Thomas G. Bever

Cerebral Dominance in Musicians and Nonmusicians

Musically experienced listeners recognize simple melodies better in the right ear than the left, while the reverse is true for naive listeners. Hence, contrary to previous reports, music perception supports the hypothesis that the left hemisphere is dominant for analytic processing and the right hemisphere for holistic processing.

The psychological reality of linguistic segments

Experimentation with the subjective location of clicks heard during speech supports the following conclusions: (a) Clicks are attracted towards the nearest major syntactic boundaries in sentential material. (b) The number of correct responses is significantly higher in the case of clicks located at major segment boundaries than in the case of clicks located within segments. (c) These results are consistent with the view that the segments marked by formal constituent structure analysis in fact function as perceptual units and that the click displacement is an effect which insures the integrity of these units. (d) The distribution of acoustic pauses in the sentential material does not account for the observed distribution of errors. (e) There is a slight tendency to prepose responses to clicks in sentences. This tendency is reversed during later stages of the experimental session. Both these effects are asymmetrical for the two ears.

Children use canonical sentence schemas: a crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections.

Abstract We propose that children construct a canonical sentence schema as a preliminary organizing structure for language behavior. The canonical sentence embodies the typical features of complete clauses in the input language, and serves as a framework for the application of productive and perceptual strategies. The canonical sentence schema offers a functional explanation of word-order and inflectional strategies based on the childs attempts to quickly master basic communication skills in his or her language. The present research explores sensitivity to the canonical sentence form and to word-order and inflectional perceptual strategies for comprehending simple transitive sentences in monolingual children aged 2;0 to 4;4 in four languages: English (ordered, uninflectional), Italian (weakly ordered, weakly inflectional), Serbo-Croatian (weakly ordered, inflectional), Turkish (minimally ordered, inflectional). The results show that children fail to respond systematically to sequences that violate the canonical sentence form of their particular language. They develop distinct word-order and inflectional strategies appropriate to the regularities of their language. The early behavioral emergence of linguistically appropriate canonical sentences and processing strategies suggests a behavioral foundation for linguistic constraints on the surface form of sentences.

Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules

Using sentence comprehension as a case study for all of cognitive science, David Townsend and Thomas Bever offer an integration of two major approaches, the symbolic-computational and the associative-connectionist. The symbolic-computational approach emphasizes the formal manipulation of symbols that underlies creative aspects of language behavior. The associative-connectionist approach captures the intuition that most behaviors consist of accumulated habits. The authors argue that the sentence is the natural level at which associative and symbolic information merge during comprehension. The authors develop and support an analysis-by-synthesis model that integrates associative and symbolic information in sentence comprehension. This integration resolves problems each approach faces when considered independently. The authors review classic and contemporary symbolic and associative theories of sentence comprehension, and show how recent developments in syntactic theory fit well with the integrated analysis-by-synthesis model. They offer analytic, experimental, and neurological evidence for their model and discuss its implications for broader issues in cognitive science, including the logical necessity of an integration of symbolic and connectionist approaches in the field.

The relation between linguistic structure and associative theories of language learning models: constructive critique of some connectionist learning models

Abstract Recently proposed connectionist models of acquired linguistic behaviors have linguistic rule-based representations built in. Similar connectionist models of language acquisition have arbitrary devices and architectures which make them mimic the effect of rules. Connectionist models in general are not well-suited to account for the acquisition of structural knowledge, and require predetermined structures even to simulate basic linguistic facts. Such models are more appropriate for describing the formation of complex associations between structures which are independently represented. This makes connectionist models potentially important tools in studying the relations between frequent behaviors and the structures underlying knowledge and representations. At the very least, such models may offer computationally powerful ways of demonstrating the limits of associationistic descriptions of behavior.

The nonperceptual reality of the phoneme

Subjects responded as soon as they heard a preset target in a sequence of nonsense syllables. The target was a complete syllable (e.g., “baeb” “saeb”) or a phoneme from that syllable, the syllable-initial consonant phoneme for some objects (e.g., “b-” or “s-”), and the medial vowel phoneme for other subjects (e.g., “-ae-”). Subjects responded more slowly to phoneme targets than to syllable targets (by 40 msec for /s-/, 70 msec for /b-/ and 250 msec for medial /ae/). These results indicate that phoneme identification is subsequent to the perception of larger phonological units. The reality of the phoneme is demonstrated independently of speech perception and production by the natural presence of alphabets, rhymes, spoonerisms, and interphonemic contextual constraints.

The active use of grammar in speech perception

Judgments of the location of short bursts of noise in sentences were used to reveal perceptual segmentation of sentences. It was assumed that segmentation would correspond to major constituent boundaries. In order to control for correlated variables of pitch and intonation, identical acoustic material was provided with alternate constituent structures. It was found that differences in response to identical strings were predicted by the points of variation in constituent structure.

The underlying structures of sentences are the primary units of immediate speech processing

Two studies of the subjective location of clicks in spoken sentences indicate: (1) within-clause phrase structure boundaries do not significantly affect the segmentation of spoken sentences; (2) divisions between underlying structure sentences determine segmentation even in the absence of corresponding explicit clause divisions in the surface phrase structure. These results support a model of speech processing according to which listeners actively segment and organize spoken sequences into potential underlying syntactic structures.

CEREBRAL ASYMMETRIES IN HUMANS ARE DUE TO THE DIFFERENTIATION OF TWO INCOMPATIBLE PROCESSES: HOLISTIC AND ANALYTIC

Clinical and experimental evidence suggests that the left hemisphere of the brain is specialized for speech activity and the right hemisphere is specialized for many nonlinguistic functions. Jackson1 related the hemispheric linguistic differences t o differences in cognitive activity, suggesting that the left hemisphere is specialized for analytical organization, while the right hemisphere is adapted for “direct associations” among stimuli and responses. Modern researchers have substantially generalized this differentiation to encompass a wide range of behaviors in normal subjects. Experimental2 and clinical3 investigators of hemispheric asymmetry generally agree on the fundamental nature of the processing differences between the two sides of the brain: the left hemisphere is specialized for propositional, analytic, and serial processing of incoming information, while the right hemisphere is more adapted for the perception of appositional, holistic, and synthetic relations. This asymmetry raises the question of whether there are essential differences in the way in which the two hemispheres organize behavior and process information. Several theories attribute hemispheric differences to a structural differentiation of some kind. Asymmetries might be due to differences intrinsic to each hemisphere: e. g., in the neurospatial organization of functions4 or the existence of modality-specific differences in capacity,S or to some fundamental differences in the way the elementary neurological interactions occur. The structural difference might exist because of forces extrinsic to the brain, e. g., a muscular predisposition for handedness, asymmetries in sensory organs, or socially trained asymmetries in such observable traits as handedness and eyedness. Each of these views supposes that there is some physical or social structure that specifically and directly causes functional asymmetry to occur; that is, these proposals are all extremely strong in that they make concrete claims about the nature of the phenomenon. Yet the apparent precision of each claim is of little use t o us, since we d o not know the relevant facts that would critically prove or disprove any of them. I shall argue that unless we have evidence conclusively proving any of the more specific claims, we should view cerebral dominance as the result of certain general properties of the mind and of the relationship between the structures of the mind and the anatomy of the brain. The basic view underlying this proposal is that the mind is composed of a number of partially independent faculties, each of which has certain

Some syntactic determinants of sentential complexity, II : Verb structure

The effect of the lexical complexity of verbs on the processing of sentences was evaluated in two experiments. Verb complexity was indexed by the number of types of grammatical structure a verb permits (e.g., a verb may be transitive or intransitive and may permit various types of complement structures). Ss’ performances in paraphrasing sentences and in solving anagrams containing complex verbs were significantly poorer than their performances with the same sentences and anagrams containing less complex verbs.