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Abstract: Linguistics is the study of
the nature of language. As a psycholinguist, I am particularly
interested in trying to understand how language is acquired and
represented in the brain. The predominant theories of how language
is represented in the brain posit acquisitional processes in which
the brain abstracts generalizations about one's language away from
instances of linguistic experience and forms physical, neurological,
representations of those generalizations. Those resident linguistic
generalizations become in turn the brain's basis for producing and
comprehending subsequent instances of linguistic usage. That is,
they become the neurological basis for speaking and understanding
your language. For much of the past 20 years, I have participated in
a research group that posits a very different view of the nature of
linguistic generalizations. Rather than positing resident linguistic
generalizations that have been abstracted away from one's linguistic
experiences, the Analogical Model posits that throughout one's
lifetime people simply accumulate memories for instances of
linguistic experiences. Their subsequent use of the language-whether
production or comprehension-involves comparing the current
communicative act with that collection of instances of previously
experienced communicative acts and identifying-on the fly-one or
more patterns inherent in that collection which best interprets or
achieves the current communicative act. Our reading of the research
literature is that the empirical evidence continues to confirm the
predictions of the Analogical Model over those of the competing
theories. |
