Victoria A. Fromkin

The Non-Anomalous Nature of Anomalous Utterances

An analysis of speech errors provides evidence for the psychological reality of theoretical linguistic concepts such as distinctive features, morpheme structure constraints, abstract underlying forms, phonological rules, and syntactic and semantic features. Furthermore, such errors reveal that linguistic performance is highly rule-governed, and that in many cases it is grammatical rules which constrain or monitor actual speech production. While a model of linguistic competence is independent of temporal constraints, a model of linguistic performance must provide information as to the sequencing of events in real time. To explain the occurrence of particular kinds of errors, a specific ordering of rules is posited, which ordering may or may not coincide with the organization of a grammar.

The development of language in genie: a case of language acquisition beyond the “critical period” ☆ ☆☆

Abstract The present paper reports on a case of a now-16-year-old girl who for most of her life suffered an extreme degree of social isolation and experiential deprivation. It summarizes her language acquisition which is occurring past the hypothesized “critical period” and the implications of this language development as related to hemispheric maturation and the development of lateralization. The results of a series of dichotic listening tests administered to her are included.

A linguist looks at “a linguist looks at ‘schizophrenic language’”

This note presents evidence in opposition to the position proposed by Chaika that schizophrenic speech can be characterized by six definable features. It is shown that, except for the disruption of the sequencing of ideas in discourse which can be attributed to nonlinguistic factors, all the features are prevalent in normal speech as exemplified by speech errors and “slips of the tongue.”

A characterization of the prosodic loss in Parkinson's disease.

Prosodic contours in the verbal output of 30 patients with Idiopathic Parkinsons disease were contrasted to those of fifteen age-, sex-, and educationally matched normal subjects. All subjects were tested for language disorder, dementia, depression, and the comprehension of linguistic prosody. The striking disorder of prosody in Parkinsons disease relates to motor control, not to a loss of the linguistic knowledge required to make prosodic distinctions. It appears that prosody, language and the motor planning of speech are integrated at a basal ganglia level.

THE LINGUISTIC DEVELOPMENT OF GENIE

This paper discusses the linguistic development of Genie, an adolescent girl who for most of her life underwent a degree of social isolation and experiential deprivation unparalleled in the reports of scientific investigation. This case touches on questions of profound interest to psychologists, philosophers, and linguists, including the relationship between cognition and language, the interdependence or autonomy of linguistic competence and performance, the mental abilities underlying language, proposed universal stages in language learning, the critical age for language acquisition, and the biological foundations of language.* Interest in cases of children reared in environments of extreme social isolation can be traced back at least to the 18th century. At that time the interest was stimulated by the debates concerning the theory of innate ideas and the struggle between the geneticists and the environmentalists. In 1758, Carl Linnaeus first included Homo ferus as a subdivision of Homo sapiens. One of the defining characteristics of Homo ferus, according to Linnaeus, was his lack of speech or overt language. All the cases in the literature attest to the correctness of this observation. The most dramatic cases of children reared under severe conditions of social isolation and stimulus deprivation are those described as wild or feral children, children who have reportedly been reared with wild animals or have lived alone in the wilderness. Two such children, Amala and Kamala, found in 1920, were supposedly reared by wolves. Information on the prior history of these children is

Lip Positions in American English Vowels

Three kinds of data were used in an attempt to determine the parameters of characteristic lip positions in a range of American English vowels: (1) standardized simultaneous frontal and lateral photographs; (2) lateral x-rays; (3) plaster casts of a subjects lips. Among the measurements taken were the following: (1) distance between the corners of the mouth (width); (2) height of the opening on the midline; (3) area as measured on a frontal view; (4) protrusion; (5) retraction of the corners of the mouth. As a check on the consistency of measurement and performance, these data were used to compare a single subjects production of the set of vowels on a number of occasions. Comparisons with other subjects were also made. The interrelationships of these variables are discussed.

Speculations on performance models

The publication of Syntactic Structures in I957 stimulated a much-needed re-evaluation among linguists as to the goals of linguistic theory and the nature of language. Part of the discussion which has ensued has centred around the question of linguistic competence versus performance. Competence has been related to performance as langue is to parole. Competence thus refers to the underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer (Chomsky, I965) and performance to the way the speaker-hearer utilizes this internalized grammar when he actually produces and understands utterances. Despite the continued controversy about this distinction, little can be added to the justifications for it put forth over many decades (cf. Chomsky, 1957, I964, I965; Katz, I964, I966; Postal, I966; Sapir, 1933; Levin, I965; de Saussure, I9I6; etc.). Yet there remains much vagueness as to the limits of each and the relationship between the two. For many years the confusion was due to the influence of Bloomfield who centred his attention on the speech act; his aim was the classification of the OUTPUT of performance, i.e. the utterances, and led to no theory about the dynamic process of performance itself (Bloomfield, I924, I926, 1927, I933). While giving lip service to a concern for langue, his own mechanistic approach negated any possibility for the rules of langue to be anything more than lists of recurrent patterns found in parole. And since he was of the opinion that the physiologic and acoustic description of acts of speech belongs to other sciences than ours (Bloomfield, I926: I53) he did not direct himself to those aspects of parole which could explain speech performance. It is likewise true that historically most phoneticians have been primarily concerned with taxonomic descriptions of speech sounds. Such approaches can tell us nothing about how a speaker of a language utilizes the rules he has learned in order to SPEAK and UNDERSTAND sentences never uttered before. This paper contends that the interrelationship between competence and performance is the concern of linguistics. To Jakobsons notion that linguistics without meaning is meaningless I would add the idea that linguistics without speech is unspeakable. This is not to say that mere concern with the data of performance is enough. The history of science has shown that without any explicit theoretical hypothesis in mind we are unable to evaluate the collected data, or even know what to look for. In the eighteenth century, the German writer Novalis said that Theories

Neuro-Muscular Specification of Linguistic Units

The technique of electromyography was utilized to investigate the relationship which exists between linguistic units and muscular activity. Muscle action potentials of the orbicularis oris muscle were recorded from three subjects. A LINC computer was used to sum and average the EMG signals of 20 tokens of 54 CVC monosyllables. The results showed that no simple correspondence exists between phonemes and motor commands. Different gestures produce /b/ and /p/ in initial and final position of an utterance. It was also shown that electromyography can be used to test linguistic hypotheses regarding particular languages. Two alternative inferences are suggested from the fact that the neural muscular correlate of a given phoneme is different in different phonetic contexts : (1) the minimal linguistic unit corresponding to the motor commands which produce speech is larger than the phoneme, perhaps more of the order of a syllable ; (2) motor commands related to phoneme production are altered, i.e. context restricted, either by feedback information concerning the existing state of muscular motion, or by stored information in the short-term memory. Further investigation is necessary before any conclusions can be reached.

The Lexicon: Evidence from Acquired Dyslexia

The organization and structure of the lexicon in a linguistic performance model is here examined, using data elicited from dyslexic patients suffering from focal brain lesions. It is argued that phonological, semantic, and orthographic representations, in separate sub-lexicons, are needed to account for the selective reading and writing disorders. The role of such data and their relevance to linguistic theory are discussed. Linguistic concepts provide the framework for investigating both normal and abnormal (e.g. aphasic) speech production and comprehension. In turn, data from aphasia may provide new insights into the nature of the mental grammar.*

Some thoughts about the brain/mind/language interface

An historical survey of the approaches to the neural basis of language and the modularity question is summarized. Evidence from aphasia, event-related potentials (ERPs), Specific Language Impairments (SLIs) in children, asymmetry of abilities as shown by linguistic ‘savants’, sign language, separation of conceptual and linguistic knowledge, other disorders such as prosopagnosia and visual agnosia is presented to support the view that human language ability is autonomous and independent of other cognitive abilities with which it interacts in use.