of the inquiries will depend upon the perspective adopted, which problems of language are considered to be of a psychological nature, and how one conceives of the relationship between psycholinguistics and neighboring disciplines. The chapter reviews some issues of interdisciplinary research strategy and explains some of the assumptions underlying the approach. Natural languages are systems of signs. The basic elements of a simple semiotic process may be portrayed as a triad including the sign, an interpreter, and a signification. Any sign process or case of semiosis may be said to involve these three constituents. A given entity is a sign only by virtue of its capacity to induce, in an interpreter, a disposition to respond in certain ways toward some kind of object or state of affairs.

PREDICATION: INQUIRIES INTO LINGUISTICALLY MEDIATED MESSAGES

The specific role of word meanings in message transmission is partly determined by the presence or absence of a common base for deictic anchorage. At the one extreme, one finds communication settings in which speaker and listener attend to the very same domain of objects and events. In general, then, there seems to be an inverse relationship between the significance of pre-established word meanings and situationally determined anchorage of the message in some shared denotative domain. The extreme case is quasi-predication, in which some constituent is introduced by purely nonlinguistic means. The process of decoding will display very different characteristics, depending upon the relationship between the linguistic fragment of communication and the cognitive state of the listener at the instant of speech perception. At the one extreme, a given form contributes to the received message exclusively via its pre-established meaning pattern. At the other extreme, there are cases of deictic anchorage, in which a given linguistic fragment serves hardly any function at all other than bringing into a given slot of the message frame some unique and already cognitively available element.

PART V – EPILOGUE

Publisher Summary Studies of associative word meaning are equally incapable of accounting for those connections that link words together into word groups and meaningful sentences. Words emerge in acts of encoding and decoding, and as tools of message transmission in a shared nonlinguistic world. Their specific contributions vary—some serve primarily to tag parts of messages onto extra-linguistic features of the immediate behavioral setting, others have no semiotic contribution at all except when appearing in specific word groups, still others make it possible—via strategies of reference—for participants in a communicative act to reach out to particular categories of objects and events outside the perceptually available world at the moment of speech. Such potentialities may be explored when a word is encountered in isolation in the psycholinguistic laboratory. Thus, what is assessed in studies of verbal labeling, measures of intensions, word association tasks, and judgments of affective word meaning can most appropriately be described as interdependent, partly chained and partly concomitant, part processes.