Comments on: Interesting Misreadings

By: Joshua Macy

Joshua Macy — Tue, 22 Jun 2004 20:03:44 +0000

It’s probably not that relevant, but it was the first example that came to mind of a clear case of cognitive interference where what we know about the language gets in the way of perceiving what’s clearly there. A better example is probably mondegreens. I think Pinker is right that the fact that mondegreens are often a less likely interpretation than the actual one, and sometimes even use nonce words, spells trouble for a naive theory of probabilistic matching. On the other hand, it cuts both ways. Since everybody presumably has pretty much the same dictionary when it comes to the words “the”, “this”, “sky”, and “guy”, and Pinker argues that the rules are pretty much built-in except for some parameters the fact that most people hear it the right way and the occassional person consistently hears the mondegreen seems to indicate that we’re bringing enough idiosyncratic psychological state to the table to guide the low-level identification and parsing of words, at least some of the time.

By: Prentiss Riddle

Prentiss Riddle — Mon, 21 Jun 2004 14:15:25 +0000

It’s been a long time since I read Pinker and I probably had no nuanced understanding of his model of d-structures and s-structures anyway, but how relevant is “Paris in the the spring” to “language”? I thought that reading and writing were supposed to be a meta- or para-linguistic process, with lots of funky cognitive quirks of their own. To get a clear counterexample to Pinker you’d need to come up with a purely heard/spoken case.

Which isn’t to say that reading and writing can’t contribute to some useful hypotheses. Another impression I had is that there’s very little in cognition that is linear. So I would expect all sorts of mutual interference among syntax, semantics, and the look and sound of words before we settle on an interpretation, if indeed we do settle on one. In actual conversation, my subjective sense of it is that we can keep multiple possible interpretations going in our heads at once, and backtrack to adjust their relative probabilities based on new information.

I must say that I’m impressed by how you and some of the other self-taught linguabloggers can intelligently debate this stuff. When I read Pinker, say, I know just enough to point out the occasional crock but not to debate the details.

By: des

des — Mon, 14 Jun 2004 11:05:45 +0000

Pinker himself is a psychologiste, and his favourite exercise is to make up Just So stories to account for the evolution of psychological modules alleged to underlie Universal Grammar. Chmosky would certainly be more into the psychology if it hadn’t been for the persistent tendency of experimental evidence not to support his hypotheses.

By: blinger

blinger — Sat, 12 Jun 2004 00:11:37 +0000

I would be interested in why you didn't enjoy The Language Instinct. I found it very interesting and persuasive. I have also ordered Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language and am waiting for it to be delivered either today or on Monday.

By: Joshua Macy

Joshua Macy — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 17:49:44 +0000

Really? You’d never know it from The Language Instinct. Pinker definitely seems to be presenting it as “this is what the mind does”, not “here’s one possible abstract description of permissible sentences.”

By: des

des — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 15:59:39 +0000

The whole surface-structure is consumed and then transformed to deep-structure where it can be mentally aprehended thing seems like it needs to be a linear process,

Classical generative grammar is explicitly not a theory of parsing – it is merely a description of the grammatical sentences in the language (what was called “comptence”), not any of the mental processes that actually process sentences (“performance”).

You may think this is a crock (I do) but it is not the crock you’re looking for.