Cognition, Vol. 10, No. 1-3

Cognition

v

Editorial Board Hioshi Azuma

Janet StojakCaplan

Janet Dean Fodor

Tokyo University, Hongo, Bunkyo-ku

Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven Conn. 06520, U.S.A.

Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Corm. 06268, U.S.A.

NoamChomsky

Paul Bertelson Lebomtok de Psychologie Exp&imentale,

Dept. Modern Languages and Dept. of Psychoiogy, Linguistics, MI. T., M.I. T. EIO-034, ambtidge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A. ambridge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A.

JerryFodor

ManfredBierwisch

&e ark Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, Gdif. 94305, U.S.A.

Dept. of Psychology, Monash University, Ciayton, Vie. 3168, Australia

Ned Block of Philosophy, M.&T.,

Labonrtcfl y of Experimental Psychub?gy, Centre for Research on Percep tion and Cognition, University of Sussex, Brighton B&l, Ct. Britain

Faculty of Education,

Tokyo, Japan

t.Iniversit&Libre de Bruxellcs I1 7 Av. Adolphe Buy/, B-1050 Brussels,Belgium

Akademie der Wlssenschaften der DDR, Zent.&nstitut fir Sprachwissenschaft, Otto Nuschke Stmsse 22123 108 Berlin, G.D.A. Dept.

Cambridge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A. Melissa Bowerman

Psychoiogy Department,

University of Kansas, Lawrence, Kunsas 66044, U.S.A.

FranqoisBresson

Labonrtooln de Psychologie, 54 bvd. Raspail, F- 75006 &is, Frcmce

RogerBrown

Anne Cu’T:r

JamesE. Cutting

Psychology Department, Uris Hali, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. 14853, U.S.A.

PeterD. Eimes

Walter S. Hunter Laboratory of Psychology, Brown University, Rovidence, R.I. 02912, U.S.A.

GunnarFant

Lab, of Speech Thnsmission, Royal Institute of Technology, S- IO044 Stockholm, 70, Sweden

Dept. of Aychokvy, Narvatxt University, C&s Fauconnier Cambridge, Mass. 02138, U.S.A. 9 Rue des Guillemites, 75004 hris, France mer

IL Bryant

Degrrrtment ‘of Experimental

Psychology,

DavidFay

Utdverslty of Oxford, South Aprk Road, OxfOn OXI 3UD. GL Britain

Bell Lubo~tc;rries, Warrenville - Napetville Road, Naperville, Ill. 60540, U.S.A.

DavidCaplan

IraFischler

Division of Neutw&gy, Ottawa CivfcHospital, Ottawa, Ont. KIS 2A3, Guta&

Department of 1”Jvcirology, Univemityof Florid&, Gainesville, i?l& 32611, USA.

KennethForster

MerrillCarrett

Department of Psychology, MS. T. El O-034, Cambridge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A. Lila Gleitman Graduate Sc41001of Education, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, U.S.A.

DavidT, Hakes,

Department of Psychology, Ur,iversity of Texas, Austin, Tex. 78712, U.S.A.

HenryHecaen Directeur d’Etudes,

Ecole Pratique des Sautes Etudes, Unitt!de Recherches Neuropsychologiques. I.N.S.E.R.M., 2, rue d’Alds& F- 75014, Paris, Fraace

Michollmbert

Labora toire de Neuro.

physlologie, CollLge de France, 1I Place Marcelin BertheYot, F. 7.5005 Paris, France

B&kJel Inheldcr

Fact&t! de Psychologie et des Sciences de l’&iuc&& Univ&tt! de GenCve, Cl&I 211 Geneva 14, Swiaerland

Marc Jeannerod Laboratoired ? iG?urupsychologie .Experimentale, I6 Av. Doyen L&pine, F-69500 Bran, France

Willem Levelt Max Planck?nstitutfur Psycholinguistik, Nimegen, The Netherhmds

John Lyorls PhilipJohnson-Laual Dept. of Linguistics, Laboratoryof Ex perimen tal Adam Ferguson Building, Psychology, Edinburgh EH8 9LL. Gt. Britain Centre for Research on Perception and Cognition, David McNeil1 Sussex University, Brighton R>Nl9QG. Ct. Britain Departmentof Behavioral Sciences, Committeeon Cognitionand Peter W. Susczyk Communication, Dept. of Psychology, Universityof Chicago, Universityof Oregon. 5848 South UniversityAvenue, Eugene, Oreg. 9 7403, Chicago,Bl. 60637, tt S.A. USA. Jerrold 1. Katz Dept. of Linguistics, CUNY GraduateCenter, 23 W42nd Street, New York, N.Y. 40036, U.S.A. Mary-Louise Kean CognitiveScience hogram, School of Sock?1Scienses, Universityof Califomio, Irvine, Calif. 92717, U.S.A. Frank Keil PsychologyDepartment, Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. .14853, U.S.A. Edward fUima Dept. of Linguistics,La JO&I, Universityof Califomlb, San Diego, Cz1i.f92037, U.S.A. Stephen hf. Kosslyn

Department of Psychologyand

So&d Relations, HarvardUniversity, Willhzm James Hall, 33 KirkkandStreet, ambridge, Mass,0.2138, USA.

HarlanLane Department of Psychology, Northeastern Unive&y, 360 HuntingtonAvenue, Boston, Mass,02115, US.A.

John Marshall Neuropsychology Unit, Radcliffe Infirmary, WoodstockRoad, Oxford OX2 6HE, Ct. Britain William Marslen-Wilson Max Planckhstitut fir Psycholinguistik, Berg en Dalseweg79, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Jod Morais Laboratoue de Psychrologie Experimentale, UniversiteLibre de .Bmxelles, 117 Avenue Adolphe Buyl, B-l OS0Brussels,Belgium

Michael Posner Dept. of Psychology, Universityof Oregon, Eugene, Ore. 97403, U.S.A. Dnvid Premack PsychologyDepartment, Universityof Pennsylvania, 3813.15 WalnutStreet, PhEadelphh, Pa. l 9174, U.S.A. Zenon Pylyshyn Dept. of Psychology, The Universityof Western Ontario, London 72, Or&, CImada Audr8 Roth Lecours Hotel-Dieude Montreal, 3840 rue St. Urban, Montreal,Quebec H2W 1 T8, Canada Steven Rose Bic-!ogy Department, The Open University, WaltonHall, MiltonKeynes MK 7 6AA. Ct. Britain Scania de SchBnen Laboratoirede Psychologie, 54 BoulevardRaspail, 75270 P&-isCddex 06, France Tim Shallice MRC Applied Psychology Unit, 1S Chaucer Road, CambridgeCB2 2EF, Ct. Britain

Dan I. Slobin John Morton MRC Applied Psychology Unit, ~~~~rree~$,?$~~~~gy# 15 Chaucer Road, CambridgecB~ 2EF, Gt. Britain t?erkeley,C”!i$ 94720, ‘U.S.A. George Noi,:et Laboratok de pSycholog& 28 rue Serpente, 7.5006 Parts,France

Elizabeth Spelke

Psychology Department,

Universityof Pennsylvania, 381.5 WalnutStreet, Phibdelphia, 84.19104, U.S.A.

Daniel Osherson Mark Steedman 2OC-124 (DSRE), Departmentof Psychology, M.I.T., Universityof Warwick, Gzmbndge, Mass02139, U.S.A. Coventry CV4 7AL, Ct. Britain

Sidney Strauss; Department of Educational Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel

EdwardWalker M.I. T. Center for C+gnitive

Science, 77 MassachusettsAvenue,

Cambridge,Mass.02139, U.S.A.

Michael Studdert-Kennedy Department of Communication Arts and Sciences, Peter Wason @ueens College, Psycholinguistics, Qty Universityof New York, UniversityCollege London, Flushing, N. Y. 11361, U.S.A. Research Unit, David Swinney 4 Stephenson Way, Department of Psychology, London NW1 2HE. Ct. Britain YldftsUniversity, Medford, Mass.02155, U.S.A. Virginia Valian 221 I Brvadwdy, New York, N. Y. 10024, U.S.A.

Ken Wexler School of Social Sciences, Universityof California, Irvine, Galif ?2 717, U.S.A.

Deirdre Wilson Deprrtment of Phonetics& Linguistics, UniversityCollege London, Gvwer Street, London WC IE FisT, Ct. Britain Edgar Zurif AphasiaResearch Center, Boston UniversityMedical Center, I50 South HuntingtvnA venue, Room ClS-5, Boston, Mass.02130, U.S.4. ‘iermina Sinclair de Zwart Centre d ‘Bpistemvlogie Gt%tPtique, Universityde Genkve, CH-121I Geneva, Switzerland

Cognition,10(1981)l-5 @Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lmsanne - Printed in The Netherlands

1

Editorial JACQUES MEHLER SUSANA FRANCK

It was almost by mistake that we noticed some months ago that Cognition was ten years old And with journals as with children, growing has both the advantages of experience and the (dangers of stultification. Thus, once we had resigned ourselves to the fact that we actually were coming of age, we had to fend off aging and stiffening structures. As a result, two decisions were rapidly taken. The first, and more administrative of the two, was to increase the journal’s periodicity from one to two volumes per year. The second, and mare creative,. was to ask several colleagues to write a few pages about their work and how they looked on it given the state of cognitive psychology as Rwhole, and what they thought developments in the discipline would be like in the coming years. These two editorial decisions can in some ways be looked on as controversial and a few comments seem therefore to be in order. We only decided to ex.pand into two volumes per year after a great deal of hesitation. Indeed, although the number of journals in the domain has increased over the last ten years, we are not convinced that the quality of the work in the area has met the promise it displayed a decade ago. Undeniably, considerable progress has been made on some formal fronts both in linguistics and AI. In cognit,ive psychology, however, progress is less obvious. A number of new paradigms have become accepted working tools and some new fields have opened up. But in contrast with, say, molecular biology over the last twenty or thirty years, one certainly does not get the impression that any revolution has occurred in our field. Experiments have perhaps increased in ti&.istication and a few optimists ncj doubt believe that some major development is just around the comer but m the meantime little has really changed. Thus, as journal editors waiting for the supreme breakt-hrough we had the choice of becoming very tough minded and selective in order to keep the number of pages published in Cognitim down to a minimum or the option of increasing the size of the journal while preserving its quality. The decision was not an easy one and it is precisely because no ma,ior new discovery has as yet shaken the field that it seemed wise to settle for the second course of action. Indeed, the exploratory nature of our work makes diversity enormous, areas of interest numerous and polemics plentiful. For the time being, then, since all the material swept up by the cognitive tidal wave could be of potential interest to the field as a whole,

2

Editorial

we decided to increase the number of printed pages available in the journal in the hopes of broadening its scope and attracting more interesting contributions while still continuing to reflect the best of the field and, to some extent, shaping its form
over the question of whether there is one basic or primary unit are inappropriate since there are, in fact, many units that are used by the speech processing mechanisms. Prosody, rhythm and speech timing Most of the research in speech perception over the last thirty years, as well as the major theoretical emphasis, has been concerned with segmental analysis of phonemes. One seriously neglected topic has been the prosodic or suprasegmental attributes of speech, which involve differences in pitch, intensity, duration, and the timing of segments and words in sentences. At present there remains a wide gap between the research on isolated segments and features and prosodic factors (see Cohen and Nooteboom, 1975). It is clear, however, that this source of linguistic information serves to link phonetic segments, features and words to grammatical processes at higher levels of analysis (see Darwin, 1975; Huggins, 1972; Nooteboom et al., 1978 for reviews). Moreover, speech prosody may also carry useful i.nformation about lexical, syntactic and semantic properties of the speaker’s message. It would be of interest to know, for example, the extent to which syntactic and semantic variables influence the durations of phonetic segments ancl words, and whether listeners iarr and do use this sort of information in understanding spoken language (see Hug,gins, 1972, 1978; Klatt and Cooper, 1975).

Lexical access and word recognition The problems of word recognition and the nature of lexical representations have been long-standing concerns of cognitive psychologists, although these problems have not been studied ex.tensively by investigators working in the mainstream of speech perception. This is true because the bulk of work on word recognition was concerned with investigating visual processes with less attention directed to questions of spoken word recognition Moreover, most of the interest in speech perception has been directed toward feature and phoneme perception which typically used isolated nonsense syllables. While such an approach is appropriate for studying ‘low level’ acoustical analysis of speech, it is not very helpful in dealing with questions surrounding how meaningful words are recognized in isolation or in connected speech. There are several interesting and important problems in speech perception that touch intimately upon the process of lexical access and bear more directly on the nature of the various types of representations in the mental lex-

254

David B. pisoni

icon. For example, it is of considerable interest to determine precisely what kinds of representations exist in the mental lexicon. Do words, morphemes, phonemes, or sequences of spectral templates represent lexical entrie:;? Is a word accessed on the basis of an acoustic, phonetic or phonological code? Are high frequency words recognized more-or-less automatically by very rapid search through a special precompiled network’? Are less frequent words analyzed by general rules for morphological analysis? One of the central problems .in word recognition and lexical access deals with the interaction of sensory input and higher-level contextual information. Some investigators, such as Forster ( 1976) and Massaro ( 1977), maintain that early sensory information is processed independently of higher-order context, and that the facilitation effects observed in word recognition are due to postperceptual processes involving decision criteria. Other investigators such as Morton (1969, 1979), Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978), Marslen-Wilson and and Tyler ( 1980), Cole and Jakimik ( 1978) and Foss and Blanck ( 1980) argue that context can, in fact, influence the extent of’early sensory analysis of the input signal. Klatt (1979, 1981) has recently proposed a model of lexical access t+iat explicitly avoids any need to compute a distinct level of representation corresponding to a sequence of discrete phonemes. Instead, he has precompiled an abstract phonetic lexicon of all possible words into a network of sequences of spectral templates. These templates are context-sensitive much Bikethe earlier ‘Wickelphones’ (Wickelgren, 1976) since they are supposed to characterize the acoustic correlates of phones in different phonetic environments by encoding the spectral characteristics and transitions from the middle of on& phone to the middle of the next. Klatt (1979) argues that this form of diphone concatenation is sufficient to capture much of the context-dependent variability observed for phonetic segments in spoken words. Much remains to be done to access these claims as valid psychological descriptions of the representation of words in the mental lexicon. Phonetic and phonological recoding of words in sentences One of the major difficulties encountered in speech perception is that each utterance of a language can be realized phonetically in many different ways. Obviously, it is unrealistic to store every possible utterance of the language in long-term memory Gnce the number of different sentences and phonetic realizations is potentially infinite. While it might be possible to adopt this strategy in the case of machine recognition of speech in very limited corltext, such a strategy seems inappropriate in the case of human speech perception.

Some current theoreticalissuesir speech perception 255

In addition to general phonological processes which characterize certain uniform dialect differences in pronunciation among talkers, there are also sets of low-level phonetic implementation rules which characterize more specific acoustic-phonetic variations among individual talkers. Because the number of different phonological phenomena in language is quite large, and because of the idiosyncratic variability of individual talkers, sets of decoding rules have been formulated from careful study of the acoustic and phonetic properties of speech in various contexts. Rules such as these must also be assumed to be part of the perceptual strategies used by human listeners in understanding spoken language, Despite the long-standing interest in phonological processes by linguists and the importance they play in the acoustic-phonetic realization of spoken language, relatively little perceptual research has been directed toward these problems. With the use of synthesis-by-rule systems, sets of phonological and phonetic implementation rules can be formulated and the effects of variations and modifications in these rules can be studied with isolated words and words in sentence contexts (see Huggins, 1978). Focused search and ‘islands of reliability’

There can be little doubt after some thirty years of research on speech that the acoustic signal contains a great deal of redundant information. A basic engineering goal has been to try to locate the most important information and code it in the most efficient way for trammission. In the same way, investigators concerned Nith human speech perception have tried to identify the ‘minimal cues’ for phonemes in the hope that once these could be identified the basic problem of recognition of speech could be solved. Unfortunately, there is a great deal more to speech perception and spoken language understanding than simply discovering the minimal cues for phonemes. The speech signal appears to be rich with salient and reliable inform;ition that listeners use in unders,tanding the message. As a consequence, the basic problem becomea one of finding in the stimulus ingut these ‘islands of reliability’ that can be used to access various different sources of knowledge. The term focused search has been used to characterize the strategies that listeners or intelligent machines use for inspecting the signal for information that can be ,useful at any given point in the perceptual process; focused search also specifically avoids information that does not provide useful support. Examples of such reliable information include: thd presence of stressed syllables, the beginnings and ends of words, and the locations of various spectral changes indicating shifts in the source function.

256

LbvidB. pisorli

Focused search emphasizes an important problem, namely, to identify those acoustic correlates of the signal that the listener relies on. The scope of a listener’s focus& seuch strategies varies substantially with the requirements of experimental tasks; what may be salient and reliable acoustic-phonetic information in one lis?ening cantext may not be used at all in another. Research on this problem has shifted recently from experiments using isolated nonsense syllables which are manipulated in very precise ways to investigations directed at ho-w listeners use these cues to perceive words in isolation and in sentence contexts whelre several diverse sources of knowledge can be used. The principle of delayed binding Human speeclh perception and spoken language understanding take place very rapidly in real time although relatively Yitcleis currently known about the processes and1 mechanisms that support z;uch on-lirlc activities. A good deal of the speech perception process occurs automatically and is therefore unavailable for oirect conscious introspection. Do all decisions at all levels of the speech perception process take place immediately in real-time or are there selected processing delays at particular analytic levels pending additional information? What is the size of the scanning window over which low-level phonetic dezisions are made? What depth of Iprocessing is required before a final and binding decision Carl be made about the se¥ta1 composition of the input signal? These are questions that are being pursued at this time by a number of researchers. The ‘principle of delayed binding’ evollved from the ARPA speech understanding project (see Klatt, 1977 for a review). According to this principle, decisiolns at 10w levels of processing are not forced if the information is unreliable or in:sufficient to make a final decision (see also Miller, 1962). Of course, such a priiciple might be appropriate in computational situations where the front-end or basic acoustic-phonetic recognition device fails to perform as well as humans do. But we know from much of the earlier research on word intelligibility that human listenerls can and do make binding low-level segmental and lexical decisions with extremely high accuracy even under very poor listening conditions. After alI, if the quality of the acoustic-phonetic information is very good, as in high-quality natural speech, phonetic, lexical and even syntactic decisions can occur on-line quite rapidly. However, in situations where the speech signal is physically degraded or impoverished, the speed of perceptuaI processing may be substantially slower, and certain low-level decisions may well have to be delayed pending higher-order constraints (Miller, Heise and Lichten, 195 1; Miller and Isard, 1963). In future research, it will

Some current theoretical issues in speech perception

257

be important to find out more about the perceptual and interpretative processes in human speech perception that aire responsible for the very rapid processing and the seemingly immediate on-line interpretation of spoken language as it is heard. Conclusion

The bulk of research on speech perception over the last thirty years has been concerned principally, if not almost exclusively, with feature and phoneme perception in isolated contexts using nonsense syllable materials, This research strategy has undoubtedly been pursued because very substantial problems arise w6en one deals wilh issues such as spoken language understanding and the relationship between ear& sensory input or the problem of word recognition and its interface with higher levels of linguistic analysis. Researchers in any field of scientific investigation typically work 011tractable problems that can be studied with existing methodology and paradigms. Relative to the bulk of speech perception restiarch on isolated phoneme perception, very little is actually known today about how the early sensory-based acoustic-phonetic information is used by the speech processing system in tasks involving word recognition and sentence perception or how changes in the segmental and/or suprasegmental structure of the speech. signal influence intelligibility and comprehen,sion of spoken language. These are problems of current interest that will no doubt 5e pursued over the next few years. I believe that continued experimental and theoretical work in speech perception will1be directed at new models and theories that capture significant aspects of the process of spoken language understanding. What is important at the present time, is to diret;i: research efforts toward somewhat broader issues involving the use of meaningful stimuli in more naturalistic experimental tasks that require the listener’s active deployment of phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic knowledge to assign an interpretation to the sensory input. Past theoretical work in speech perception has not been very well developed nor has the link between theory and empirical data been very sophisticated. Moreover, work :n the field of speech perception as in other areas has tended to be defined by :zdecific experimental paradigms or particular phenomena (i.e., dichotic listening, categorical perception or selective adaptation). The major theoretical issues in speech perception often seem to be ignored. They receive little serious attention by investigators who are involved in working on the details of experhnczltal problems that unfortunately’ bear only marginally on the primary perceptual and cognitive processes that are used in spoken language understanding. Although a very formidable task, research

in the future will be focused more directly on the general problem of spoken Iangaage understanding. In my view, it is here that the greatest insights into language processing will be found in the next ten years. References Bevcr. T. G., Lackner, J., a;:d Kirk, R. (1969) The underlying structure sentence is the primary unit of immediate speech process~mg.Percep. PWychophys., 5, 225 -234. Cohen, A., and Nooteboom, S. (eds.). (1975) Smcture and Process in Speech Perceprion. Heidlelberg, Springer-Verlag. -Cole, R. A., and Jakimik, J. (1978) Understanding speech: How words are heard. In G. Underwood (ed.), Strategies of Informationfiocesssig. New York, Academic Press, pp. 68-l 16. Darwin, C. J. (1975) On the dynamic use of prosody in speech perception. In A. Cohen and S. G. Nooteboom (eds.), Strucrthrre and Process in Speech Perception Berlin, Springer-Verlang, PP. 178-194. I$nt, C. G. M. (1962) Description analysis of the acoustic aspects of speech. Logos, 5, 3-17. Forster, K. I. (1976) Act l ssing the mental lexicon. In R. J. Wales and E. Walker (eds.), New Apprwches to LongrtageMechanisms Amsterdam, North-Holland, pp. 257 -? 87. Foss, D. J.,and Blank, MM. A. (1980) Identifying the sreer’ codes. Cog. PsychoZ.,22, l-31. Gaitenby, J. H. (1965) The elastic word. In HaskinsLaboratories StatusReport on Speech Research, SR-2, 3.1-3.12. Gmong, W. F. (1979) The internal structure of consonants in speech perception: Acoustic cues, not distinctive feaiures. Unpublished manuscript. Hums, A. W. P. (1972) On the perception of temporal phenomena in speech. J. acoust. Sot. Am., 51, 1279-i 290. Huggins, A. W. F. (1978) Speech timing and intelligibility. In J. Requin (ed.), Attention and Perfcrmance VZ!.Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum. Klatt, D.. H. (I 975) Vowel lengthening is syntactically determined in a connected discourse. J. Phon., 3.129-140. Klatt, D. M. (1976) Linguistic uses of segmentaldurationin English: Acoustic and perceptual evidence. J. acousf. Sot, Am, 59, 1208-1221. Klatt, D. H. (1977) Review of the ARPA speech understanding project. J. acoousr.Sot. Am., 62,13451366. K&t, D. H. (1979) Speech percetion: A model of acoustic-phonetic analysis and lexical access. X man, 7. 279.-312: Wit, D. H. (1979) Synthesis by rule of segmental durations in English sentences. In B. Lindblom and S. Ohman (eds.), FIntiers of Speech Communication Research. New York, Academic Press. Klatt, D. H. ( In press) Lertcal representations and processing strategies during speech production and perception. Psychol. Ret Watt, D. H., and Cooper, W. E. (1975) Perception of segment duration in sentence contexts. In A. Cohen and S. G. Nooteboom (eds.), Structure and Process in Speech Perception, New York, Springer-Verlag. IlehisTe,1. (1970j SuprasegmerzfalsCambridge, MA., MIT Press. Marslen-Wilson, W. D., and Tyler, L. K. (1980) The temporal structure of spoken language understanding. cog., 8, l-71. Ma&n-Wilson, W. D., and Welsh, A. (1978) Processing interactions and lexical access during word recognition in continuous speech. Cog, Fsychoi., 10, 29-63.

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Massaro, D. W. (1977) Reading and listening. Technical Report No. 423, Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Miller, G. A. (1962) Decision units in the perception of speech. IRE Transactions on Information Theory, IT-S, 81-83.

Miller, G. A., Heise, G. A., and Lichten, W. (1951) The intelligibility of speech as a function of the cantext of the test materials. J. exper. Psychol., 41, 329-335. Miller, G. A., and Hard, S. (1963) Some perceptual consequences of linguistic rules. J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 2, 217-228.

Miller, J. L. (1981) The effect of speaking rate on segmental distinctions: Acoustic variation and perceptual compensation. In P. D. Eimas and J. L. Miller (eds.), Perspectives on the Study of Speech, _Hillsdale,NJ, Erlbaum Associates. Morton, J. (1969) Llteraction of information in word recognition. Psychol. Rev., 76, 165-178. Morton, J. (1979) Word recognition. In J. Morton and J. D. Marshall (eds.),PsychoZinguistics 2: Structuresand Processes. Cambridge, MIT Press, pp. 107-156. Nooteboom, S. G., Brokx, J. P. L., and deRooij, J. 1. (1978) Contributions of prosody to speech perception. In W. J. M. Levelt and G. B. Floresd’Arcais (eds.), Studies in the Perception of Language. New York, John Wiley, pp. 75-107. Parker, F. (1977) Distinctive features and acoustic cues.J. acoust. Sot. Am., 62, 1051-1054. Pisoni, D. B. (1978) Speech perception. In W. K. Estes(ed.)., Handbook of Learning and Cognitive Processes (vol. 6) Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum Associates, pp. 167-233. Port, R. F. (1981) Combinations of timing factors in speech plvd,ction. J. acoust. Sot. Am., 69, 262-274. Remez, R. E., Rubin, P. E., Pisoni, D. B.,andCarrell, T. D. (19Pl) Speech perception without traditional speech cues. Science, 212, 947-950. Searle, C. L., Jacobson, J. Z.,and Raymcnt, S. G. (1979) Stop consonant discriminatijn based on human audition. J. Acoust. Sot. Am., 65.799 - 809. Studdert-Kennedy, 51. (-974) The perception of speech. In T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in L.‘yguistics (vol. XI.). The Hague, Mouton. Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1976) Speech perception. Hn N. J. Lass (ed.), Contemporary Issues in ExperimentalPhonetics. New York, Academic Press, pp. 243-293. Wickelgren, W. A. (1976) Phonetic coding and serial order. In E. C. Carterette and M. P. Riedman (eds.), Handbook of Perception (vol. VMI). New York, Academic Press, pp. 227-264. Zwicker, E., Terhardt, E., and Paulus, E. (1979) Automatic speech recognition using psychoacoustic mode1s.J. acoust. Sot. Am., 6.5,487-498.

Cognition, IO (1981) X1-266 @Msevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne - Printed in The Netherlands

261

Cognjtion and neural systems MICHAEL I. POSNER* Univtkity

of Oregon

The past twenty years of research in the field of attention has witnessed a steady trend toward the study of internal covert mechanisms that lie behind the performance of skilled tasks. My own work has reflected this trend by starting with studies or okilled human perfomance, shifting to explorations of cognitive structure and later to model tasks that allowed more contact with neural systems. Human performance

The term human performance was introduced two decades ago to describe an approach that sought direct studies of everyday life skills. Research in the area emphasizes quantitative treatment of input output relationships. This levei of analysis is often most appropriate to application in a variety of military and industrial settings (Fitts and Posner, 196’7j. Cognition

The field of cognitive psychology (Neisser, 1967; Posner, 1973) reflects a greater emphasis upon internal mental structures and transformations that lie between input and output. A major area of cognitive research has been the study of speech perception and reading. The roles of automatic and conscious processes in producing sensory specific, phonetic and semantic codes have been examined in detail (Posner, 1978). This work has given us new perspective on the breakdown of cognitive function in brain injury (Coltheart, Patterson and Marshall, 1980) and upon its normal development over the lifespan (Posner and Rothbart, 1980. *This research was supported by NSF Grant BNS 792537 to the University of Oregon. Portions of this paper were presented to the 39th meeting of the Neuroscience Research Associates. I wish to thank many colleagues who have been involved in the research program described in this paper and Mary IL Rothbart for her help in clarifying this work Reprint requests should be addressed to M. I. Posner, Psychology Department, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403, U.S.A.

262 M I. Posner

C0gnitiwneuroscience

As our understanding of the role of internal mechanisms in producing complex behavior has increased, cognitive psychologists have quite naturally cozze into greater contact with neuroscience disciplines. While the goals of neuroscience are focussed on identifying general principles of nervous system structure and function, I believe the methods and ideas of cognitive psychology can play an important role in helping to formulate these principles and in applying them to the problems of cognition. Such problems include both the study of uniquely human processes such as reading and also more general cognitive abilities that we share with other organisms. E$atid attention

During the last several years my colleagues and I have sought to foster the connections between cognition and neuroscience through the study of spatial attention (Posner, 1978; Posner, Pea and Volpe, in press). We have tried to devellop paradigms for the study of attention in normal human beings that would make contact with developing neuroscience studies of attention using single cell recording from alert monkeys. In an effort to get beyond demonstrations that models of cognition can be loosely related to problems of brain injury, we have attempted a more detailed analysis of hypotheses arising in both neuroscience and psychology. For example, there has been active interest in the relationship between attention and movement in both neurophysiology (Goldberg and Wurtz, 1972; Mountcastle, 1978) and in cognitive psychology (Posner, 1980). For visual events, the major interest has been in the relationship between orienting (overtly by eye movements, or covertly via shifts of attention) and the efficiency of detecting (making arbitrary responses, or being aware of) stimuli. In our behavioral work, we have been able to explore three general points: 1. Meastirement of covert orienting of attention by changes in the efficiency of detecting stimulus events at different spatial positions. 2. The relationship between movements of covert attention and movements of the eyes. 3. The pathways controlling both covert and overt orianting. Measurement ofcovert attention We have a variety of methods (e.g., reaction time, probability of reporting near threshold stimuli) to measure the efficiency of detecting information at various positions in the visual field. Subjects maintain fixation, but if cued to

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shift attention to places other than the line of sight they are able to do so (Posner, Nissen and Ogden, 1978). Such shifts are accompanied by improved efficiency of performance in terms of the latency of responding to signals that occur at the expected position in comparison to those that occur at the unexpected position (Posner, Nissen and Ogden, 1978). We have shown that in the case of luminance detection, the fovea plays no special rule in the control of attention, although attention cannot be used to compensate for the fovea when acuity is important (Posner, 1980). Shifts of covert attention can be time-locked so that the changes in efficiency can be traced dynamically as attention is moved across the visual field (Shuhnan, hzrungton and McLean, 1979). Attention aud eye movement The time-locking of attention shifts to external signals allows testing a number of theoretical positions about the relationship between the position of the eyes and orienting of covert attention. We have shown that the occurrence of a peripheral event leads to a shift of covert attention to the area of the target about 150 msec prior to an eye movement (Posner, 1980; Remington, 1980). This occurs even when the subject has a strong incentive to maintain attention at fixation and its time course resembles that of the selective enhancement of superior colliculus units (Goldberg and Wurtz, 1972). If a central cue is use.d to instruct subjects to make an eye movement, no evidence for a shift in visual attention prior to the eye movement has been found (Remington, 1980). These findings (Posner, 1980) suggest that there are strong functional relationships between the shifts of visual attention toward the occurrence of peripheral stimuli but that there is no identity in the underlying physiological system. Nor can attention be viewed as closely coupled to the programming of the oculomotor system as propossd by efference thecries (Wurtz and Mohlea, 1976). The close functional relationship between attention movements and eye movements is similar to the relationship between eye movements and hand movements (Posner and Cohen, 1980). We have also explored the significance of the functional relation between attention and eye movements found in adults for understanding of the development of attentional mechanisms in newborns (Posner and Rothbart, 198 1). Pathways of control It has long been believed that the superior colliculus plays a special role in programming overt movements of the eyes. Mammals tend to have stronger

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pathways from the retina to the contralateral superior collicull!s than ipsilateral connections. We have tested the functional significance of this anatomical relationship by allowing our subjects to view stimulus displays monoc~larlyy (Posner and Cohen, 1980). Subjects are instructed to move their eyes in a natural fashion. When simultaneous events are presented on both sides of fixation, there is a strong tendency to move toward the temporal visual field in accordance with the anatomical connections cited above (Posner and Cohen, 1980). This asymmetry does not occur with eye movements to auditory commands nor does it occur strongly in conscious judgments of temporal order that do not involve movements of the ey-es. There appears to be a similar temporal bias in infants occurring even when only a single stimulus is preset ted (Lewis, Maurer and Milewski, 1979). Shulman (1979) sought to determine if a similar bias toward the temporal visual field existed in coverts shifts of attention. He used several methods to explore this situation. He first determined the advantage in reaction time when attention was brought to a position in the visual field by the occurrence of a single peripheral target. He had subjects view monocularly trials in which physical targets occurred simultaneously to the left and right of fixation. A bias toward the temporal visual field of the magnitude found with eye movements should have produced a temporal tield advantage of about 70 msec, but no such bias was found. A number of approaches using patients are now being explored to determine the role of the second visual system in the control of covert shifts of visual attention. Recent work by Holtzman, Sidtis, Volpe, Wilson and Gazzaniga (in press) using split brain subjects has shown that orienting cues given to one half brain can guide movements of the other half brain. This means that no*rcortical pathways play a role in the overall process of directing covert attention. Similarly, our results (Rafel, Posner and Walker, 198 1) with patients suffering from collicular lesions (progressive supranuclear palsy) suggest a role for these -nidbrain structures in the latency of covert orienting. Conclusions The work on reading and the study of spatial attention have employed a common set of approaches. Prominent among these is the detailed study of normal human subjects using various forms of mental chronometry, the use of selected populations to achieve insights into the formation and breakdown of cognitive function and the effort to relate results to perspectives developing from an increased understanding of nervous system function obtained from neuroscience stu&s. Yhese approaches maintain the empirical and analytic

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style that has characterized the psychological study of adult cognition, but also help to ensure that studies remain in close contact with skills of daily life and with important problems of cognitive deficit. I believe the close contact with applied problems will continue to be important in my own future work. Although I can’t honestly indicate a dramatic breakthrough in following this approach, I do hope that the accumulating research findings an? the availability of new techniques will help to further illuminate the relationship between cognition and brain activity.

References Bushnell, M. C., Robinson, D. L. and Goldberg, M. I. (1978) Dissociation of movement and attention: neuronal correlates in posterior parietal cortex. A'eurosciences Abstracts, 4, 621. Fitts, P. M. and Posner, M. I. (1967) Human Performance. Belmont, Calif., Brooks Cole. Coltheart, M., Patterson, K. and ?larshall, R. C. (1980) Developmental Dyslexia. London, Routledge % Kegan Paul. Goldberg, M. E. and Wurtz, R. H. (1972) Activity of superior colliculus in behaving monkeys. II. ;,ftBct of attention on neuronal responses. J. Neurophysiol., 3.5 560-574. Holtzman, J. D., Sidtis, J. J., Voll:e, B. T., Wilson, D. H. and Gazzaniga, M. S. (In press) Dissociation of spatial information for stimulus localization and the control of attention. Brain. Lewis, T. L., Maurer, D. and Mile&ski, A. E. (1979) The development of nasal de&e&ion in young infants. ARVO Abstracts, ;rlay, p. 27 1. Mountcastle, V. B. (1978) E;ain mechanisms for directed attention. J, Royal Sot. Med., 71 14-27. Neisser, U. (1967) Co,@tiue Psycholggy. New York, Appleton-Century Crofts. Posner, M. I. (1973) Cognition: an introduction. Glenview, Ill., Scott, Foresman. Poner, M. I. (1978) Chronometric Exploration of Mind. Hillsdale,NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Posner, M. I. (1980) Orienting of attention. The VIIth Sir Frederic Bartlett Lecture. Q. J. exper. Psychol., 32, 3-25. Posner, M. I. and ‘Cohen, Y. (1980) Attention and the control of movements. In G. E. Stelmach and J. Requin (eds.), ?Wonids in Motor Behavior. Amsterdam, North Holland Publishing Co., 243258. Posner, M. I., Nissen, M. J. and Ogden, W. C. (1978) Attended and unattended processing modes: The role of set for spatial location. In Pick, H. E. and Saltzman, I. J. @Is.), Modes of Perceivingand Processinginformation. Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Posner, M. I., Pea, R. and Volpe, B. (In press) Cognitive-Neuroscience: Developments toward a science of synthesis. To appear in Mehler, J. (ed.), Roceedings of the CNRS Conference, Royaumont, June X4-18,1980. Posner, M. I. and Rothbart, M. (1981) The development of attentional mechanism. In J. Plowers (ed.), The Nebraska Symposium 1980. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press. Rafel, R., Posner, M. I. and Walker, J. (1981) Progressive supranuclear palsy: Clinical and experimental observations. Paper presented to International Neuropsychology Society, Atlanta, February. Remington, R. W. (1980) Attention and saccadic eye movements. J. exper. Psychoi. Hum. Percep. Perf., 6, 726-744.

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Shuhnan, G. L, (1979)Spatial dete rminants of attention allocation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,

univefsity of Oregon. Shu!man, G. L, Remingtcq R. W. and McLean, 1. (1979) Moving attention through visual space. J. expw. l?sychoLHum. Pemp. Perfi, $522426. Wurtz, R. H. and Mohler, C. W. (1976) Organization of monkey superior coUiculus: Enhanced visual response of supe&ial layer cells. J. NeumphysioL 39, 745-765.

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Psychological explanations and knowledge-dependent processes ZENON W. PYLYSHYN* University of Western Ontario

The experimental and theoretical research that I have been engaged in during the past decade has been guided by certain general views concerning the nature of explanation in cognitive psychology. It turns out, perhaps surprisingly, that some pretty fundamental FZlilosophical considerations make an immediate difference to one’s d-.y to day research. Psychology is like that: The distance between one’s philosophical views (whether they are implicit or explicit) and everyday psychological investigations is remarkably short. One has but to look at the introductory and concluding sections of reports of stmightforward laboratory observations to see that what experimenters think is’3eing studied and what morals they arti prepared to draw from the resuits is the,*oughly conditioned by the stand that they take on the most basic philosop+ ical questions about the nature of mind and of psychological explanation. The basic position that has guided my own research is this. It seems that there are two distinct kinds of processes responsible for our behavior, each of which requires a different form of explanation becacse its regularities are governed by quite different principles. The first kind of explanation (Type I) is what might be called a cognitivist or knowledge-based or rational account, which explains certain aspects of behavior as a rational consequence of th.e organism’s possessing specific beliefs and goals. The operative principle in this sort of explanation is generally, though not exclusively, that of rationality (though a rationality whose excercise is conditioned by various limits on processing capacity). In the simplest case we might say that an organism performs action A because it has goal G and believes that carrying out A will help achieve G. Such explanations are entirely routine in large segments of psychology (e.g., social psychology) where decision-making is considered a central process. In other areas, however, (e.g., learning) it is looked upon with suspicion and generally treated as merely an informal way of speaking, and as replaceable, at least in principle, by a more objective or nr?ralistic account. There is ve.ry good reason to believe, however, that this way of talking is essential: that without such terms as goals, tacit knowledge, utilitie:;, inferences, *Reprint requests should be sent to: Zenon Pylyshyn, Department of Psychology, The University of Wetexn Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada, N6A X2.

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and so on, we would not be able to capture important generalizations about hum&n behavior. The second kind of process requires what might be called a naturalistic or mechanical-cau~ explanation (I will call this Type II to avoid evoking unfortunate prejudices). In this case the behavior of the organism is explained in terms of its possessing certain intrinsic properties which are lawfully connected in ways that cause it to behave as it dots. Although an ideally complete explanation of such processes might derive the properties and regularities in question from basic biological principles, in practice one is generally satisfied with a characterization of the regularities at a more global (or ‘functional’) level. One might usefully think of behaviors requiring Type II explanations as being in a sense ‘twired in’. Unlike the hard-wiring on a typical computer, however, the ‘wiring’ in the brain is relatively malleable. Despite the existence of such general neurological malleability, however, we need to distinguish the sorts of changes to an organism that arise as a rationally comprehensible consequence of its relations with other cognitive states or with a meaningful interpreted environment-say changes that take place when a person is toId something or sees or hearssomething which he or she interprets in some way, as opposed to those changes that take place only through non-rational means (e.g., maturation, psychosurgery, biochemistry, or perhaps rate repetition or even the operation of such principles as contiguity or reinforcement). The reason is that these two forms of change appear to follow quite different principles; specifically the first requires that we attend to the meaning, or the semantics, of the causal event, while the latter does not. The distinction b%ween these two types of processes arises in explaining certain regularities in behavior when the latter are characterized in terms of meaningful actions -actions such as, for example, answering questions, making assertions, reaching for the salt, buying a car, or any other activity whose charanterization involves essential reference to one’s intentions. One of the main reasons why this sort of behavior has to be explained in terms of goals, beliefs and inferences is that it can frequently be altered in a coherent and rationahy explicable marmer by merely providing the subject with certain information-independently of how and in what physical form tbat information is in fact transmitted. This observation is the basis of a useful methodological principle (called the ‘cogniti.ve penetrability’ condition) for decidmg whether a certain process is Type I IorType II. Suppose that the function (in sense of a mathematical input-output relation) carried out by some stage of a psychologicaI process can be shown to be freely manipulable by certain external effects. Suppose, further, that the nature of thevariation is such that it appears both systematic and coherently explainable only when the influencing effects are viewed as sigrmh to which the organism has given some

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particular interpretation. In such cases the function itself cannot be satisfactorily explained as a Type II process. It must, at least in part, be given a Type I account since clearly some interpretation-dependent rational process, like making an inference or a decision must be involved. For example, if the way people react to some stimulus can be radically changed by telling or shtiwing them something (thereby perhaps changing their goals’or their expectations or beliefs about the stimwlus, or changing the way that they interpret the task) then clearly there must be some stage of interpretation, inference or decision-making taking place in the overall process that determines the S-R function in questions. Thus if Brewer ( 1974) is right in claiming that virtually all cases of reported human conditioning are ‘cognitively penetrable’ in this sense -i.e., that the effects can be induced, systematically changed, or even eliminated entirely by merely informing subjects of the contingencies of the experiment-then at the very least the explanttion of these results must appeal to more than just the built-in mechaarism of conditioning. Some stage in the process must involve decisions based on what subjects believe, and hence requires a Type I explanation. I have also used this criterion to argue, for example, that certain proposals for ‘analogue’ processes in cognition are not well founded, or that the claim that phenomena such as those associated with mental imagery arise from certain built-in properties of a medium or a ‘surface display’ are incorrect. I will briefly mention one or two of these cases below. One of the important discoveries of cognitive science is that it is possible to reconcile Type I processes with a materialist view of causation, and thereby avoid the retreat to dualism. This is done by hypothesizing the existence of (1) symbol structures (i.e., representations) that encode beliefs and goals in some physical form, and (2) elementary operations, which are themselves presumeably Type II processes in the brain, but which can be arranged to carry out the required Type I processes-just as the operations built into a cornputer can be used to carry out rational processes like reasoning and decision making. Indeed, the distinction between the two principal kinds of processes we have been discussing is exactly parallel to the distinction drawn in cornputer science between the program and what is called the funct!onal architecture of the virtual machine, represented by the hardware and the resources provided by the programming language. My contention has beer; that drawing the distinction between Type I and Type II processes is of fundamental importance to the task of understanding cognitive phenomena. In the first place failure to distinguish between those properties of the overall process that arise from rules-and-representations and those that arise from biological properties of the underlying medium, allows one to construct ad hoc computational models that will mimic any observed

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input-output behavior with very little constraint-leaving too many degrees of freedom to permit the claim that the resulting mdJde1is explanatory (see the discussion in Py13Vshyn, 1979b, 1980). In the second place, failure to make the distinction frequently leads people to treat the discovery of some behavioral regularity as a discovery about some property of mental mechanisms (Type II) whereas it should, in fact, be treated as a discovery about subjects’ tacit knowledge of certain properties of the real world, or as a discovery about what the subjects take their task to be (this issue, as it applies to the case of mental imagery studies, is discussed at length in Pylyshyn, 198 1). There are numerous examples reported in the literature which show that a Type I (representational) process is required to explain phenomena that people had interpreted as indicating certain basic properties of mind. I have already cited the example of human conditioning experiments, But one of the earliest victims of this demonstration of cognitive peiletrability was in psychophysics, where Swets, Tanner and Birdsall (196 1) showed that the psychophysical threshold Function was cognitively penetrable-that it could be manipulated by altering subjects’ perceived utilities. Similarly, the psychophysical function responsable for the multidimensional structure of a similarity space, as derived from similarity judgments, was shown to be cognitively penetrable by Shepard (1964), who found that which (if any) metrical structure one obtains depends on which aspects of a stimulus the subject chooses to attend to-and the latter, in turn, depends upon. the subject’s goals, expectations, and so on. The cognitive penetrability of a large part of perception (almost everything past figure-ground isolation and stereopsis) is also one of the principal arguments against Gibson’s theory of direct perception (see Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1981). Similarly, my early arguments against the vie*v that images are stored in memory (Pylyshyn, 1973, 1978) relied in part on the observation that the way in which such memories fail and the way in which they are accessed all indicate that they are conceptual, rather than geometric, in nature: that the processes that operate on such memories are of Type I (which is one reason why I still prefer to call them ‘propositional’despite the widespread misunderstanding engendered by the use of this term). More recently we have obtained experimental evidence showing that a number of image manipulation processes, assumed by many to be evidence for Type II (frequently called ‘analogue’l ) processes, are in fact cognitively ‘The term l analogue* means many things to many people.I have used it here and elsewhere to refer to Type II processes. In Pylyshyn (1981) I argue that this is the sense of the term that is in fact relevant in arguments about the nature of mental representation. I have no views concerning whether or not Type I processes are inherently discrete, though it should be recognized that the only form of symbol systems that we: understand well enough to use as the basis of a theory of mental representation are discrete ones-such as computer data structures or various logical calculi. ;

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penetrable. For example, the rate at which subjects appear to ‘mentally rotate’ figures in figure comparison tasks such as those studied by Cooper and Shepard (1973) (in which ‘rotation rate’ is defined in terms of the slope of the best fitting straight line relating reaction time and angle of misalignment of two figures being compared) was shown to depend upon the conceptual complexity of both the figures in question and of the post-rotation comparison task. This led us to conclude that at least some stage in the process must be of Type I (or non-analogue), and hence that a holistic rotation account is incorrect (Pylyshyn, 1979a). In addition, a large number of mental image manipulation tasks such as those studied by Kosslyn (1980) (e.g. ones involving recording the relation between reaction time and the distance traversed in shifting one’s attention over a mental image, or the relation between time to extract informat. 3r-rfrom an image and the reported ‘size’ of the image) may also be ceg-.ttively penetrable. Thus in a number of separate studies we have shown that the linear relation between image distance and reaction time can be eliminated if the subject understands the task to.be something other than the deliberate simulation of certain properties of viewing a real physical event. This has led. us to suppose that it may be the case that in most such s+TAGes, what we are learning is that subjects have tacit knowledge of the real situation they are asked to imagine and that they have the psychophysical ability to generate the appropriate simulated results (i.e., the reaction time function that would have OLcurred in the real situation). If that is the case then cleariy we learn little abou; mental mechanisms (Type II processes) in such studies but only about what subjects know and what they understand the requirements of the task to be-i.e., about Type I processes, which require a ‘rational’ explanation. As I argued in 3ylyshyn (198 I), casting theories about such processes in the form of computer models does nothing to alleviate the confusion caused by the failure to distinguish these two types of processes. In that case one still needs to distinguish ?hose parts of the program that are merely emulating the functional architecture of the mind on the foreign architecture of currently available digital computers, from the Type I cog,titive processes that are hypothesized to be actually taking place in the mind. Ideally what we need to have is independent evidence for the basic cognitively impenetrable functions that are used to carry out the cognitive processes-i.e., we need to know the .functional architecture of the mind. This, as one might suspect, is no easy charge. Evidence for the nature of the functional architecture might come from behavior,al studies, from biology, or from ideas developed in corn-puter science (especially proposals, such as those of Newell, 1973? or of Fahlman, 1979, for radically different and psychologically promisiny a.rchitectures).

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In the meantime, and in the absence of clearly adequate general architectural proposals, it is at least important to keep the distinction in mind. Sometimes knowing that there is an important distinction to be respected is just as important for the development of sound research programs as having reliable data. As an example of how keeping in mind the distinction between functional architecture and cognitive process can affect one’s theory construction, consider the following example drawn from some of our recent computer modelling work. We have taken some preliminary steps in the direction of developing a model of perceptual-motor coordination, a process which we believe contains some interesting examples of cognitively impenetrable functions -and one that may hold some clues concerning the often cited ‘spatial’ character of mental images and the rather special properties exhibited by images that are ‘projected’ onto perceived scenes. In designing this model (described in Fylyshyn, Elcock, Marmor and Sander, 1978) we were guided by the recognition that process models cannot avoid making some assumptions about the nature of the underlying mechanisms or architecture. In keeping with this concern we proceeded by what Marr ( 1976) has called the principle of minimum commitment: we have, whenever possible, aticnted the least powerful mechanism, compatible with known empirical constraints, that is capable of carrying out the task. This strategy allows the observed behavior to be characterized in terms of the fewest (or at least the weakest) assumptions about wl&h of the required functions are actually built into the organism, as opposed to being carried out by more general knowledge-dependent processes. This strategy, which is invoked only in the absence of detailed information about which functions are candidates for the functional architecture, is an instance of a quite general methodological principle: do not proliferate special cases when you can subsume instances under a general principle. It is like the policy adopted in the study of motivation, in which one at.tempts to characterize motives in terms of general cognitive pri-lciples in preference to attributing each apparently new motive to some newly discovered instinct. It is also equivalent to the principle of trying to fit a curve by an equation with the fewest free parameters. However successful these first steps may be (if nothing else they have suggested a number of empirical predictions which we have not yet tested), they do show that a fundamental distinction can have immediate consequences both for the interpretation of empirical findings and for the development of formal models. It should be added,.in concluding, that there are many cases in which we do have reason to believe that certain functions are cognitively impenetrable. For example there are many functions in the visual system (e.g., those which Marr, 1976, has characterized as deriving a ‘primal sketch’) and in language

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processing (e.g., aspects of syntactic analysis or lexical lookup) that appear to be cognitively impenetrable. Because such processes i:a:ayprovide the ‘fixed points’ or the ‘cognitive constants’ in a future explanatory theory of mind, it is important to attempt to discover as many of them as ycssible. Indeed I anticipate important discoveries in the next decade to proceed along these lines: the strategy of ‘divide and conquer’ is an important one in science and I expect that careful analysis of task demands (along the lines being carried out in Artificial Intelligence) together with ingenious empirical work will reveal many modules of cognitively impenetrable processes like those cited above. At the same time, however, we must be cautious in accepting what seem on the surface to be primitive mechanisms of cognitive processing. Cognition is characterized by an amazing degree of plasticity, and the history of the field is littered with the remains of various proposed mechanisms that +vereinvented to serve as theoretical building blocks, but which turned out themselves to be just additional cognitive processes in need of a Type I explanation. In many of these cases, the apparent primitiveness of the processes, which led people to view them as elementary mechanisms, was an artifact of the experimental method used, and resulted from a blindness to the fwndamzntal distinctions discussed above and to the theoretical importance of the criterion of cognitive penetrability. The importance of these issues to the computational view of mind is discussed at length in Pylyshyn (fcrtl- Toming). Referemces Brewer. W. F. (1974) There is no convincing evidence for operant or classical conditioning in adult humans. In W. B. Weiner, and D. S. Palermo (eds.), Cognitiorcartdthe symbolic processes. Hillsdale, NJ, Prentice-Hall. Cooper, L. A., and &.eparcl, R. N. (1973) Chronometric studies of the rotation of mental images. In W. G. Chase (ea.), Visualinformation processing. New York, Academic Press. Fahlman, S. E. (1979) NETL: A system for representingand using reef world knowledge. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press. Fodor, J. A,, and Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1981) How direct is visual perception: Somexeflectionson Gibson’s ‘Ecological Approach’. 4’>g., 9, 139-196. Kosslyn, S. M. (1980) image urrdmind. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard Unversity Press. Marr, D. (1976) Early processing of visual information. Phil. Trans. R. SIC. London, 275,483--534. Newell, A. (i973) Production systems: Models of control structures. In W. G. Chase (ed.), Visualinf;xmation prorn&ng. New York, Academic Press. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1: .5) What the mind’s eye tells the mind’s brain: a critique of mental imagery. Pry chol. Bul., 80, l-24. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1978) Imagery and artifical intelligenct. In W. Savage (ea.), Perceptionu;ld cogfiition: issuesin the foundations ofpsychology, Minneapolis, University cf Minnesota Press. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (197%) The rate of ‘mental rotation’ of images: a tesf c,,f a holistic analoguc hypothesis.Mem. Cog., 7, 19-28.

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Pylyshyn, Z.‘W. (19793) Validattig computational models: a critique of Anderson’s indeterminacy of representation claim. Aychol. Rev., 86, 383-394. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1980) Computation and cognition: issues in the foundations of cognitive science. Behav. Brain Sci,, 3,111,-169. Pylyshym, Z. W. (1981) The imagery debate: analogue media versus tacit knowledge. Psychol. Rev., 88, 16-45. Pylyshyn, Z. W. (In press) Computationand cognition Cambridge, Mass, MIT Press. Bradford Books. Pylyshy.n, Z. W., Elcock, E. W., Maaror, M., and Sander, P. (1978) Explorations in perceptual-motor spaces. Roceedings of the second internationalconferences of the Gmadian Society for Computational Studies of intelligence. Toronto, University of Toronto, Department of Computer Science. Shepard, R. N. (1964) Attention and the metrical structure of the similarity space. J. Math. Psycho& 1. 54-87. Swets, 1. A., Tanner, W. P., and Birdsall, T. G. (1961) Decision processes in perception. Psychol.Rev., 68. 30 l-340.

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Psychology without linguistics = language without grammar DAN I. SLOBIN’ University of Californi-8, Berkeley

“Developmental psycholinguistics”, or the modern cdd;r of child language development, began about 20 years ago with a search for the early structurd principles underlying children’s speech in English. Cuided by Piagetian psycholog/ and Chomskyan linguistics, we approached language development as a phenomenon of successive grammatical structuration. The dominant theoretical issues of the sixtics dealt with the degree of innateness of the underlying principles, the extent to which they were specialized for language behavior, and their fit to current models of transformational grammar and its descendants. Psychologists and linguists discussed these problems in common terms , ar:*eexamples could be adduced; in short, the notions expressed by grammatical markers are a privileged subset of notions accessible to tile child. Within this subset, language-free developmental sequences are observed. For example, across a varrzty of distinct languages, topological notions of relative proximity (‘in’, ‘on’, ‘under’, ‘at’) are acquired earlier than notions of projective spatial location (‘in front’, ‘behind’) (Johnston. and Slobin, 197% The first past-tense markings always refer to processes resulting in immediately tangible end-states contemporaneous with the moment of speaking. The first encodings of transitive events- whether by word order, accusative markings on object nouns, OPergative markings on subject nouns-refer to

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direct physical manipulations of objects. In short, the development of grammatically relevant semantics lies outside of the development of language-specific means of expression (e.g. prepositions, postpositions, or nominal inflections for locative notions; affixes, stem alterations, or auxiliaries for ter- marking; and so forth). (2) At the same time, languages differ in the relative accessibility to the child of the means of expression of developing notions. For example, suffixes are more salient than prefixes, postpositions more salient than prepositions. Accordingly, the encoding of locative notions by suffixes (as in Hungarian) or by pos;positions(as in Turkish)emerges earlierthan the encoding of the same notions by prefixes (as in Bantu 1anguag:s) or by prepositions (as in English). However, the order of emergence of locative notions is the same across tlbese different types of languages. To some extent, form and function have separate developmental histories. As more semantic systems and more types of formal expression are studied ontogenetically, we will come to understand more about the child’s initial and growing sensitivities to particular features of linguistic form. (3) Languages also differ in terms of the ways in which semantic distinctions are grouped relative to linguistic form. Some conflations of semantic categories seem to be “primitive”, while others are not. For example, Turkish uses a single morpheme to encode accusative and definiteness on nouns, and this conflation poses no difficulty to children. However, conflations of accusative with animacy or with affirmative-negative distinction, as in Slavic languages, are not easily acquired. Or, to take another example of conflation, Slavic verb-stem alternations for tense are more difficult to master than verbstem alternations for aspect, indicating that aspect may be a more mherently verbal notion than tense. Numerous data of this sort will contribute to defining a developmental hierarchy of notions available for grammaticization. For example, case is likely to be grammaticized before animacy, aspect before tense, a.nd so forth. Eventually, comparisons of this sort will contribute to universal definitions of the semantic bases of grammatical distinctions. Such a hierarchy, however, also interacts with the specific grammatical form of encoding basic notions. For example, definiteness is acquired more easily if marked on the noun-phrase (as in Turkish noun suffixes and Indo-European and Semitic articles) than on the verb (as in Hungarian). Japanese children have difficulty in learning to adjust adjective stems for tense, indicating that tense may be an inherently verb-associated notion. Continued examination of crosslinguistic acquisition data on these lines will reveal “natural” tendencies to’ conflate or separate various semantic categories and to relate those categories to particular morphological and syntactic structures.

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(4) Systems of mapping between f-r-m and function must be processed “online” as speakers produce and interpret utterances. We are only beginning to elaborate mod.els of the developmert of proc . *,singskills. For example, word order patterns are relatively more difficult ‘:r attend to as guides to meaning than are particular “local cues” such as suf ..y3s. Turkish children of age 2; 0 are able to understand all six orders of subject, verb, and object is simple transitive sentences, where the object is marked with a distinctive accusative inflection, while English-speaking children of the same age cannot yet inter pret noun-verb-noun sequences as expressing subject-verb-object (Slobin, in press a). The development of processing skills clearly plays a signicicant role in determini1i.g which aspects of the grammar will be accessible to children at particular points in development, along with the perceptual and conceptual factors hinted at above. (5) Finally, linguistic systems continually undergo revision and reorganization throughout the course of development. Some revisions reflect attempts to secure clarity of expression, as when childr:n pass through stages of preferring analytic to synthetic expressions (e.g., make dead to kill), or full to contracted forms (e.g., will not to won ‘t). Other reorganizations reflect emerging realizations of regularity (as in the replacement of rote exceptions by rule-formed “errors”, such as the replacement of early correct rote past tenses broke and hit by breaked and hitted). Overregularizations are eventually replaced by a return of earlier rote forms, resulting in an adult-like system in which rules and exceptions coexist. Many separate examples such as these await the el&oration of a theory of stages of linguistic change. This quick overview of five major developmental issues points to a need for a comprehensive and interactionist developmental model in which particular linguistic skills of analysis and model building will take their place along with factors of cognitive development. It is far too early to make definitive state ments of the relative roles of language-specific and general cognitive factors in such a model. What is needed is many detailed studies of the course of acquisition of particular linguistic domains, iq all of their structural richnessmorphosyntactic, semantic, and-pragmatic. My prediction is that a powerful and definable “Language A6;quisition Device” (LAD) or “Language Acquisition System” (LAS) will eventually emerge. LAD/LAS, however, will l:ave to bootstrap itself in interaction with particular types of input--linguistic, cognitive, and social--modifying itself in predictable ways in constructing, and finally arriving at adult linguistic competence. Analysis of these psycholinguistic processes cannot succeed without detailed crosslinguistic developmental study, and cannot be carried out in ignorance of the detailed form of linguistic structures.

Asnmon, hf. S., and Slobin, D. L(l979)A cross-linguistic study of the processingof causative sentences. 43g., S, l-17. Johnston, J. R., and Slobin, D. 1. (1979) The development of Locative expressions in English, Italian, SerboCroatian and Turkish.I. child JZUM~., 6.531-547. Karmiloff-Smith, A. (In press). Language as a formal problem-space for children. In W. Deutsch (ed.), The chiW3 constmction of iknguuge. London, Academic Press. Skbin, D. 1.0973) Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In C. A. Ferguson and D. 1. Slobin teds.), Stu@iesof chiM hnguage deuelapment. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, pp. 175-208. Skbh,D.l.r1l977)Lauguage changein childhood and inhistory. In J.Macnamara(ed.),LangguJearning and thought. New York, Academic Press, pp. 185-214. Sl&n, D. I. (1980) The repeated path between transparency and opacity in language. 1n.U. Bellugi and hf. !&adder@Kennedy (eds.), S&cd and spoken bguage: Biological constraintson linguistic fm West Berlin, Verlag Chemie, pp. 229-243. Slobin, D. I. (In press (I) Theorighrsofgrammatical encoding of events. In W. Deutsch (ed.), The child’s constmction ofkknguage. London, Academic Press. Sk&?, D. I. (In press b) Universaland particular in the acquisition of language. In L. R. Gleitman and E. Wanner (eds.), Language acquisition: Stute of the art. Cambridge,C- -bridge University Press. Slobin, D. I. &I.) (In preparation) The cmsdinguistic study of child lkngr:ap:. : I&dale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates..

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Pragmatics DAN SPERBER C.N. R.S. and Universiti de Paris DEIRDRE WILSON* University College, London

Pragmatics, the theory of utterance-interpretation, is a branch of cognitive psychology. Utterances convey information which is conceptual, intentionally communicated and linguistically encoded, and which is processed in the context of additional conceptua! material retrieved or derived from memory. An adequate pragmatic theory she&id ‘ncorporate a general account of the processing of conceptual information $1 a context, and a ptrticular account of whatever special principles and problems are involved in the processing of information that has been intentionally, and linguistically, communicated. Pragmatic theories in this sense, if not under this name, have always existed; however, it is only in the last ten years or so that pragmatics has become an institutionalized research field, with its own textbooks, international conferences and journals.’ Its contributors are based in a variety of disciplines, including psychology and psycholinguistics, linguistics, AI and sociolinguistics. The field is so new and so diverse that no consensus on basic concepts and theories, or even on overall goals and research tasks, has yet emerged. Our remarks here like most contributions to the field, will be fairly speculative. The main aim of pragmatic theory is to provide an explicit account of how human beings interpret utterancei. To do this, one would have to say ihow disambiguation is achieved ; how reference is assigned; how sentence fragm.ents are interpreted; how ungrammatical utterances are dealt with. what role presuppositional phenomena play; how implicatures (intended inferences) are worked out; how contextual and encyclopaedic knowledge is brought to bear; and so on. Any organized’set of answers to these and similar questions would constitute a pragmatic theory on some level of adequacy. *Reprint requests should be sent to Deirdre Wilson, Department of Linguistics, Uriversity College, Cower Stxet, London WCIE 6 BT, England. a Recent and forthcoming general works include de Beaugrande and Dressier (1981); Cole (1978), Cole (1981), Leech (In press), Levinson (In press), Lyons (In press), Parrett and Verschueren (19801, and van Dijk (1977).

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Work so far published in the field tends to fall into three categories. The fust, and most interesting, consists of work which directly addresses these cetitral questions. Grice’s William James Lectures (1975, 1978) are classic examples. Here, Grice establishes a distinction between conventional meaning, assigned by semantic rule, and conversational meaning, created by the operation of a general communicative principle developed into various maxims of truthfulness, informativeness, relevance, perspicuity, etc. Work in this category can be both stimulating and suggestive ,2 but it is almost always so vague and intuitive as to constitute less a theory than a set of hints on how to go about constructing one. The second category consists of empirical work. A good example would be Clark and Schu,nk (1980), which investigates responses toI indirect requests and the properties which make them seem more oi: less polite. Work in this category, though it can be explicit and well-evidenced, is necessarily limited in scope, and is also hard to interpret in the absence of an established theoretical framework. The third category consists of formal work. An interesting example is Gazdaltlr(1979), in which the techniques of formal semantics are applied to a small range of pragmatic phenomena, and in particular pr,-,gmatic presuppositional phenomena. Work in this category is almost always explicit, but it is rarely directly relevant to the goals of pragmatic theory. Its practitioners tend to look only ai questions that seem immediately amenable to formal treatment, and these are rarely the fundamental ones.3 Over the last few years, we have tried to develop answers of our own to some of the central questions of pragmatics. Our work borrows from Grice’s the crucial insight that the interpretation of an utterance is based not only on me,aning and context but also on a general communicative principle tacitly shared by the interlocutors. Our work also differs from Grice’s in several important respects4 First, our claims are more explicit, For example, whereas G&e suggests a maxim of relevance without attempting to say what relevance is, we take an explicit definition of relevance as the basis for a reformulated Principle of Relevance, which in turn forms the basis for a unitied pragmatic theory (see bdow). Second, our work is psychological rather than philosophical in intent. We want to look at natural classes of phenomena, and to account for them in %ee, for example, Ducrot (19721, Stahaker (1974), and Allwood (1976). ‘Caz&u (1979, pp. 53-4) remarks that his attempted formalization of some aspects of Grids work loses much of the power and general&y’of Grice’s proposals, but adds ‘not to stick to formalist methodo@~in an areame this can only lead out of linguistics and into literary criticism’. ‘See Wilson and Sperber (la press) for discussion.

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terms of principles with systematic psychological correlates, This has led us to reject Grice’s most basic claim about the domain of pragmatic theory. clrice and most pragmaticians see pragmatics as concerned solely with utterancecomprehension, which involves recovery only of a set of propositions that the speaker specifically intended to convey. ’ We do not believe that comprehension is a well-defined domain. The typical case of communication seems to be one where the speaker specifically intends to express a certain proposition, and generally intendssome conclusions to be drawn from it (generally intends it to ha.ve some relevance); however, there is much variety in the further intentions that he could have. At one extreme, he may have no specitic intentiorls about the form or content of the conclusions to be drawn; at the other exLreme he may have highly specific intentions &out them; and between the two extremes, he could intend there to be conclusions of a certain general type, but not of a specific form, and so on. In other words, comprehension shades off imperceptibly into a wider process of utterance-interpretation, in which responsibility for a particular conclusion sometimes falls wholly on the speaker, sometimes falls wholly on the hearer, and in many cases is shared in some proportion by both. It is utterance-inn’crpretation, not utterance-comprehension, that is the natural domain of pragmatic theory. The third respect in which we differ from Grice is iu the role we assign to relevance in the processing of all conceptual informatiq and to a Principle of Relevance in the interpretation of utterances. Intuitively, to establish the relevance of some proposition is to see how it connects up with some accessible body of information (or context). We argue, more explicitly, that to establish the relevance of a proposition is to combine it with a context of acccs-e sible information and infer from this combination some conclusions (contextual impZicutionsPwhich would not be inferable from either the proposition or the context on its own. To maximize the relevance of a proposition is to process it in such a way as to maximize the number of its contextual implications and minimize the processing cost of deriving them. Maximizing relevance, in our terms, is simply a matter of extracting information from the combination of a proposition and a cor.text in the most efficient way, ancl it seems reasonable to assume that ali’ conceptual information is processed with this aim? Most information is not very relevant. However, when a speaker intentionally provides a hearer with information, he thereby gives a guarantee that a certain standard of relevance has been aimed at. This guarantee is incorpo‘Specifying the type of intentions involved is a complex technical matter. See Schiifer (1972) for discussion. For more general discussion of this issue, see Clark and Carlson (In press), and Sperber and Wilson (In press). 6For details of this account of relevance, see Wilson and Sperber (In preparation).

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rated into our Principle of Relevance: the speaker tries to make his utterance as relevant as possible to the hearer. The hearer has a systematic expectation of relevance.. He may, of course, have more specific expectations as to what the speaker will say, but, we argue, either these further expectations follow from the Principle of Relevance in the context, or else they are just ordinary elements of the context with no special role in interpret,ttion. The Principle of Relevance plays a unique role in theminterpretation of utterances by.providing a shared criterion against which possible interpretations can be tested. An utterance has bet:n properly disambiguated, references have been properly assigned, sentence-fragments have been properly completed when and only when the resulting proposition satisfies the Principle of Relevance. We claim that either only one disambiguation of an utterance satisfies the Principle of Relevance, or an ambiguity is perceived by the hearer.’ Similarly, the Principle of Relevance determines the implicatures of an utterance: when the speaker could not have expected his utterance to be relevant to the hearer without intending him to derive some specific contextual implication from it, then, and only then, that implication is also an implicature.’ A central question concerning the processing of conceptual information in context is how contextual information is selected, retrieved and expl,oited. We argue that this complex process is governed by the goal of maximizing relevance. A small initial context (the interpretation of the preceding utterance in the case of verbal material) is systematically searched for contextual implications and can be expanded in several directions, While each expansion may increase the number of contextual implications, it also increases the processing cost in such a way that the context must be kept narrow or else relevance would decrease.9 When, in the inferential processing of a proposition, the systematic search of a narrow context for possible contextual implications fails to satisfy expectations of relevance, use is made of what we call ‘evocational processing’. This second form of processing consists in sampling a much larger context in search of conceptual connections on the basis of which relevance might be increased. Evocational processing can be intentionally triggered in a subject by providing him with information the relevance of which he will not be able to establish solely through inferential processing. This occurs, in particular, when-7 Expeszmental studies on’the

processof disambguationtake the goal of that process for granted. The goal of disambiguation is intuitively obvious but has not been so far explicitly described. The Principle of Relevance provides the basis for such a description._ *Presuppositional phenomena can also be accounted for on the basis of the hinciple of Relevance; see VGlson *nd Sperber (1979), Sperber and Wilson (In preparation). For a discussion of previous accounts, see Wilson (1975). 9!%eSperber and Wilson (In press).

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ever a figure of rhetoric is used. Figures of rhetoric such as metaphors cre?te and, at first, frustrate expectations of relevance which can then be satisfied through evocational processing. Along these lines, the Principle of Relevance can provide some insight into not only th3 inferential but also the evocatioilal aspects of utterance-interpretation, and hence folrm the basis for a unified theory of pragmatics and rhetoriclO If our approach to pragmatics is right, it closes dowu one line of research currently being pursued, and opens up a quite different one. Much recent work on pragmatics assumes the existence of a pragmatic device or module. with its own formal properties and rules, comparable to the linguistir device and others suggested by recent psychological research. As far as we can see, there is no evidence for this assumption, or for the widely held alternative assumption that pragmatics is simply one component of the linguistic device. Prag,matics is not a separate device or sub-device with its own specialized structure: it is simply the domain in which linguistic abilities, logical abilities and memory interact. Precisely because of this lack of specialization, we think pragj atics can yield valuable insights into other areas of psychology. There is a whole range of highly complex natural phenomena which are in important respects beyond the scope of experimental methods, and about which informants -make only vague and subjective statements: for example, the unders!anc”;ng of a work of art, or a ritual, or another person. Utterance-interpretation i: also a highly complex natural phenomenon which cannot always be er.perimenta’!y studied; however, intuitions about utterance-interpretation are somewhat more clearcut and less controversial: it would be rare, for example, to find two informants disagreeing about the disambiguation of an utterance in context. Psychologically justified pragmatic theories are thus easier to construct than, say, psychologically justified aesthetic theories. If we are right about the lack of a specialized device for utterance-interpretation, the basic principles involved in it should be equally applicable to other complex natural phenomena of the same type: phenomena which, like the interpretation of utterances, seem to involve, in a search for relevance, a combination of inferential and evocational processing. Pragmatics thus seems to us to be capable of throwing direct light on psychological mechanisms of some generality and indirect light on other areas of thought where these mechanisms play a part. We think pragmatics is entering a more active and creative phase. However the best we can expect is quite modest compared to the task at hand. It is likely that theoretical work in pragmatics (and in related areas of psychology) will remair highly speculative. But speculation need not be trivial or vague. ii-

See Spurber (197Sa,19756,1980),

Sperber and Wilson (1981, In preparation).

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Allwood, J. (1976) Linguistic Communication as Action and C&operation: A ::tudy in Pragmatics Gothenburg Monogmphs in Linguistics2. University of G6tebolg. de Beaugrande, R., and Dressier, W. (1981) Zntroductionto Text Linguistics. London, Longman. Clark, H., and Carlson, T. (In Press) Context for comprehension. In J. Long and A. Baddeley teds.), A ntwtzbn and Performance, XI. Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaem. Clark, H., and &hunk, D. (1980) Polite responses to polite requests. Cog., 8, 11 l-143. Cole, P. (cd.) (1978) Syntax and Semantics 9: Ragmatics.New York, Academic .‘ress. Cole, P, fed_) (1981) RadicalPragnraticsNew Ywk, Academic Press. Ducrot. 0. (1972) Tie et ne pas d&e. Paris, Hermann. Gazdar, G. (1979) Rag?rurtis: Zmplicature.Presuppositionand Logical Form. New York, Academic Press. Grizze, H. P. (1975) Logic and conversation. In P. Cole and J. Morgan teds.), Syntax and Semantics3: Speech Acta New York, Academic Press. G&e, H, P. (197% Further notes on logic and conversation. In P. Cole ted.), Syntax and Semantics 9: Ragmatics~New York, Academic Press. Leech, G. (In press) Linguisticsand Rhetoric. London, Long&n. Levinson, 6 (In press) ZVagmatics.Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Lyons, J. (In press) Lorrgrurge,Meaningrmd Context. London, Fontana. Parret, H., and Verschueren, J. (198O)P~~gmuticsond Beyond. Amsterdam, 1. Benjamin. Schiffer, 8. ( 1972) Meumtig. Oxford, Clarendon Press. Sperber, D. (19750) Rethinking Syn&ofism. Cambridge University Press. Sperber, D. 1(1975&jRudiments de rhitorique cognitive. Po&que, revue de thiorie et d tinalyselit& robes. 23,389-415. Sperber, D. (1980) Is symbolic thought prerational? In M. Foster and S. Brandes (eds.11,Symbol as Sense. New York, Academic P:ess. Sperber, D., and Wilson, D. (1981) Irony and the use-mention distinction. In P. Cole ted.), Syntax and Wnant&s 9: fiagmutics. New York, r;&emic Press. Sperber. D., and Wilson, D. (In press) Mutual knowledge and relevance in theories of comprehension. In N. V. Smith Bed.!,iVow&ngs of the SSRC Colloquiumon MutualKnowledge. London, Academic Press, Sperkr, D., and Wilson, D. (In preparation) hnguage and Relevance: Foundations of Pragmatic *ovS~htier, R. (1974) Pragmatic presuppositions. In M. Munitz and P. Unger teds.), Zemanticsand Phiiosuphy. New York, New York University Press. KiiIn, D. 11975) Resuppositions and Won-l?uth-GmditionalSemantics. New Yorlk, Academic Press. Rilson, D., and Sperber, D. (1979) Ordered entailments: an alternative to presuppo$tional theories. In C.-K. Oh and D. Dineen @W,Syntax and Semantics ZZ: Aesupposition. New York, Academic Pzess. B=n, I)., and Sperber, D. (In prew) On G&e’s theory of convezation. To appear in P. Werth (ed.), London, Croom Helm. ~~mmtztkm~&wech and hccmrse whn, D., and Sperber, D. (In preparation) On defining ‘relevance’. To appear in R. Grandy (ed.), Femchri@for PbuI &ice. Van 0% T. (19773 Text and Context.: Expkxations in the Semantics and : .-agmaticsof Discourse. Loruion, Lorrgman.

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Cognition in animals: Learn +j as program assembly J. E. R. STADDON” Duke University

Learning most tasks has two components. First, an approximate solution must be found: the student laboriously solves the first algebra problem, the rat stumbles on the lever. Second, after an intervening period when the organism does something else, a residue must remain of what occurred on first exposure so that there are savings, i.e., the organism does a bit better the seccmd time than it did the first time. Learning is compounded of these two effects: initial often ill-directed stabs at solving the problem, which will be repeated in reduced form on subsequent exposures, plus the retention from occasion to occasion of an accumulating core of reliable knowledge. The two major areas of animal learning are divided along these general lines. Operant conditioning, to the extent that it is concerned with learning at all, is interested in the initial “shaping” of behavior by the condition: ,f reinforcement. There is much less interest in how the changes wrought in one experimental session carry over to the next. Classical conditioning, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the accumulation of “strength” by a conditioned stinmlus from one experimental session to the next. Although classical and operant conditioners disagree on many points they agree in one respect: on the importance of stimuli and responses. Both lines ofwork have their theoretical roots in the refle.u---not the reflex of Sherrington a subtle concept subordinate to his main theme of integration, but a simpler idea used as a metaphor for cause. In recent years, dissatisfaction with this primitive kind of theory has led to the appearance of “cognitive” views. These take several forms: updated versions of Tolmanian cognitive maps (e.g., Menzel, 1978), experimental exploration of the perceptual categories of animals (e.g., Herrnstein and de Villiers, 1980), more or 1~s~ explicit informationprocessing accounts (e.g.,Wagner, 1978),through accounts of animal behavior as a rational process paralleiing human verbal reasoning (e.g., Seligman and Johnston, 1973). Any account involving the word “memory” or referrip: - to constructs at all’removed from measurable stimuli and responses tends also to label itself “cognitive” (cf., several chapters in the book edited by Hulse, Fowler and Honig, 1978. *I thank Richard Herrnstein, Stewart Hulse and Evalyn Segal for comments on an earlier version of this piece. Research supported by grants from the National Science Foundation to Duke University. Reprint requests should be sent to J. E. R. Staddon, Department of Psychology, Duke Universtiy, Durham, North Carolina 27706, U. S. A.

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In some respects, these changes are a clear advance. The evidence that animals can form representations of the world of rich, maplike connectivity is overwhelming. The idea that ability to time can be described in terms of an internal clock is perfectly plausible, even though its physiology (in mammals) and properties are far from fully understood. It is useful to emphasise that theories of animal behavior need not be restricted entirely to peripheral processes: We are no longer confined by the bizarre presumption that the only acceptable kind of biological clock is one in which the hands and escapement are composed of the animal’s observable behavior, for example. Yet this new freedom is not without its dangers. In the exhilaration of throwing over what I have termed “hooks-and-eyes” behaviorism (Staddon, 1973), a distressing tendency to revert to old-fashioned anthropomorphism has Surfaced, Animals are said to learn that they are “helpless” and cannot control external events; they learn “relations”, they “remember”, they “expect” certain things to happen, and so on. “So what! “, the reader may object. It is well known that computer programmers speak of their machines in just this familiar way: the machine remembers past data; it expects certain kinds of input and behaves disagreeably if it fails to receive them; it may even act “helpless” under certain circumstances. Yet no one doubts that a proper scientific account can be given of all these things. Books on programming are free of the exhortations to terminological hygiene that were once commonplace i.ntexts on behavioral psychology. The difference between the computer and the animal, of course, is that a mechanistic account of computer behavior is available to anyone with the wit and patience to thread his way through the appropriate program. AI1 know that such an account exists, even if few choose to check it out. But mechanistic accounts are lacking in many of the examples I have given. We have no more insight into the behavior of a “helpless” person or animal than is provided by our personal intuition -an attribute in which many individuals are notoriously deficient. Little agreement can be expected on this basis. The problem with “relational” learning is at least as old as the controversy between Kenneth Spence (1937) and the gestalt psychologists. “Animals learn relations”, they said -referring to the results of transposition experiments. “Then why do they sometimes fail?” asked Spence-referring to transposition reversal. Spence’s solution was an additive process by which particular physical stimuli are associated with gradients of effect that summate to guide choice. His theory is simple, perhaps too simple, but at least it provides a mechanism not only for those instances where animals behave relationally, but also for the cases where they do not. One may disagree with Spence’s solution, but one cannot avoid the obligation to do as he did and

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provide a mechanism for those “cognitive” aspects of performance for which anthropomorphic labels are so seductive, Sympathetic understanding is not scientific explanation. The modest insig.at that animals learn more than stimulus-response relations does not justify the leap into a never-never land of mental life. Not only do rationalistic explan&ions beg the question, they may also miss the point. Many years ago, the comfortable anthropomorphising of Romanes and his successors was demolished by careful experimental analyses that dissected such elegant adaptations as predation and nest building into simple programs, whose elements could be laid bare by breaking invariable natural associations. For example, Fabre ( 19 15) showed that if the paralyzed prey of a cricket-hunting wasp (left briefly by the predator as she inspects h.er burrow) is slightly moved, the emerging wasp insists each time on repositioning the cricket and inspecting the burrow again. This sequence is repeated indefinitely, as often as the cricket is moved, Even vertebrates show similar rigidities-gulls retrieving imaginary eggs and incubating baseballs, robins aHacking distant mail vans, fish courting colored discs, chicks imprinting on almost anything, and so on. The point is that “rational” behavior may rest on quite a simple set of well-knit subroutines. Rationality vanishes as soon as the rules by which the animal operates are known. The danger of rationalistic accounts is that they lead us to neglect the task of challenging the organism in ways that will reveal the mechanical structure that must underly the appearance of rationality. We learned this lesson once; must we do so again? If not expectations of S-R connections, then what do organisms learn? I suspect that the very form of the statement is misleading: the organism (an agent) does something (it learns). Net so; what actually happens is tl;st we (the experimenter) expose this biological system to an interactive environment of some sort and, after a while, the system behaves in a different way than it did before. And the changes persist, so that even after lapse of time, the new pattern of behavior is retained. In the metaphor of the computer, the organism behaves as if it has a new program. There is no agent here, unless it be tllc experimenter. No thing is learned, Rather from ingredients given by nature and past experience a new program better suited to changed conditions has evolved It may be convenient to describe the properties oF this new program by saying that the animal has developed an expectation or is “helpless”, but this no more explains what is happening than it would were the program a real one. written for an electronic, rather than a biological, computer. The two stages of learning that I described earlier fit easily into the program metaphor. The first stage, in which behavior is variable and “exploratory” may represent the first steps in putting together an effective program.

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Such a program has two aspects. One is concerned with knowledge: the program must encode the new situation in a way that relates it to--and differentiates it from -others in the animal’s experience. This code also functions as a retrieval cue for the second aspect of the program: its performance rules; these guide behavior with respect to the encoded representation. If the first: step has been well done, then situations functionally similar to the training situation wi!l be sufficient to retrieve part, at least, of the original program-the animal is then said to generalize in an adaptive way. For the most part functiona; and physical similarity are closely related: in nature, physically similar situations will usually require similar behavior. Occasionally, as in a discrimination-learning experiment, physically similar situations will require quite different behavior. Even though su,;h similar situations will at first retrieve similar programs, if the similarity i.s not too great, the processes of program assembly (i.e., learning) are usually sufficient tc rllow the development of different programs for each situation. The animal is then said to discriminate appropriately. This analogy has several implications for our understanding of conventional operant-conditioning procedures: I. Stimulus control

Rather than being a relation analogous to 2 reflex, this is really close,. to a memory retrieval process. The nature of the process is obscured because +he stimulus responded to-the colored pigeon key, for example-is also a large part of the situational context that calls up the behavior of key pecking. The resembkmce is clearer in the case of temporal control, where the stimulus in questial ti in the past (the pause in responding produced by periodic food on a fixed-interval schedule is an instance of temporal control). Here limitations on temporal control correspond closely to limitations on memory revealed in experiments with people (cf., Staddon, 1974). Experiments on successive discrimination reversal can also be ana?.yzed in a way tihat makes clear the resemblance between stimulus control and memory-retrieval1 (Staddcn and Frank, 1974; Staddon, in preparation, Chapter 11). 2. Acquisition The Hghly variable, exploratory behavior that characterizes first a new situation may represent a relatively fixed program that whenever the animal confronts a situation not previously encoded it has no stored prmm. (This view is close to Craik’s [ 19431

exposure to is called up or for which w&known

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interpretation of learning as the detection of a discrepancy between a stored model and a new situation). Proof of this conjecture is difficult because few situations are truly novel (in the sense of having no resemblance to any previously experienced situation), so that animals’ response to most new situations usually contains some previously learned elements. Nevertheless, in some careful observations of rats in a runway in my laboratory a few years ago, Kello (1973) recorded a stereotyped sequence of exploratory behaviors that could be reliably elici.ted by novel odors. It may be that sufficiently detailed observations of other animals exposed to a range of situations will reveal similar stereotypy. This “new-situation” program presumably has the function of assembling, by a process analogous to variation and selection (Campbell, 1960; Staddon and Simmelhag, 1971) elements of a new program, well adapted to the new circumstances. 3. 1ndivi:lual differeqces Two programmers will rarely accomplish the same task in the same way: if the job is at all complex, many programs, of roughly equal speed and efficiency, can usually be devised to accomplish it. It is no surprise, therefore, to find that beneath the surface similarity of performances on standard reinforcement schedules there is quite a range of individual differences. For example, Figure 1 shows the cumulative response records during an extinction (no reinforcement) test of two pigeons identically trained on a cyclic variableinterval schedule (Innis and Staddon, 1970). Both pigeons showed the same tmcking behavior in training, respondling fastest at times of high food density; yet in the extinction test, one animal (#437) shows a reliable periodicity, the other does not. Evidently each animal accomplished the tracking in a different way. Similar results have been reported in experiments on attention (i.e., selective stimulus control) in pigeons (e.g., Reynolds, 1961). Most students of both human and animal learning when pressed can come up with other examples. Since they make poor material for the hoped-for general laws of learning, (and are statistically inconvenient besides, relatively few find their way into print. 4. Reversibility and observability Learning is not a reversible process; moreover5 the program analogy implies that different organisms are likely to learn different things (i.e., evolve different programs) even in the same situation. These two features pose severe

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methodological problems for the study of learning. Because of individual differences, group-average data (methodologically required by irreversibility) are likely to be of only limited usefulness. Yet theorems well known to students of cognitive science (e.g., Moore, 1956;Kalman, 1968;see also Houston, Halliday and McFarland, 1977; Staddon, in preparation, Chapter 8) place severe &nits on what can be discovered about a “black-box” system, even when an indefinite number of identical copies is available. When replicas are not available, the problem of discovering the properties of a complex black box are substantial indeed. There is obviously a pressing need to develop novel methods for studying learning in individual organisms. 5. Reinforcement and Optimality analysis

Organisms may generate the same performance in different ways; nevertheless, the performance itself often makes sense in terms of its outcome. Animals in situations not too different from their natural environment will often behave in ways that maximize net energy intake or minimize time spent, for example (cf., Maynard Smith, 1978; Staddon, 1980). Approaching operant behavior from the po; .. of maximization also derives in a natural way from the familiar notion of rbn,tircement as “control”of behavior by its consequences-indeed, Rachhn (1980) has persuasively argued that reinforcement theory and the Figure 1. Cknulative records fbr two pigeons during two separate 20-m&ztest periods in which no reinforcement wasavailable,following trainingon a cyclic-interval schedule. figeon #37 shows cyclic variation, pigeon $103 does not. (From Innis and Staddon, 1971, Figure 5).

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econotnics of utility are one and the same. Analysis of behaviors as constrained optimization is a useful way to deal with what von Bertalanffy (1956) has termed “equifinal” systems, that is, systems that can achieve the same objective through a variety of means. Optimality analyses can provide simple accounts for complex adaptive behavior. In addition, the nature of the constraints that must be assumed to obtain accurate predictions tells us something about the mechanisms of learning -the principles of program assembly, in terms of my metaphor. Recent interest in economic and optimality analyses of operant behavior (e.g., Herrnstein and Vaughan, 1980; Houston and McNamara, 198 1; Rachlin and Burkhard, 1978; Rachlin, Green, Kage:i and Battalio, 1976; Staddon, 1979; Staddon, Hinson and Kram, 1981) is a belated recognition of the equifmal nature of operant behavior. References Campbell, D. T. (1960) Blind variation and selective re .ention in creative thought as in other knowledge processes.Psychol. Rev., 67, 380-400. Craik, K. J. W. (1943) The rsafureof explanation. Cambridge, University Press. Herrnstein, R. J. and de Villiers, P. A. (1980) Fish as natural categories for people and pigeons. In G. H. Bower(ed.), The psychology of learrdngand I ?tivation: Advances in research and theory. Vol. 14. New York, Academic Press. Herrnstein, R. J. and Vaughan, W. (1980) Melioration and behavioral allocation. In J. E. R. Staddon, (ed.), Limits to action: The allocationof indivtiual beh jior. New York, Academic Press. Fabre, J. H. (1915) 13re hunting wasps.New York, Dodd, Muad & Co. Houston, A. I., HaIliday, T. R., and McFarIand,, D. J. (1977) Towards a model of the courtsh@ of the smooth newt ;Ttiturusvulgar&,with special emphasis on problems of observability in the simulation of behaviour. Med. BW Eng. IS, 49-61. Houston, A. I. and McNamara, J. (1981) How ito maximize reward rate on two variable-interval paradigms. J. Ex.rer. Anal. Behav., 35.367-396. Hulse, S. H., Fowler, bI., and Honig, W. K. (Eds.) (1978) C&nitir~eprocesses in animal behavior. Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrtnze Erlbaum. Innis, Nancy K., and S: addon, J. E. R. (1971) Temporal tracking on cyclic-interval reinforcement schedules. J. Exper. A,qai.Behav. 16, 4 11-d’ 23. Kalman, R. E. (1968) New Developments in system theory relevant tobiology. InM. D. Mesarovic (ed.), @stems theov md biology. New York, Springer-Verlag. KeIlo, J. (1973) Observation of.the behavior of rats running to reward and nonreward in an al&way. Ph. D. Dissertation, Duke University. Maynard Smith, J. (1978) Optimization theory in evolution. An. Rev. Ed. 9, 31-56. Menzel, E. W. (1978) Cognitive mapping in chhmpanzees. In S. H. Hulse, H. Fowler, and W. K. Ho& (eds.), Cbgnitiveprocessesin antmalbehavior. Hillsdale, NJ. Lawrence Erlbaum. Moore, E. F. (1956) Gedankenexperiments on sequential machines. In C. E. Shannon and J. McCarthy (eds.), Automata studies. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press. Rachlin, H. (1980)~Economics and behavIora psychology. In Staddon, J. E. EL (ed.), Limits to action: 17rea&catiGn of individualbehavior. New York, Academic Press.

Rachlin, H., and Burkhard, B. (1978) The temporal triangle: Response substitution in instrumental conditioning. Psychal. Rev. 85, 22-48. Rachlin, H., Green, L., Kagel, J. H., and Battalio, R. C. (1976) Economic demand theory and psychological studies of choicq. In G. Bower (ed.), The ,asychologyoflearningand mofivation(Vol. 10). New York, Academic Press. Reym&, G. S. (1951) Attention in the pigeon. J. exper. Anal. B&v., 4,203 -208. Seligman, hi. E. P. and Johnston, J. C. (1973) A cognitive theory of avoidance learning. in F. J. McGuigan and D. B. Lumsden (eds.), Contemporaryapproachesto conditioning and learning. New’ York, Wiley. Spence, K. R. (1937) The differential response in animals to stimuU varying in a single dimension. Pq cho!. I&w. 44,435-444. Staddnn, J. E. R. (1973) On the ?otion of cause, with applications to behaviorism. Behav. I, 25-63. Staddon, 3. E. R. (1974) Temporal control, attention and memory. Psychol. Rev. 81, 375-391. Staddon. J. E. R. (1979) Operant behavior as adaptation to constraint. J. exper. Pqychol. Gen. ZOS, 48-6 7. Saddon, J. E. R. (1980) Optimality analyses of operant behavior and their relation to optimal foraging. In i. E. R. Staddon, (Ed.), Limits to action: The allocationof individualbehavior. New York, Academic Press. Staddon, J. E. R., and Frank, Janice. (1974) Mechanisms of discrimination reversal. An. Behav. 22, 802-828. Staddon, J.,E. R.,Hirjon, J. M., and Kram, R. (1981) 0ptimalchoice.J. exper. Anal Behav..35,397-412. Staddon, J. E. R., and Simmelhag, V. (1971) The “superstition” experiment: A reexamination of its implications for the principles of adaptive behavior. Psychol. Rev. 78, 3-43. van Bertalanffy, L. (1956) General systems theory. GeneralSystems Handbook, 1. Wagner, A. R. (1978) Expectanci&-s and the priming of STM. In S. H. H&e, H. Fowler, and W. K. . Honig (eds.), Cognitivepnxesses in animal behavior. Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum. Staddon, J. E. R. Adoptive behmtiorand &aming. New York: Oxford University Ress, in preparation.

Cognition, 10 (1981) 295-300 @ Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Iausanne - Printed in The Netherlands

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Cognitive development in school and out SIDNEY STRAUSS” Tel Aviv

University

The contributors to this issue were given the charge to reflect on their own work and to suggest where main outcomer and theoretical breakthroughs in the area of cognitionawill be coming in the next decade. I have broadly taken this to mean discussing where my work will be heading in the next number of years. In my own egocentric way what I will be writing here has to do with orie direction I think my area ought to go; in the process I will reflect on problems that have arisen in my work that I think have soms generality. Given space limitations, I will only be able to present here: (1) 2 single question that strikes me as important for my field, (2) a brief anaJysis of various approaches that can be used to inform it, and (3) an ever. tziefer statement about a general problem besetting the study of cognition. Before getting on with the above, I must state at the out:+ that my field is what might be called applied cognitive developrmental psychology. The area in which my cognitive developniental work is applied is educarion and my concerns and the problems I investigate are always chosen with an eye towards their importance for educ&ional theory and practice. Before the reader deci.des to turn to the next article, I would like to note that although there are vzry few people who would define their field in this way, and despite the fact that it sounds like a very narrow intersect of several areas with-, out an essence of its own, it is my conviction that the area I am about to describe strikes at ihe deepest roots of the ways we represent what it is that we know and the ways that these representations can conflict with each other -and in so doing lead to cognitive development. The placement of these representations in the spectrum of epistemological issues related to common sense knowledge through knowledge that has a cultural history, as in the case of scientific and mathematical. knowledge, is a central goal of my work. It has intrigued me that we seem to represent our knowledge in different languages or notations (for lack of better words) and that these notations seem to influence how we think about various problems. One of the ques*I wouldlike to thank David Feldman for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. This paper is Working Paper Number 5 of the Tel-Aviv University Study Group of EIumanDevelopment. Reprint requests should be sent to Sidney Strauss, School of Education, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv(Ramat Aviv), Israel 69978.

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tions that I have been asking is what influence one mode of representation has on another. One system of representation is that of common sense, everyday.notions of events in the environment that have regularity. This regularity is a mental construction, of course. An indication of how this kind of mental representation works comes from the ways one solves physical concept tasks that measure intensive physical quantity. Intensivity is a quantity that is not dependent on its amount and, temperature is an instance of this concept. A task that measures children’s understandings of this aspect of temperature, when presented qualitatively, is as follows: Three cups (A, B, and C) of equal amounts of sametemperature water are presented to children. All of the children judge them to be the same temperature. The water from two of the cups (A + B) are then poured into an empty container (D) and the children are asked to compare the temperatures of the water in the mixed cup (D) and the untouched cup (C). When tasks such as this one were presented to children ages 3%. 12% it was found that very young children solved this task correctly and justified their correct judgments as follows: ‘They were the same before so they are the same now’ (identity justification). Older children produced an incorrect judgment for this task and justified it in te:ms of extensive, additive quantity; i.e., they argued that the cup with more water is hotter or colder depending on whether or not the original water was hot or cold. Still older children produced the correct judgment and it was accompanied by the identity justification (Strauss, in press; Strauss, Stavy, and Orpaz, 1977). Another way to present this same concept of intensive physical quantity is via a numerical representation. For example, we can present children with water in two containers and measure its temperature with a thermometer. Let’s say the temperature recorded in each cup was 10 “C. The water is then poured into a third, empty cup and the children are asked to tell us the temperature of the mixed water. The overwhelming majority of children through age 13 answer that ihe mixed water’s temperature was 20 “C instead of the correct answer of 10 “C (Strauss et al., ? 977). Now we set that there is a conflict between children’s qualitative, common sense representations of temperature and their representation of the number system as they apply it to temperature. In the case of the representation in the number system, what we are probably witness to here is a confusion on the part of children between joining and additivity (Carnap, 1966; Cohen and Nagel, 1934; Hempel, 1952). Notice that in the case of intensivity water is being physically joined or combined. Hen@ (1952) introduced a symbol for physically joining or combining, a small circle, instead of the plus sign. Hence, xoy designates, in our case, mixing water from one cup with water from another cup. In the case of exten-

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sive quantity the arithmetic analogue is ‘+‘. The general principle of additivity, with respect to any magnitude, M can be expressed: M(aob) = M(a) + M(b) The reason for this distinction is that there are two types of additivity : (1) the physical operation of joining objects and (2) the arithmetic operation performed on numbers. One does not add, say, lengths or weights. Rather, one adds numbers that represent lengths of lines or weights of objects. Arithmetic operations of additivity can be appropriately performed on numbers that represent measures of extensive physical quantities. In other words, arithmetic operations of addition model the physical joining of extensive physical quantities. It may be the case that children attempted to apply this model to numerical intensive physical quantity tasks, thus producing kncorrect judgments on them. I shall now very briefly attempt to characterize the two kinds of knowledge just described. The common sense representation of qualitative empirical regularities is tied to complex interactions lbetween the sensory system, the environment that supplies the information to our sensory system, and the mental structures through which we organize the sensory &formation and which guides our behaviors. I ar,gue here that individuals’ common sense knowledge a.bout qualitative physical concepts is no different today than in the times of, say, Aristotle. These are spon.taneous concepts (Vygotsky, 1962) that are universal acquisitions (Feldman, 1980). In contrast, the numerical representation of the same (or other) concepts ie QC?!spontaneous but, rather, requires instruction before it is part of the conceptual repertoire of the individual. And it is cultural/historical in the sense that, to keep our examples parallel, the scientific and mathematical knowledge about physical concepts such as temperature have changed radically since Aristotle’s time. Now t!z~, what happens when these two representations are in conflict with each other? For example, in the case of temperature we saw that somewhat older children correctly solve the intensivity task when it is presented qualitatively and incorrectly solve it when presented numerically. Children from ages 7 through 1 l., were confronted with their own contradiction and were asked what they thought about it (Strauss it al., 1977). One sign (although not a decisive one) that children’s qualitative and numerical representations oi‘ temperature are different was that many of the children at all ages found it difficult to understand that the qualitative and numerical versions were the same task asked in different ways. ,4fter some discussion, children began to understand that these tasks were the same. We found three types of responses to the conflict, these types being age-related. The frost type was found among the youngest children who

did not even recognize that a conflict existed and ar:gued that cold water when mixed with cold water remains cold and that the same water when measured to be 10 “c and mixed turns out to be 20 “C. Or as many children stated, ‘It’s different when you have numbers’. The second type of response was found among somewhat older children and it was to change their correct common sense qualitative understanding to an incorrect one by arguing that cold water wheq mixed with water at the same temperature becomes colder. I-Iere we see a drop in performance that results from one rep.resentational system ovel?iding another representatianal system whose notation or language is different. The third response to the conflict was found &mong the oldest children who changed their incorrect numerical answers to correct ones. I have argued elsewhere (Strauss and Stavy, in press) that in the case of the oldest children, the correct solution on the numerical task is arrived at through ‘consultation’ with the correct qualitative understanding of the problem. Now we see the very interesting developmental phenomenon that the numerical representation that overrode the performance in the qualitative representation becomes reorganized by that very qualitative representation. Other examples of this phenomenon come from Sheeran’s (1973) work on children’s . ?nsorimotor and verbal representations of weight conservation and from Bamoerger’s (in press) work on children’s sensory (figural) and musical (formal) representations of rhythm. A curriculum unit on the concept of temperature was developed for fifth grade children based on some 0’ the above considerations. This unit was introduced into Israeli classrooms and was tested against a graup of children who were given individualized instruction and a control group (Stavy and Berkovitz, 1980). The results were that those who learned from the curri-, culum unit and those who received individualized instruction advanced considerably in their ability to correctly solve numerical intensivity tasks. The developmental information allows us to make informed decisions about curricular content, its sequencing, and timing. It is my conviction that a curriculum unit, if not based on a thorough understanding of the development of children’s competerices about the concepts to be taught, is essentially blind and should not *be expected to be successful as a teaching instrument. Notice that the concepts taught in th.is unit were those that I had previously described as being nonspontaneous and cuhural/historic;ti in character and ia need of instrrlction if they are to become part of how children come to represent their world. In other woxds, they are nonuniversal (Feldman, 1980). In one aspect of education one tries to pass on the cultural/historical (in my example, scientific and mathematical) knowledge while taking into account the cumrnon sense knowledge that children have developed. Sometimes the scientific and mathematical knowledge go hand in hand. Sometimes the com-

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mon sense knowledge runs counter to the scientific knowledge. And at still other times children have no clear common sense knowledge about the cultural/hrstorical knowledge we want to impart to our children via schooling. In all three situations we wiI1 probably need different teaching strategies to pass on the cultural/historical knowledge. Some of educational theory should be trying to tiork out how one bridges and connects between the common sense and cultural/historical knowledge so that they inform and support each other. And some of cognitive development theory (which does not now do SO) should be dealing with transitions within and transactions between the structures underlying children’s common sense and culturdl/historical knowledge (Vygotsky, 1962, 1978). In addition to the societal-educational view I just presented, there are other approaches that can be used to describe aspects of the problem I just presented. Most prominent among them that have informed my developmental work are structuralism a.nd information processing. There is a tendency today to view structuralism and information processing as alternative approaches. It is surely the case that some of the stiffest opposition to Piaget’s structuralism has come from those who ascribe to and work within one or another of the various information processing models. And this is probably as it should be since the struggle of ideas is often seen as an adversary relation in which each side tries to find weaknesses in the other’s position and to fight off opposition attempts to do the same. My work in both approaches (Strauss, 198 1; Strauss and Levin, in press) leaves me with the distinct feeling that they do not have to be alternatives and that they can be complementary, depending on the purposes behind one’s work. I believe that the two approaches appear to be different because of the level of derail thev are working at. The structuralist position, as outlined by Piaget, takes a rather broad stroke view of cognitive development whereas information processing approaches generally involve fine-grained analyses. Also, their purposes have often been different. Structuralism has reserved much of its energy for describing and elaborsting on the nature of mental organizations (structures) and occasionally about how they transform themselves. Information processing approaches often deal with operating rules about how information gets represented and transformed. But notice that the rules operate within an organization and this organization can be compatible with Piaget’s notion of structure. For example, Guy Cellerier from Geneva, Seymour Papert from MIT, and Juan Pascual-Leone from York University have all used different information processing approaches based on Piaget’s model of structuralism. There are others, of course, who ascribe to different information processing models and who would surely claim that they are not structuralists. And, indeed, this is probably the case. However,

the point I wanted to make here is that the information processing and structuralist models do not inevitably and inexorably lead to different places. In the end we might find out that they do, but as things stand now they can be seen, in some cases, as complementary. And now for my briefest statement of all. I believe that a deep problem btxtting the study of cognition is that our contemporary world of literature, theatre, pitiosophy, etc., does not have a clear image or metaphor of man as there once was in, say, the 18th and 19th centuries. This lack has a negative influence on the sort of theoretical and conceptual work being done in cognition and in education, as well. References Bamberger,J. (In press) Revisiting children’s draw&s of simple rhythms. In S. Strauss (ed.), U-shaped behavbralgrowth. New York, Academic Press. Carnap, R. (1966) philosophicrrlfoundations of physics. New York, Basic Books. Cohen, M. R. and Nagel, E. (1934) An introduction tc; logic a,+xdscientific method. New York, Harcourt, &ace, and Work!. Fel&nan, D. H. (1980) Bqond universalsin cognitive development. Norwood, NJ, Ablex. Hempel, C. G. (1952) Internationalencyclopedia of unified science, Vol. 2, No. 7: Fundamentals of concept formation in empirical science. Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Shef:ran, L. (1973) Vertical decalage in weight conservation between sensorhnotor and conceptual fevels. Unpublished honors thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1973. Reported in Bower, T. G. R. Concepts d development. In ploceedings of the 21s~ Inr.ernationalGmgress of Psychology. &is. PressesUniversitairesde France. Stavy, R and Berkovitz, B. (198U) Cognitive conMct as .I basis for teaching quantitative aspects of the concept of temperature. Sci. Educat...64,679-432. Strauss, S. (1981) Us&aped behaviora growth and eArcat5oa,Final Report for the Israeli Ministry of EdWltiOll. S?mas,

S. (In psess) Ancestral and descendant behaviors: The case of U-shaped behavioral growth. In T. G. &ever(ed.), Drops in leoraring.Hiusdale, NJ, Erlbaum. S*muss, S. and L&n, 1. (In press) Comments on Siegler. Monographsof fhe Society for Research in Gild Development. Strauss, SWaad &WY. R (In’press) U-shaped behavior%1 growth: Implications for theories of develop ment. In W. W. Hartup (ed.), Review of child development research Vol. 6, Chicago, University OfchicagQ Press. Strauss, S., Stavy R, and Orpaz, N. (1977) The child’s development of the concept of temperature. Unpu%lishedmanuscript. Tel-Aviv University. VYgpfelEy,l.. S. (1%2) Srhoorgltt and hmguage. Cambridge(Mass.), MIT Press. VYgotsky. L S. (1978) Mind tr bociety: The development of higher psychologicalprocesses. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman @is.), Cambridge (Mass.), HarvardUniversity Press.

Cognition, 10 (1981) 301-306 @ Elrevier Sequoia S.A.., Lausanne - Printed in The Netherlands

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The emergence of phonetic structure MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY* Queens College and Graduate Center City University of New York and Haskins Laboratories.

The earliest claim for the special status of speech as an acoustic signal sprang from the difficulty of devising an effecticjc alternative code to use in reading machines for the blind. Many years of sporadic, occasionally concentrated, effort have still yielded no acoustic system by which blind (or sighted) users can follow a text much more quickly than the 35 words a minute of skilled Morse code operators. Given the very high rates at which we handle an optical transform of language, in reading and writing, this failure with acoustic codes is particularly striking, Evidently, the advantage of speech lies not in the modality itself, but in the particular way it exploits tne modality. What acoustic properties set speech !.n this privileged relation to language? The concept of ‘encodedness’ was an early attempt to answer this question (Liberman, Cooper, Shankweiler and Studdert-Kennedy, 1.967). Liberman and his colleagues embraced the paradox that, although speech carries a linguistic message, units corresponding to thos;: ~>fthe message are not to be found in the signal. They proposed that speech should be viewed not as a cipher on linguistic structure, offering the listener a si.gnal isomorphic, unit for unit, with the message, but as a code. The code collapsed the phonemic segments (consonants and vowels) into acoustic syllables, so that cues to the component segments were subtly interleaved. The function of the code was to finesse the limited temporal resolving power of the ear. We typically speak and comfortably understand speech at a rate of lo- 15 phonemes/second, close to the rate at which discrete elements merge into a buzz. By packaging consonants and vowels into syllabic units, the argument went, we reduce this rate by a factor of two or three and so bring the signal within the resolving range of the ear. This complex code called for specialized decoding mechanisms. More than a decade of research was devoted to establishing the existence of a specialized phonetic decoding device in the left cerebral hemisphere and to *I thank Alvin Liberman, Ignatius Mattingiy and Bruno Repp far much fruitful discussion and ad&e. Preparation of this paper was supported in part by NICHD Grant HD 01994 to Maskins Laboratories. Reprint requests should be sent to Michael Studdert-Kennedy, Haskins Laboratories, 270 Crown Street, New Haven, Ct. 06510, U.S.A.

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isolating the perceptual stages by which the supposed device analyzed the syllable into its phonetic components. This information-processing approach to speech perception exploited a variety of experimental paradigms that had seemed valuable in visual research (see Darwin [ 19761 and StuddertKennedy [ 1976, 19801 for reviews), but led eventually to a dead end, as it gradually became apparent that the undertaking was mired in tautology. A prime ex; ,nple was the proposal to ‘explain’ sensitivity to features, whether phonetic Jr acoustic, as due to featuredetectjng devices, and to look for evidence oi such mechanisms in infants. Current research has drawn back’ and is now moving along two different, though not necessarily divergent, paths. The first bypasses the problems of segmental phonetic perception and focuses on what some believe to be the more realistic problem of describing the contributions of prosody, syntax and pragmatics to understanding speech. The second path, with which I am concerned, reverse; the procedure of the earlier encoding approach. fnstead of assuming that linguistic units should somehow be represented as segments in the signal and then attempting to explain the paradox of ,;neir absence by tailoring B perceptual mechanism for their extraction, the new approach simply asks: What information does the speech signal, in fact, convey? If we could answer this question, we might be in a position not to assume and impose linguistic structure, but. to describe how it emerges. Consider the lexicon of an average middle-class American child of six years. The chiId has a lexicon of some 12- 15,000 words, most of them Beamed over the previous four years at a rate of 7 or 8 a day. What makes this feat possible? Of course, the child must want to talk, and the meanings of the words he learns must match his experience: cut and funny, say, are more likely to be remembered than trepan and surd. But logically prior to the meaning of a word is its physical manifestation as a unit of neuromuscular action in the speaker and as an auditory event in the listener. Since the listening child readily becomes a speaker, even of words that he does not understand, the sound of a word must, at the very least, carry information on how to speak it. More exactly, the sound reflects a pattern of changes in laryngeal posture and in the supralaryngeal cavities of the vocal tract. The minimaI endowment of the child is therefore a capacity to reproduce a functionahy equivalent motor pattern with his own apparatus. What properties of the speech signal guide the child’s reproduction? We do not know the answer to this question. We do not even know the appropriate dimensions of description. But several lines of evid-ence suggest that the properties may be more dynamic and more abstract than cus’romary descriptions of spectral sections and spectral change. For example, some half

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dozen studies have dtimonstrated ‘trading relations’ among acoustically incommensurate portions of the signal (e.g., Fitch, Halwes, Erickson and Liberman, 1.980; Liberman and Pisoni, 1977; Repp, Liberman, Eccardt and Pesetsky, 1978. Perhaps the most familiar example is the relation between extent of first formant transition and delay in voicing at the onset of a stop consonant-vowel syllable: reciprocal variations in spectral structure and onset delay produce equivalent phonetic percepts (Summerfield and Haggard, 1977). Presumably, the grounds of this and other such equivalences lie in the articulatory dynamics of natural speech, of which we do not yet have an adequate account. (For review of studies of this type, see Repp [in preparation] ) A second line of evidence comes from studies of sine-wave speech synthesis. Remez, Rubin, Pisoni and Carrel1 (1981) have shown that much, if not all, of the information for the perception of a novel utterance is preserved if the acoustic pattern, stripped of variations in overall amplitude and in the relative energy of formants, is reduced to a pattern of modulated sine waves following the approximate center frequencies of the three lowest formants. Here, it seems, nothing of the origin,al signal is preserved other than changes, and derivatives of changes, in the frequency positions of the main peaks of the vocal tract transfer function (cf. Kuhn, 1975). Finally, several recent audio-visual studies have shown that phonetic judgments of a spoken syllable can be modified, if the listener simultaneously watches a video presentation of a face mouthing a different syllable: for example a face uttering [gal on video, ,while a loudspeaker presents [ baj , is usually judged to be saying [da] (McGurk and MacDonald, 1976; Summerfield, 1979). The phonetic percept, in such a case, evidently derives from some combination of abstract, dynamic properties that characterize both auditory and visual patterns. Moreover, infants are sensitive to dynamic correspondences between speech heard and speech seen. Three-month old infants lcok longer at the face of a woman reading nursery rhymes, if auditory and visual displays are synchronized, than if the auditory pattern is delayed by 400 milliseconds (Dodd, 1979). This finding evidently reflects more than a general preference for audio-visual synchrony, since six-month old infants also look longer at the video display of a face repeating a disyllable that they hear (e.g. ilulul ) than at the synchronized display of a face repeating a different disyllable (e.g. [mama] ). (MacKain, StuCdert-Kennedy, Spieker and Stern, Reference note 1). The point here is not the cross-modal transfer of a pattern, which can be demonstrated readily in lower animals. Rather, it is the inference from this cross-modal transfer, and from the other evidence cited, that the speech

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signal conveys information about articulation by means of an abstract (nnd therefore modality-free) dynamic pattern. The infant studies hint further that the infant learns to speak by discovering its capacity to transpose that pattern into an organizing scheme for control of its own vocal apparatus. Here we should note that, while the capacity to imitate general motor behavior may be quite common across animal species, a capacity for vocal imitation is rare. We should also distinguish social facilitation and general observational lea.rning from the detailed processes of imitation, evidenced by the cultural phenomenon of dialects among whales, seals, certain songbirds and humans. Firtally, we should note that speech (like musical performance and, perhaps, dance) has the peculiarity of being organized, at one level of execetion, in terms of a relatively small number of recurrent and, within limits, interchangeable gestures. Salient among these gestures are those that correspond to the processes of closing and opening the vocal tract, that is to the onsets (or offsets) and to the nuclei of syllables. We do not have to suppose that the child must analyze adult speech into features, syllables, segments or even words, before he can set about imitating what he has heard. To suppose this would be to posit for speech a mode of development that precisely reverses the normal (phylogenetic and ontogeaetic) process of differentiation. And, in fact, the earliest utterances used for symbolic ,or communicative ends, seem to be prosodic patterns which retain their unity across a wide variety of segmental realizations (Menn, 1976). Moreover, the early words also seem to be indivisible: for example, the child commonly pronounces certain sounds correctly in some words, but not in others (Menvuk and Menn, 1979). This implies that the child’s first pass at the adult model of a word is an unsegmented sweep, a rough, analog copy of the unsegmented syllable, And there is no reason to believe that the child’s percept is very much more differentiated than his production. Differentiation begins perhaps, when, with the growth of vocabulary, recurrent patterns emerge in the child’s motor repertoire. Words intersect, and similar control patte.rns coalesce into more or less invariant segments. The segmental organization is then revealed to the listener by the Lsild’s distortions. Menn (1978, 1980) describes these distortions as the result of systematic constraints on the child’s output: the execution of one segment of a word is distorted as a function of the properties of another. She classifies these constraints in terms of consonant harmony (e.g. [gAkJ for duck), conx:want sequence. (e.g., [nos] for snow;, relative position (e.g. [ daegel for ‘g@-~) and absolute position (e.g., [II] for fish). Here we touch on deep issues concerning the origin and nature of phonnlogical rules. Bllt the descriptive insights of Menn and others working in child phonology are important to the present argument, because they seem to justify a view of the phonetic segment as emerging from recurrent motor

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patterns in the execution of syllables rather than as imposed by a specialized perceptual device. As motor differentiation proceeds, these recurrent patterns form classes, defined by their shared motor components--shared, in part, because the vocal tract has relatively i’ewindependently movable parts. These components are, of course, the motor origins of phonetic features (cf. Studdert-Kennedy and Lane, 1980). Some such formulation is necessary to resolve the paradox of a quasi-continuous signal carrying a segmented linguistic message. The signal carries no message: it carries information concerning its source. The message lies in the peculiar relation between the source and the listener, as a human and as a speaker of a particular language. Readers familiar with the work of Turvey and Shaw (e.g., 1979) will recognize that the present sketch of a new approach to speech perception owes much to their ecological perspective (as also to Fowler, Rubin, Remez and Turvey, 1980). What may not be generally realized is that this perspeclive is highly compatible with much recent work in natural phonology (e.g., Ylitampe, 19731, child phonology (e;g., Menn, 1980) and phonetic theory I:e.g., Lindblam, 1988; MacNeilage and Ladefoged, 1976; Ohala (in press). for exarnple, Lindblom and his colleagues have, for several years, been developing principles by which the feature structure of the sound systems of different languages might be derived from perceptual and articulatory constraints, More generally, Lindblom (1980) has stressed that explanatory theory must refer (. . . to principles that are independent of the domain of the observations themselves’ (p. 18) and has urged that phonetic theory ‘. . . move [its] search for basic explanatory principles into the physics and physiology of the brain, nervous system and speech organs.. .’ (p. 18). In short, if language is a window on the mind, speech is the thin end of an experimental wedge that will pry the window open. The next ten years may finally see the first steps toward a genuine biology of language.

Referexes Darwin, C. J. (1976) The ycxception of spexh. In Carterette, E. and Friedman, M. (eds.), Handbook of Perception, Vol. VI,‘. New York, Academic Press, 176-226. Dodd, B. (1979) Lip reading in infants: Attention to speech presented in- and out-of-synchrony. Cog. Psych&, II, 478-484. t’rickson, D. M. and Liberman, A. M. (1980) Perceptual equivalence of two Fitch, H. L., Halwes, T., L, acoustic cues for stop-cnnsonant manner. Percep. Psychophys., 27. 343-350. Fowler, C. A., Rubin, P., Remez, R. E. and Turvey, M. T. (1980) Implications for speech production of a general theoiy of action. In Butterworth, B. (ed.), Language Production. New York, Academic Press, 373-42. Kuhn, C. M. (1973) On the front cavity resonance and its possible role in speech perception. J. Acoust. Sot. Am., 58, 428-433.

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Liberman, A. M., Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P. and Studdert-Kennedy, M, (1967) Perception of the speer’ code. Psychol. Rev., 74,43 l-461. Liberman, A. M. and Pisoni, D. B. (1977) Evidence for a special speech-perceiving mechanism in the human. In Bullock, T. H. (ed.), The Recognition of Complex Acoustic Signals. Berlin, Dahlem Konferenzen, 59-76. Lindblom, B. (1980) The goal of phonetics, its unification and application. Phonetica, 37, 7-26. McGurk, H. and McDonald, J. (1976) Hearing lips and seeing voices.Nuture, 264, 746-748. MacNeiiage, P. and Ladefoged, P. (1976) The production of speech and language. In Carterette, E. C. and Friedman, M. (eds.), Handbook of Perception, Vol. VII. New York, Academic Press, 75-120. Menn, L. (1976) P&em. Control and Contrastin Reginning Speech: A t&e Study in the Develop menr of Word Fom mrd Word Function. Bloomington, Indiana University Linguistics Club. Menn, L. (1978) Phonological units in beginning speech. In Bei:, A. nd Hooper, J. B. (eds.), Syllables und Segments. Amsterdam, North-Holland. Menn, L. (1980) Phonological theory and child phonology. In Yeni-Komshian, G., Kavanagh, J. F. and Ferguson, C. A. (eds.), Child Phonology: Perceptionand Reduction, Vol. I, 23-41. Menyuk, P. and Menn, L. (1979) Early strategies for the perception and production of words and sounds. In Fletcher, P. and Garniar, M. (eds.), Lcnguuge Acquisition. New York, Cambridge University Press, 49 - 70. Ghala, J. (In press) The origin of sound patterns in vocal tract constraints. In MacNeiIage, P. F. (ed.), Speech Reduction. New York, Springer-Verlag. Remez, K. E., Rubin, P. E., Pisoni, D. B. and Carrell, T. D. (1981) Speech perception without traditional speech cues. Scienre 212. 947-950. Repp, B. H. (In preparation) Phonetic trading relations and context effe$ *s: New experimental evidence for a speech mode of perception. Repp, B. H., Liberman, A. M., Eccardt, T. and Pesetsky, D. (1978) Perceptual integration of acoustic cues for stop, : fricative, and affricate manner. J. Exper. Psychol.: Hum. Percep. Perf, 4, 621-637. Stampe, D. (In press) A Dissertationon NaturalPhonology. NeroYo:k, Garland. Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1976) Speech perception. In Lass, N. J. (ed.), ContemporaryIssues in Experi. mentalPhonetics. New York, Academic Press, 243-293. Studdert-Kerr&y, M. (1980) Speech perception. Lung. Sp., 23, 45-66. Studdert-Kennedy, M. and Lane, H. (1980) The structuring of language: Clues from the differences between signed and spoken language. In Sellugi, U. and Studdert-Kennedy, M. (eds.), Signed Language and Spoken Language: .RiologicalConstminrson LinguisticForm. Deerfield Beach, Fl., VerIag Chemie, 29-410. Summertield, Q. (i979) Use of visual information for phonetic perception. Phoneticu,36, 314-331. Summer~eld, Q. and Haggard, M. (1977) On the dissociation of spectral and temporal cues to the voicing distinct!Jn in inithl stop consonants.J. Acoust. Sue. Am., 42, 436-448. Turvey, M. T. and Shaw, R. E. (‘1979) The primacy of perceiving: An ecological reformulation of perception for understanding memory. In Nilsson, L.-G. (ed.), Perspectives on Memory Research: Essays in Honor of Uppsah’s 500th Anniversary. Hill&dale, NJ, Erlbaum.

Reference Note

MacKain, K., Studdert-Kennedy, M., Spieker, S. and Stern, D. Cross-modal r3ordination in infants’ perception of speech. Paper to be read at the Second International Conference on Child Psychology, Vancouver, B.C., August 1981.

Cognition, 10 (1981) 307-312 @ Ekvier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne - Printed in The Netherlands

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The process of language comprehension; an approach to examining issuesin\ cognition and language DAVID SWINNEY* Tufts University

The ftmdamental concer.ns of the field of cognitive ps;.chology-understanding the nature of the mental representation of information and the processes which operate on those representations--have received their most extensive examination in the past decade in the field of psycholinguistics. The reasons for this are obvious: language is a relatively accessible domain for study, and the systematic classification and observation brought by linguistics and philoso?hy to language provided a major initial stepping stone for the investigation of the psychological functions underlying human language production and comprehension. And, \vhile there has been much growth in a number of other fields in the area of cognition, the now-expanded domain of psycholinguistics still represents one of the most l_romising and profitable areas foi examining cognitive function. It appears likely that major breakthroughs in understanding the extent of (and constraints on) our ability to perceive, process, store, recall and comprehend information will come from gaining a detailed empirical understanding of the nature of language processing. It is particularly important in this regard to underscore the poi+ that language, like other cognitive functions, is a (dynamic) pwtxss. It is, m fact, precisely because it is a process that gaining an understanding of its nature has proved so intractable over the years; such an enterprise requires that we rely on more than, just an examination of the end-state characteristics of the process (such as memory representations) or static models of its putative underlying structure. Rather, if we are to achieve any sublrtantive understanding of language performance it is necessary that we examine the microstructure of the entire process as it occurs in real time. It is only through the careful examination of the temporal course of mental operations involved ir. the various levels of analysis underlying speech that we can hope to discover its nature. There are a number of critical questions underlying the examin.ation of language as a process which must be answered in the coming years. The first, and in one sense most fundamental, concerns the basic nature of the integra*Reprint requests should be sent to: David Swinney, Psychology Department, Tufts University, Medford, Mass.02155, U.S.A.

tion of information that occurs duriklg the perceptual processing [or production) of language. This issue has evolved in the past few years into a hotly contested one, one that contrasts hypotheses that, on the one hand, view language processing as a maximally interactive system (in which any type of contextual information can affect the nature of processing of any other piece of inf jrmation) and, on the other hancl, view the system as a highly modular orle comprised of autonomous subroutines (so that conrextual information does not affect processing internal to any particular subroutine). Resolution of the issue of whether the s:rstem in general is a modular or an interactive one is perhaps the most impo.stant key to establishing a viable psychological model of perceptual processulg. Certainly, it is clear that a system wh’sh supports the nearly infinite variability in processing that is inherent in any maximally interactive model requires a significantly more powerful underlying mechanism th*an one which consists of relatively autonomous, context free, internally consistant routines. Failure to provide clear definition of tile nature of information integration almost guarantees that we will posit either far tDo powerful or far too weak an underlying mechanism as the basis for language behavior, a failul 9 which may well be a critical one in our atten qts to understand the procebs. However, in addlcion to being important in and of itself, part of the importance of focusing on the nature of .nformation integration is that it highlights several other key problems that must be faced in discovering the nature of language processing. One set of these issues concerns the nature of thr. informationai types themselves. We do not have an account of the didtirlct types of informatior that are actually functional in speech processing. While systematic observation in linguistics has allowed for the char;cterization of a number of sources of information 1 language-phonetic, morphemic, syntactic, etc. -such descriptions are based un the rules and constraints of linguistic descripti,. n and have yet t,o be shown to have anything but an indirect relationship to the types of information which are functional in the ongoing process SC language comprehension. The development of the psychologically relevant characterization of the functional sources of imarmation ilj language processing is a critical goal for psycholinguistics, and it is important to note that it is a problem that can only be resolved by empirical study. A fidrther, related, issue stems from the fact that the characterizations we give tc both whatever relel ant informational types exist and to the procedures by which these functic.,n are intimately tied to assumptions we make about the techniques by which we examine these prucesses. There is simpiy no passive window which’ allows examination of mental processes without affecting those processes to some extent. Thus, it is absolutely essential at

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this time that we begin to consider the modeling of our empirical tasks as being a critically important part of our attempt to model mental representations. It is encouraging to note that, from time to time, various experimental techniques have undergone critical examination (witness the study of phoneme monitoring over the past nine year s). However, far too little is known of even the most basic characteristics of those tasks which have attracted such attention, not to mention those that have been ignored in this respect. There are at least two corollary issues that are of importance here. The first relates to the critical need for discovering, testing, and using new experiAmentaltechniques. Given that the problems we face are to be best resolved by empirical examination of the real-time characteristics of language processing, we are in need of experimental techniques which are sufticiently flexible to examine such processing on-line and, simultaneously, which are as non-intrusive into the process under study as possible. Further, we are in great need of tasks which are differentially sensitive to various levels of analysis in language processing. It is important that examination of mental processes be seen to be a multi-leveled enterprise. We need to discover the nature of c :h of the several putative levels of processing as they occur (either serially or in parallel) during the on-going perceptual analysis of language; the relative speed, interactivity, and scope of each of these processes must be detailed. Thus, the relative temporal course of processing, the accumulation of detail, and the r&e of integration of each process into the developing interpretation needs to be documented for (for example) Fhonetic, lexical and syntactic information during comprehension. To do this, it will be necessary to develop batteries of ‘on-line’ tasks, each ot which has known properties that reflect different aspects of the process under study. The second corAary issue concerns the need for determining the relationship that holds between conscious and unconscious processing and automaticity of processing. There is not sufficient space here to even begin to detail the degree to-which these interrelated issues are critical to the enterprise of understanding language processing. However, because language is a highly OVIrlearned, automatized system, until we understand the consequence; of that fact and the way in which it affects our ability to interrupt, examine, introspect upon, have intuitions about, and manipulate language, we will have little idea of the tr.:a information contained in the data tha.t we are gathering. Similarly, until M2 understand the cognitive operations un.derlying the ability to bring the results of unconscious processing (the level of most of language processing) to consciousness we will not have adequate knowledge of how our exper.l.lental tasks may be changing the basic 01~~ation of the language processing system. Further, gainir‘g an understanding of consciousness and automaticity will provide a basis for examining the nature

of the relationship between putative language processes and more generalized, domain-universal, cognitive functions. The distinction between such processes is clea.rly a critical one in our development of cognitive processirg theories. Specific approaches

The immediate goal of much of our work over the past six years has been to discover the nature of the processes that underlie language comprehension through the careful examination of the information available throughout the course of sentence/discourse understanding. We have taken the major testing ground for examination of this general theoretical issue to be the domain of lexical processing. This choice has been made for a number of reasons. First, wordls are likely candidates for being truly functional sources of information during language processing; word recognition is acknowledged to play a role in nearly every psychological account of language, just as words are taken to be important structures in most linguistic accounts. In addition, lexical representation and processing are commonly considered to be (the) major points of intersection of acoustic-phonetic, syntactic, semantic and discourse i.nfoimation in language. Thus it is a logical realm in which to examine the general nature of information interaction, the (relative) temporal characteristics of language processing, and theoretical issues of automaticity, uncons.cious inference, and the relationship of linguistic and psychological modeling. An important phase of our work has involved the examination of the maximally interactive and autonomous module hypotheses of information integration as they apply to the access and processing of lexical material. We have studied the effects of a large range of ‘higher order’ contextual information sources (from local lexical semantic and structural relationships to more global sentential and discourse cjffects) upon ths access and integration of lexical material in ongoing sentepce/discourse comprehension. In pursuit of this work, we have developed a relatively sensitive, nonintrusive, flexible, measure of the unconscious access of lexical information -the cross modal lexical priming task. The work :!sing this task has been illuminating in many regards. We have, throughout a number of studies, found strong support for the hypothesis that (at least) lexical access is an autonomous, form-driven process, one that operates without regard to biasing input from higher order contextual information (e.g., Swinney, 1979; Swinney, Onifer, Prather, and Hirshkowitz, 1979; Onifer and Swinney, 198 1; Swinnt~y 1981a; 198lb). T!~ough the examination of the temporal course of activatiion of lexical material we have also learned much about the nature of the po@access effects of frequency-of-meaning, type of contextual information, and speed of processing upon the choice of a relevant interpretation for

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a word from among all of the information that is initially acck:ssed. Some information about the roles that automaticity and consciousness play in the context-independent process of access and in the contextually incorporative post-access decision proce% have also begun to be determined through the use of cross modal priming and other on-li:.e procedures (Swinney, 198 lb). Some of the most e&citing evidence, however, has come from our examination of these real-time processing issues in populations which have specific language disorders, disorders which provide theoretically dissociative test cases for study of the issues raised above, and in immature populations, populations in which the highly automatized routines which exist in adult language processors have yet to develop. The study of the on-line processing of words, structures, and suprasegmental informati:>n in young children and in populations with aphasias, schizophrenia, and dy sslexiasare providing critical diagnostic evidence for the validity of the modular (autonomy) theory of languafle processing as well as providing critical evidence about the primacy of certain types of these operations and about the nature of the automatization of such routines in language (see, e.g., Swinney, Zurif and Cutler, 1980; Swinney, 1981b). P’Drk involving such a multidisciplinary approach seems to us to be absolutely necessary for the development of a firm understanding of mental operations, if only becar:se it is often just in the absence of overlearned routines and fully functional systems that some of the microstructure of mental events become apparent. An additional, and we think important, focus for much of our recent effort has been in the relatively neglecttid area of non-literal language processing. While it is understandable that much of the early work in language focused solely on the processing of literal material, it is equally clear that an extremely large amount of the language that we deal with is non-literal: idoms, similies, metaphors, and the like. .C)ur major efforts in the past two years have been on attempting to understand the on-line processing characteristics of nonliteral as well as literal processing-to determine whether the processor attempts such. interpretations (particularly where multiple interpretations are possible) by use of a cannonical order hypothesis, by reliance on surface cues, or by some other means. The evidence thus far (see, e.g., Swinney and Cutler, 1979) both supports the modular theory of perceptual information integration and adds much evidence to our general understanding of the role of learning in language perception. Finally, much of our recent efforts have been aimed toward the examination of the underlying properties of semantic and syntactic priming, both in discourse contexts and in isolation. The results have suggested ihat much of what has been assumed to be an ‘automatic’ spread of facilitation in prim@ may in fact be the result of a relatively elaborate decision process. Recent

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work with Penny Prather has extended these findings into both the area of speech perception and the domain of visual processing, in an attempt to discover the degree to which much of the evidence supporting a processor comprised of independent subsystems applies to other domains of cognitive processing. In all, the approach that we have taken in examining many of the questions raised above -the nature of information interaction, the types of information that are functionally availdble in processing, the temporal course of conscious and unconscious processes, and (overall) the nature of the reof language-has obviously presentations involved in the perceptual anal) merely scratched the surface of the complexity of both theory and fact that must be developed to provide a sufficient characterizat.ion of the cognitive system. However, we have found it particularly instructive to examine the form of the evidence that has emerged from an extensive examination of one small portion of the language system -lexical processing. Particularly because this evidence is in such agreement with that obtained from our broader, multidisciplinary examinations of language processing, we take it . be likely that it is representative of the nature of cognitive processing in gcneral. Independent of the validity of this interpretation, it is important to reemphasize that the issues are largely empirical ones, and thus we can look forward to their resolution through the development of well reasoned experimental evidence in the coming years. References Keeie, B., and Swinney, D. (1979) On the relationship of hemispheric specialization and develop mental dyslexia. cortex, 15.471-481. Chifer, W., and Swinney, D. (In press) Assessing lexical ambiguities during sentence comprehension: Effects of frequencyof-meaning and contextual bias. Mem. chg. Swinney, D. (1979) lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. i. verb. Learn. verb. Behlrv., 18, 645-660. Swinney, D. (In press a) The structure and timecourse of information interaction during speech comprehension: Lexical segmentation, access, and interpretation. In Mehler, J., Garrett, hf., and Walker, E. T. C. (eds.), h>ceedings of the Royaumont cbnference on Cbgnitive fiychology. Swinnw, D. (In press b) Jxxical processing during sentence comprehension: Effects of higher order constraints and implications for representation. To appear in T. Meyers, J. Laver,and.J. Ander?on (eds.), TIIe C@nitive Representation of Speech (Advances i. Psychology Series). Amsterdam, North-Holland. Swinney, D., and Cutler, A. (1979) The access and processing of idiomatic expressions. J. verb. Learn. verb. Behav., 18.523-534. Swimmy, D.,Gnifer, W., Rather, P., and Hirshlcowitz, M. (1979) Semantic facilitation across sensory modalities in the proces&g of individual words and sentences, Mem. Chg., 7, 154-165. Swinney, D., and Rather, P. (1980) Phoneme identification: the role of within-syllable context in monitoring for syllableinitial consonants. Pereep. &vchophys., 27,104-l 10. Swirmey, D., Zurif, E., ard Cutler, A. (1980) Effe:ts of sen&&al stress and word class upon comprehension in Broca’s aphasics. Brain Lung., 10, 132-144.

Cognition, 10 (1081) 313-321 @ Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne - Printed in The Netherlands

Cognition: The view from ecological

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M. T. TURVEY* University of Connecticut and Hask, :” L id”, 3ra tories CLAUDIA

CARELLO

University of Connecticut

The term ‘cognition’ is taken, very generally, to refer to the cocxdination of any organism (as an epistemic agent) and its environment (as the support for its acts). The task of cognitive theory is to explain this epistemic, intentional coordination of organism and environment. Orthodoxy subscribes to the Lockean view that the coordination is achieved through, and explained by, a special class of things. Locke called these things that interface organism and environment ‘ideas. ; contemporary cognitive theorists lean toward ‘representaticns’, ‘programs’, ‘reference signals’, ‘schemata’, etc. Each of these coordinating things is an entity presumed to be endowed with properties that are (sometimes loosely, often d-ictlyj isomorphic with those properties of the state of affairs for which the coordinator is said to be causally responsible. Moreover, it is also presumed that a coordinating thing is of the same logical t:?rpe as the organism, snvironment state of affairs that it putatively explains- each ir an instance of intelligence (or knowing, or rationality, or goal-directedness). For the orthodox theorist, an appropriate candidate to play the role of coordiriating thing in a given situation is arrived at by inference: Those properties and that organization that are sufficient to describe .the observed phenomenon must be identified. The assumption is that actual coordinating things are determined similarly, that is, that these instances of i:ntelligence are arrived at intelligently. This view is troublesome on two counts, neither of which seems to bother establishment theorists. First, orthodox cognitive theory is not distressed by the large loans of intelligence that its program demands. Given that coordinating things are rational entities arrived at by rational means, how does orthodox theory account for the ultimate origin of all this rationality? Second, the orthodox view is similarly unconcerned with the skepticism engendered by the assumption that perception is a relation of an organism to an internal representation of its environment. Given that inference can fail, and that the cm*This paper was written while the first author was a Fellow zt the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Support from NSF Grant BNS 76 22943 is gratefully ‘acknowledged. Reprint requests should be sent to: M. Turvey, Department of Psychology, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut, 06268, U.S.A.

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sequences of inferences unfettered by real constraints are vacuous, how does orthodox theory insure that an inference-determined representation represents an actual state of affairs, that is, that perception is not of fictions but of the real environmental ,things (types of substance, surface, place, object ,and event) with respect to which acts are conducted? The second concern-skepticismcan be alleviated in the orthodox perspective, but only by exacerbating the first---taking out further loans of intelligence. Investing an organism with detailed foreknowledge of the conditions of its ecosystem might build into orthodox theory sufficient constraint to guarantee that the organisn’s inferences are realistic. However, to presuppose the very thing that is to be explained is a move that no serious science of cognition can abide. It seems, therefore, that the orthadox approach to cognition is seriously infirmed 6;ld that the foundations of cognitive theory demand a radical rethinking of the kind initiated by Gibson (1950, 1966,1979). The heterodox, ecological approach explicitly recognizes ‘knowing’ as a natural phenomenon at a particular scale of magnitude, viz., the ecological scale of living things and their niches. It requires that ontology and epistemology-and the scientific theory and method that they shape-be tailored to the ecological scale ‘(Gibson, 1979 ; Michaels and Carello, 198 1). It rejects any strategy that inputes coordinating things to explain cognition and embraces, instead, a strategy that searches for natural laws at the ecological scale (fashioned by scale-independent principles) that coordinate organism and environment (Turvey, Shaw, Reed and Mace, 1981). The ecological strategy observes two rules of thumb: (1) resist taking out loans of intelligence; and (2) regard with skepticism, and be prepared to jettison, any assumption, concept, interpretation, fact, theory, strategy, etc., that undercuts or threatens to undercut the principle of ecological realism. This principle can be sketched roughly as follows. An activity of an organism is a nesting of behavioral adjustments to a nesting of environmental properties. (For exampr_e, a-bird searching for insects is oriented at a fine spatiotemporal scale to the.crevice at which it directs its beak, at a less fine spatiotempora! scale to the branch on which it stands, and at a much coarser spatiotemporal scale to the sky-earth light differential). To control its activity, the organism must perceive both the nested environmental properties and its own nesf4 behaviors. The principle of ecological realism is the assertion that the nested pro.perties of organism and environment are objective states of affairs of the organism-niche system (that is, their existence is independent of whether ~1 not the organism experiences them) and it is these states of affairs, and ody these, that are the ‘objects’ of perception (Gibson, 1979; Shaw, Turvey and Mace, in press; Turvey and Shaw, 1979). Any move that will inevitably replace the aforementioned ‘objects’ of perception with some others (pop-

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ularly, neural states and/or mental states) undercuts the principle and, therefore, is not allowed. The commitment to the principle of ecological realism expressed in rule (2) she. Id not be undervalued. In our view, that commitment directs the ecological program and makes it cohere. A renunciation of realism would make a mockery of what scientists do qua scientists (Bunge, 1973; d’Espagnat, 1979) and a renunciation of the principle of ecological realism would make a mockery of what scientists do qua organisms (and what organisms do in general). Without the principle, the adaptive relation of organism and niche would be in the style of the cartoon character Mr. Magoo who never sees what behaviors the environment actually permits nor what behaviors are actually performed but who survives nevertheless through the benevolence of the animator. The adaptive relation of organism and niche over the short term (popularly referred to as perceptuo-motor coordination) requires the principle of ecological realism, as do the adaptive relations over the medium t\;lm (learning), and the long term (evolution) (see Johnston and Turvey, 1980). The principle of ecological realism, therefore, is taken to be the fundamental principle of a science of cognition. In our view, while types of inquiry other than scientific may not be obliged to preserve the principle at all costs, science is obliged. For a science of cognition, however, it is an obligation that is not met easily-cognitive theory feeds on various disciplines that, themselves, not only contain many(entrenched) conceptions and methodologies that deny the principle but also lack other conceptions and methodologies needed to sustain it. The principle’s ultimate significance is that,for any discipline,it picks out concepts, assumptions, interpretations, etc. that are unacceptable and it points to those concepts, etc. that are required, whether they be currently available or not. The ecological approach has identified a number of such conceptions, etc. Some of athe major ones are listed below,. togeth.er with a brief descriptiort (most have been advanced in some detail elsewhere). Collectively, these conceptions define a framework in which to investigate cognition.

1. Organisrn-environmcat relation Perhaps fFe fundamental conception of ecological realism concerns the logical dependence of organism and environment (Gibson, 1979; Turvey .and Shaw, 1979). Organism-environment synergy does not suggest merely that an organism implies the existence of some environment (or vice versa) but, more strongly, that each component of an organism-niche system logically conditions the very nature of the other component (Patten, 1979; Shaw and Turvey, 198 1). Such a claim demands that organism-niche systems be the

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irreducible units of analysis for understanding the phenomena of knowing (Michaels and Carello, 198 1; Shaw, et al., in press). 2, Description of the environment In order to be consistent with the principle of ecological realism, a useful description of the environment must reflect an environment’s mutually constraining relationship to the organism. Such an organism-referential descrip tion is provided in Gibson’s concept of affordance, a tiescription that captures the nature of a given niche as the environmental support for a particular animal’s activities (Gibson, 1979). The behavioral concerns motivated by the principle of ecological realism are currently being brought to bear on the concept of niche in zoology and ecology (Alley, 1981), where it has been conceded that traditional treatments of physical and biological needs alone are incomplete (Whittaker, Levin and Root, 1973). In highlighting the mutuality between an organism’s activities and the niche in which that organism evolved and with respect to which those activities are adaptive, the efficacy of borrowing organism-neutral phlysical taxonomies and simplistic biological taxonomies is denied (Runeson, 1977; Turvcy and Shaw, 1979; Turvey et al., 1981 j. Appropriate physical and biological taxonomies have yet to be determined but it is contended that the principle of ecological realism will be a necessary constraint on their ultimate formulations (Shaw and Cutting, 1980). 3*ll&ormation Neither classical information theory nor the currently popular quasilinguistic view of information is acceptable (Gibsor, 1966; Kugler, Kelso and Turvey, in press). The ecological approach asserts that the concept of information cannot be developed systematically apart from considerations of activity. In scientific discourse, ‘information is used in many contexts, but it is in the contexts of coordinating and controlling activity (more generally, dynamics) that its use is most pronounced and its nature most elusive. Ecological realism imposes severe demands on the concept: Information must be unique and specific to the facts about which it informs (Gibson, 1979 ; Mace 1977 ; Reed and .Iones, 1978; Turvey and Shaw, 19791, meaningful to the coordination and control requirements of the activity (what can be done, how it can be donr+ and when it can be dQne) (Gibson, 1979; Lee, 1980; Michaels and Carello, 1981; Fowler and Turvey, 1978), and continuously scaled to the dimensions of the system over which the activity is defmed (Kugler, et aT., in press).

Cbgnition: The view from ecological realism 3 17

4. Natural law The interpretation of natural law as a relation between classes of things (more formally, an intensional relation between extensions) denies specification in the sense of one property lawfully related to another, for example, an activityrelevant property of the environment lawfully related to a property of ambient light (Fodor and Pylyshyn, 1981; Turvey et al, 1981). As noted in (3), ecolsgical realism mandates specification. The ecological approach requires, therefore, that a natural law be a relation between properties (more formally, an extentional relation between intensions) rather than a relation between classes (Reed, 1979; Turvey, etal., 1981). 5. Units or scales of measure Given that extrinsic units of measure sustain animal-environment dualism and, therefore, undermine ecological realism, they are not tolerated. Very roughly, given that extrinsic units (meters, grams, etc.) are arbitrarily imposed on an environment, they require that the organism perform a complicated conversion in order to derive units appropriate for activity. Units that are intrinsic to an organism-niche system, on the other hand, share common bases in the organism and niche (.;;lhawand Cutting, 1980) such that certain parts and processes of the ;ysPem define the units in which other parts and processes are measured (see, for example, Lee, 1980; Sedgwick, 1973). The task of systematically determining intrinsic measures may be facilitated by the identification of constraints that make the coordination and cciltrol of movement possible. For example, a measurement system appropriate to the activ’~:ds of a living thing should consist of three coimplicative metrics-an intrinsic temporal metric, an i.ntrinsic spatial metric, and an intrinsic power metric-such that fixing the value of any two of them on any given occasion will naturally constrain the third (Kugler, personal communication). A paradigmatic instance is a tennis player who requires information appropriate to her dimensions for where to contact the ball, when contact is to be made, and how much power is required in ordry to arrive at the appropriate place at the, appropriate time.

6, Semantics Oirthodox semantics is rooted in (i) the analysis of formal mathematical languages, with its notions of meaning as a fixed property of an expression and an unrestricted universe as the ground for interpreting sentences, and (ii) a

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tradition that identifies the intentionalit:l of everyday language with a commitment to concepts or mental represer .ations, which can be representations of ‘inexistent’ things. From the ecorogical perspective, however, semantics begins with a commitment to the view that language is intentional because it reports on the relations of the user to the propertied things that make up the language user’s environment (e.g., BarsAse, in press; Barwise and Perry, 198 1) and not because it reports on concepts, ideas, etc., as is the orthodox claim. The interpretation of expressions, therefore, must be in terms of the propertied things and the relations that compose ihe speaker-environment system. And the context-free meaning of e\:,*yessions assumed in orthodox semantics must give way tc the ecological fact that the linguistic expressions that intimately link human and environment (such as ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘today’) assume different designations, that is, pick out different propertied things and relations, as a function of the user, event, and place (Barwise, in press; Barwise and Perry, 1981). 7. Physical theory

*

Until recently, physical theories have sought, by and large, to give causal accounts of transitions between states of the same order of complexity (mechanics) and have addressed, to only a limited degree, the question of how various orders of complexity might arise (equilibrium, reversible thermodynamics). The orthodox approach to cognition couples a tendency to assume that physical theory is complete with the supposition thitt the kinds of orders that characterize cognition are largely outside physics’ explanatory power. This coupling leads to the promotion of a special explanatory vocabulary, that of representation and computation. But, as implied above, coordinating things are prescriptions for states of affairs and come very close to embodying the very order that they are meant to explain; and a discrete, symbolic mode yields a vocabulary that is proprietary only for explaining an ideal system existing in an ideal universe in which space, tinlti, matter, and energy make no contribution (Pattee, 1974; Shaw and Rlclntyre, 1974). Commitment to the principle of ecologizaI realism cautions against as suming that physics is complete and, instead, advocates patience with regard to physics’ eventual contribution to cognition. It underscrores the need to ground cognitive theory in a physical system that is real rather than ideal. Given that the principle requires that epistemic, intentional states of an organism-niche system be a ‘posteriori facts, not a priori prescriptions (i.e., states that arise from the design of the organism-niche system rather than states that are imposed by a model of the organism-niche system) (Kugler, et al., 1980;

agnition:

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3 19

Turvey, et al., 198 l), the charge to physical theory is an acccclnt of the physical principles of design that govern the evolution of different orders of complexity in a contirluous dynamical system. This charge is being met by physical theories that couple statistical mechanics and nonequ?brium irreversible thermodynamics (e.g., Iberall, 1972, 1977; Morowitz, 1978; Prigogine, 1978; Yates, 1980). This curious feature of an ecological approach-that the conceptions, etc. of the various branches of knowledge must be consistent with the principle of ecological realism- marks the ecological approach as an eccentric way of doing science. It asserts that, at the ecological scale, a certain principle must hold for the phenomena characteristic of that scale to be manifest, and it uses this principle- encouraged by a belief in the mutual compatibility of natural phenomena (Shaw and McIntyre, 1974; Shaw and Turvey, 198 1; Turvey and Shaw, 1979)-as a benchmark for evaluating statements about st;ltes of affairs at all scales of magnitude. Happily, this eccentricity is not limited to proponents of the ecological view. It is intuited in other circles, for example, that the basic features of the universe are understandable in terms of a few physical constants together with the constraint that the order ->fmagnitude of these constants be consistent with the fact of living things (Carter, 1974; Carr and Rees, 1979). The ecological approach expresses a similar intuition but one that we suspect is more far-reaching: A thoroughgoing explanation of perception in the service of activity, consistent with the principle of ecological realism, will impose powerful constraints not only on cognitive theory but on physical and biological theory as well.

References Alley, T. (1981) A re-examination of the concept of an ecological niche. Unpublished manuscript, University of Connecticut. Barwise, J. (in press) Scenes and other situations. J. Phil. Barwisc, J., and Perry, J. (1981) Semantic innocence and uncompromising situations. MidwestStudies in Philosophy, 6. Bunge, M. (1973) Philosophy ofphysics Dordrecht, Holland, D. Rsidel Publishing Co. Carr, B. J., and Rees, M. J. (1979) The anthropic principle and the structure of the physical world. Voture, 278,605-612. Carter, B. (1974) Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology. In M. S. L0ng;d.r (ed.), Confrontation of cosmologicaltheories withohsercotionaldata.Boston, D. Reidel Publishing Company. cl’Espagnat,B. (1979) The quantum theory and reality. Sci. Amer., 241, 158-181. Fodor, 3. A., and Pylyshgn, 2. W. (1981) How direct is visual perception? Some reflections on Gibson’s ‘Ecological Approach’. Cog,, 9, 139 -196. Fowler, C. A., and Turvey, M. T., (1978) Skill acquisition: An event approach with special reference to searching for the optimum of a function of several variables. In -3. Stelmach ted.), Inforn:ntion piocessing Pr motor control and learning. New York, Aca:jemic Press.

Gibson, J. J. (1950) 77rep~rcePtion of the visual world, Boston, MA, Houghton-Mifflin. Gibson, J. J., (1966) The senses considered QSpemeptual systems, Boston, MA, Houghton-Mifflii. Gibson, 3. 3. (1979) The ecological appmch to visud perception. Boston, MA, Houghton-Mifflin. Iberall, A. S. (1972) Towni a general science oftible systems. New York, McGraw-Hill. Iberall, A. S. (I 977) A fieki and circuit thermodynamics for integrative physiology: 1. Introduction to general ncrtions. Am. J. Physh$Zeg. Int. Camp. Hysio.., 2, R171 -Rl8Q. Johnston. 1.. and Turvey, M. 1. (1980) A sketclr of an ecological methatheory for theories of learning. In G. H. Bower(ed.), f7Ire pathology of l%rningand motivation. (Vol. 14). New York, Academic Press. Kugler, P. N., Kelso, J. A. S., and Turvey, M. T. (1980) On the concept of coordinative structures as dissipative structures. I. Theoretical lines of convergence. In G. E. Stelmach and J. Requin (eds.), 7 rtorhds in motor behavior. New York, North Holland Publishing Co. Kugler, P. N., Kelso, J. A. S., and Turvey, &I.T. (in press) On the control and coordination of naturally devebping systems. In J. A. S. K&J and J. Clark (eds.j, Development of human motur skill. New York, John Wiley. Lee, D. (198@ Visuo-motor coordination in space-time. In G. Stelmach and J. Requin feds.), Tutorials in motor be&&or. Amsterdam. North-Holland Publishing Co. Mace, W. M. (1977) James Gibson’s strategy for perceiving: Ask not what’s inside your head, but what your headf inside of. In R. Shaw and J. Bransford (eds.), Perceiving, acting und knowing. Hillsdale, NJ, ErIbaum. Michaels, C. F., and Carello, C. (1981) Dtiect perception, New York, Prentice Hall. Morowitz, H. J. (1978) Foundations of bioenergetics, New York, Academic Press. Pattee, H. I-I.i 19741 Discrete and continuous processes in computers and brains. In M. Conrad, N.Guttinger and M. Dal Ciu (eds.), Lecture notes in bio-mathemattis 4: Physics and mathematics of the nervszIpsystzm New York, Sptinger-Verlag. Patten, B. 6. (i379) Environs: Relativistic elementary particles for ecology. Paper presented at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee. Prigogine, 1. (1978) Time, structure and fhtctuations. Sci.. 202,777-785. Reed, E. S. and Jones, R. K. (1978) Gibson’s theory of perception: A case of hasty epistemologizing? Phil S&i, 45,519-530. Reed, E. S. ( 197Fr The ontological status of natural laws. Unpublished manuscript, Center for Research in Human Learning, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Runeson, S. (1977) On the possibility of ‘smart’ perceptual mechanisms. ZIctind J. Psychol., 18, 172-179. Se&wick, H. A. (1973) The visible ho&on: A potential source of visual information for the perception of size ancf distance, (Doctoral 4Issertation, C~~rnellUniversity, 1973). Dissertution Abstracts International. 34, 1301B-1302B. (i _iiversity Microflls No 73-22,530). shaw, R. E.. and Cutting, J. (1980) Clues from an ecological theory of event perception. In U. Bell@ and M. Studdert-Kennedy (eds.)&nedand spoken language:Biological constraints on linguistic form. Weinheim, Verlag Chemie. Shaw, R. E., and McIntyre, M. (1974) Algoristic foundations to cognitive psychology. In W. Weiner and D. PaIermo (eds.), Cognition und the symbolic processe% Hillsdale, NJ, Erlbaum. shaw, R., and Turvey, M. T. (1981) Coalitions as models for ecosystems: A realist perspective on per~eptwi organization. In M. Kubovy and J. Pomerantz (eda.), PerceptuuZorganiz&ion, Hiisdale, NJ, Erlbaum. Shaw, R, TUmY, M.T., and Mace, W. (In press) EcoIogieal psycl~ology: Theconsequenceof a commitment to reaIism. In W. Weimer art-l D. Palermo @Is.), Cognition and the symbolic processes‘ IL Iii&We, NJ, ErIbaum.

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Turvey, M. T., and Shaw, R. (1979) The primacy of perceiving: An ecological reformulation of perception for understanding memory. In LG. N&on (ed.), Perspecrives on memory research: Essays in honor of UppsaibUniversity’s500th anniversary,Hi&dale, NJ, Erlbaum, Turvey, M. T., Shaw, R. E., Reed, E. S., and Mace, W. M. (1981) Ecological laws of perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (1981). Cog., 9, 139-195. Whittaker, R. H., Levin, S.A., and Root, R. B. (1973) Niche, habitat, and ecotope. Amer. MS., ?07, 321-338. Yates, F. E(1980) Systems analysis of hormone action: Principles and strategies. In R. F. Coldberger (ed.), Biologicalreguktion and development. Vol.III: Hormoneaction. New York, Plenum Press.

Cognition, 10 (1981) 323-329 @ Elsevier Sequoia S-A., Lausanne - Printed in The Netherlands

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Linguistic knowledge ad llanguageacquisition VIRGINIA

VAtJAN*

Columbia lh versity

This paper presents several hypotheses about knowledge and knowledge acquisition that are relevant to problems of language acquisition, and in terms of them assesses one aspect of the study of language acquisition and makes suggestions about future progress. Knowledge is a mental state, and may be explicit o?:tacit. Knowledge may be of, about, or that something. Knowledge is organized in terms of propositions whose elements are concepts. (The discussion excludes knowledge how, even though such knowledge plays an important role in language acquisition.) We have and acquire knowledge, rather than knowing and learning knowledge. Learning is one method whereby we acquire knowledge. Why is it incorrect to say that we know or learn knowledge? It can be more easily seen with other propositional attitudes. Take desire. Say that one could characterize a rule system for desire that was mentally represented and via which people determined their desires. (Whether such a system exists is immaterial.) One would not. say that one desires the rules: the rules allow one to derive desires; the rules are mentally represented; a person has the rules. Similarly for every propositional attitude: one can have the rules that constitute the attitudt, but one can not bear that attitude toward the rules. There is good reason to think that knowing is like every other prapositional attitude. Knowledge represents a relation between a person and something which can be known of, about, or that. Knowledge has a content which states what is known. Grammatical rules comprise one’s knowledge of language. One has the knowledge, and therefore also has the rules which CPAMute the knowledge. If, however, one knew the rules, there would hav ; to be another set of propositions comprising that knowledge. Whenever on: attributes knowledge one must also attribute a set of propositions of which the knowledge consists. If one knows a rule then that knowledge must be characterized, and it cannot be done by using the same content as the rule. Only if one is said to have knowledge (in the form of having rules) rather than knowing knowledge (in the form of knowing rules) can the problem be avoided. *I thankJ. J. Katz for a discussion of these issues. Reprint requests should be sent to V. Valian,Pwchology Department, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, U. S. A.

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The word ‘learn’ operates similarly. Just as the expression ‘knowing knowledge is ill-formed, so is the expression ‘learning knowledge’. The same sorts of things that can be known can be learned. The state of having knowledge can arise either as part of initial mental structure, or as the consequence of acquiring knowledge. The controversial problems begin in characterizing how knowledge can be acquired. One hypothesis put forward here is that knowledge can only be acquired via learning or via derivation from prior knowledge. Another hypothes;, is that there are two methods of learning, one being hypothesis-testing, the other being what I shall call fitting into or elaborating’ an already existent knowledge structure. Other candidates can either be reduced to one of these methods or ruled out. A third hypothesis is that there are different types of propositional knowledge, and different sources may be linked with different types. Taken together, the hypotheses suggest that each phenomenon of language acquisition is likely to be a mixed one. Thea, interpreting them as if they were unitary can result in incorrect reiection of certain learning methods. The first hypothesis, that knowledge can only be acquired via learning or derivation from prior knowledge, contrasts with suggestions that knowledge can be acquired by taking a pill, re-wiring a brain, being hit on the head, or the like. It may also contrast with suggestions that knowledge can be ‘grown’ (Chomsky, 1980), depending on how that metaphor is interpreted. Nothing definitive can be said in favor of or against any of the positions, but there is an argument that shows the difficulty of being confident that there are no boundaries on possible methods of acquisition of knowledge. There are two preliminary considerations. First, all conceivable methods require change in a mental state, and all methods outside of learning or derivation, b&h of’ which are mental processes, are methods involving change in a physical brain state which must be assumed either to cause or to be the same as chinge : n a mental state. Second, not all changes in brainstatescorrespond tochanges in mental states, so Lidit proponents of being hit on the head as an acquisition method must show what kinds of head hits will work. Thus, even if one denied that knowledge was a mental state and claimed it was only a special kind of physical state, it would still be necessary to specify the conditions under which being hit on the head could induce this special kind of physical .state. Taking a pill ard neural re-wiring connote more precise and localized brain changes than concussion, but there is no difference in princ2plc. Physical methods are also problematic in that we know of no cases where purely physical alterations have resulted in knowledge acquisition, or anything that looks like knowledge acquisition.

Linguistic knowledge and language

An apparent parallel exists in that not all mental processes result in knowledge acquisition, and thus proponents of learning must provide theories showing what kinds of mental changes result in knowledge acquisition. There is a difference, however, since ‘learning’ is, by definition, a method of know]edge acquisition. The preliminary considerations to one side, here is the argument. One can theoretically mimic a process or state to any degree of precision, If there is a difference between knowing something and acting in such a way that is behaviorally indistinguishable from knowing something, then it must be demonstrated that a proposed method of acquisition delivers a knowledge state and not a state mimicking a knowledge state. Learning does so by defmition, SO that with learning the problem is to come up with a correct theory. Other proposed methods do not necessarily lead to knowledge. One alternative is to deny the difference between knowing and acting in a manner behaviorally indistinguishable from knowing, with the consequence that a chess computer, say, and a chess player have the same relation to the rules of chess.’ If one denies the difference, however, there seems no point in talking about knowledge. One may as well talk merely of mechanisms which govern behavior. An analogy can be made with ESP. When magicians show that by clever sleight of hand feats of telekinesis can be understood as trickery we do not say, ‘Oh, that’s what telekinesis is, clever sleight of hand’. Rather, we say, ‘There’s no such thing as telekinesis, it’s all clever sleight of hand’. Clever sleight of hand is not an exposition of telekenesis. Thus, if we want to retain the concept of knowledge we must also maintain a difference between having knowledge and mimicking having knowledge. Given the reality of that distmction, an appropriate concern about a proposed acquisition model is whether it can in. principle arrive at knowledge. Again, for a learning theory or a derivetion theory, the in-principle question does not arise; we know knowledge can be acquired by learning or by derivation from prior knowledge. The only qucstion is whether we have sbecified the method properly. There seem, then, grounds for provisionally accepting the hypothesis that only learning and derivation from prior knowledge will allow knowLedge acquisition, The second hypothesis, that th.cre are only two methods oflanguage learning, hypothesis-testing and fitting into a knowledge structure, cannot be ‘Chess rules are different from linguistic rules. One can know the rules of chess, unlike the rules of crammar, because chessrulesare like facts&out the language, Knowledge of the rules of chess is P trivial lonent of chess-playing: one does not derives moves from chess rules unless one does not know fow to play. A chess player has another set of rules, implicit ones which are more sin~ilarto linguistic rules,that determine moves; that set the player does not kno--abut has.

argued for here. Rather, the obvious methods which do not fit either model (e.g., conditioning, reinforcement, and imitation) are dismissed as already ruled cmt,2 and most remaining methods are taken as variants of hypothesistesting or knowledge structure elaboration. Is ‘organ growth’ (Chomsky, 1880) a possible except ion? Organ growth may or may not be a learning theory. If it is not, it is subject to the problems mentioned above. Chomsky seems to suggest it is not by likening the language system to the visual system. The analogy is not helpful, however, because it is not clear that any knowledge is involved in either the development of the visual system, or as a product of that development. To task a simple example, in recognizing an object, and in knowing it is a chair, the knowledge is not in the visual system. One has learned that a certain visual configuration represents a chair, and made a link between cognition and perception. Thus, the knowledge situation is sufficiently confused in perception that making analogies with it does not clarify the status of linguistic knowledge and its acquisition. Chomsky also, however, likens language learning to Peircean adbuction which is a hypothesis-testing model with a heavily constrained initial hypothesis space. If that is a correct characterization, then an organ growth model would seem to be a learning theory. All other language learning models appear to be variants of a hypothesis model, a knowledL:-structure elaboration model, or a composite. Therefore, it will be useful to briefly characterize suchmodels. Ahypothesis-testing model has five components; it is in how the components are specified that the theories differ. The first component states what is acquired, the second what is innate, the third what the content of the hypothlesesis, the fourth the role of experience. The fifth component delimits the constraints on the hypothesistesting mechanism (e.g., how many rules it can change at one time, whether it can store unanalyzed strings, and so on) and the procedures the mechanism uses in testing hypotheses. The first two components highly constrain the hypothesis space; expe@ence serves as confirming or disconfirming evidence. *Strategies (Bever. 1970) and operating principles (Slobin, lY.73) have not been offered as learning theories. As Cramer (1976) points out, strategies might explain how children behave when they do not umkstand a structure 5ut say nothing about how children learn a structure. Operating principles are based either on commonly-encountered properties oflanguages (e.g., ‘avoid exceptions’ reflects the fact that languages are system&c) or on commonlgrencountered features of learners(e.g., ‘avoid exceptions’ refkcts the fact that learners tend to form rules), or both. They are compatible with any type of learning theory. Piagetian principles have also not been offered as a language learning theory, although cognitive PhenomeIIa predicted by Piagetim theory often occur just prior to or concomitant with language pha rtomena, the signifkange of which is unclear.

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Erreich, Valian, 2nd Winzemer ( 1980) and

*

pothesis, that there are different types of propositional knowledge and different sources for the different types. We can roughly characterize two types: Type I includes laws and principles, and theories and explanations, and tends to be innate or acquired via hypothesis-testing; Type II includes single facts and systems of facts (like tax.onomies) and tends to be acquired by elaborating a knowledge structure. The basic outline of such a model is that the concepts in which the new knowledge will be encoded are already present; learning involves hooking up a new combination, or new sub-combinations, and wherever possible connecting the new fact with prior knowledge to make it less isclated. Many of the facts we acquire are ‘direct’ facts: they are presented in 2% manner highly si;!lilar to their ultimate mental represt;ntation. A newspaper article about the A,:ademy Awards, for example, states who won an award for best screenplay. We know about screenplays, awards, movies, and so on, -and can fit the new knowJedge into our knowledge structure-about Hollywood, sayquite easily. Otiler facts, however, such as word meanings, are typically not presented directly: to fit them in with a knowledge structure may first require a procedure of hypothesis testing, in order ‘to determine what the facts are. In language acquisition both Type I and Type II knowledge must be acquired: many individual specific facts must be learned (e.g., the declensions of irregular verbs), as well as broader language-specific patterns that will be mentally accounted for in terms of rules and principl.es. It is thus quite likely that some knowledge is acquired via both methods of learning, and some pia derivation from prior knowledge (as when a judgment can be made about, say, the ambiguity of a sentence never heard before). If it is the case that different kinds of knowledge are being acquired simultaneously, by the operation of at least three different methods of knowledge acquisition and revealed in a performance mechanism which is also developing, each resulting phenomenon of language acquisition is likely to be a mixed bag:, ‘Pinker (1981) seems ‘io offer a mixed model, part hypothesis-testing, part knowledge structure elab

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and riot susceptible to unitary interpretations. Attempts to force unitary interpret&ions can thus give misleading pictures of language acquisition. Salient superficial factors can appear to be the only factors. Usually, good performance requires knowledge of general rules plus specific facts, as in whquestion comprehension, which involves knowledge of **?h-movementand subject-aux inversion, and also of iniividual wh-words and individual verbs (see Winzemer, 198 I for a working-out of this example). If a unitary interpretation is sought, the salience of generalizations that hold for performance on specific words can override attention to the concurrent acquisition of rules. A second case occurs when different domains of knowledge are being acquired simultaneously. If the child is acquiring phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic knowledge simultaneously there will be numerous compatible descriptions of her behavior, all of which can be correct. If, however, the availability of several different descriptions is coupled with reductionism, then some descriptions will be incorrectly rejected. For example, syntactic and semantic descriptions are often available for the same phenomena (take Brown’s 1973 discussion of syntactic and semantic cumulative complexity), which is what one would expect if both syntactic and semantic knowled&?as:?being acquired simultaneously. But the tendency to see syntax as reducible to semantics results in syntactic descriptions being rejected if there is a semantic description available. (For further discussion see Valian, 1981.) The current situation in the study of language acquisition is one in which the theories make few predictions about phenomena, and the phenomena radicalIy underdetermine the theories. (Further, many of the theories are so non-specific that they cannot be evaluated on any grounds; notable exceptions include Hamburger, 1980, Wexler and Culicover, 1980, Pinker, 198 1, Erreich, et al., 1983.) How can the theories and phenomena come in closer wntact? The first suggestion is, paradoxicaIly, that theorists temporarily put aside attempts to account for most current phenonema, and concentrate on deriving predictions from their theories about new phenomena. The problem with most known phenomena is that, being mixed, they frustrate efforts at theory construction. An example is telegraphic speech, for which we tend to look for a single account. However, some word omissions may be due to one cause, while others have a different cause. Valian (1981) shows that the frequent absence of determiners in children’s speech can be explained by the optionality of determiners within noun phrases. But irheabsence of be as auxiliary must have a different explanation. Thus, ‘telegraphic speech’ may be une name covering several different processes, with one process linked to the acquisition of categories. Telegraphic speech, as a phenomenon, cannot helpfully constrain

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learning theories if it is not actually a single phenomenon. Eventually the old phenomena will have to be explained or convincingly demonstated to be outside the domain of language acquisition, but we will be in a better position to do that with stronger theories. The second suggestion is directed to the need for phenomena that will bear more Directly on learning theories, by being less mixed. There might be two ways of arriving at purer phenomena. One is to avoid clearly mixed phenomena unless guided by a theory which analyzes the types of knowledge and the methods of acquisition invojved, or unless it is possible to control for all but one knowledge type and one acquisition method. An example of a clearly mixed phenomena is increasing MLU with age, which reflects all types of knowiedge acquired in all ways. Thus, despite its robustness, the phenomenon is not Woretically useful. Another way of arriving at purer phenomena is by successive approximations: one can analyze a phenomenon according to its probable knowledge types and acquisition methods, using the results to suggest future observations that will be localized to a particular knowledge and acquisition type. The phenomena will thereby be more directly relevant to the construction and confirmation of theories. References Anderson, J. R. (1980) Cognitive Psychology and its implications. San Francisco, W. H. Freeman. Bever, T. G. (1970) The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (ed.), Cognition and the Development of Language. New York, Wiley. Brown, R. (1973) A Flist Language. Cambridge, HarvardUniversity Press. Chomsky, N. (1980) Rules and Representations. New York, Columbia University Press. Cramer, R. F. (1976) Developmental strategies for language. In V. Hamilton and M. 13.Vernon (eds.), It?teDevelopment of CognitiveRecesses. New York, Academic Press. Erreich, A., Valian, V., and Winzemer, J. (1980) Aspects of a theory of language acquisition.J. Child Lu?ag.,7,157-179. Hamburger, H. (19gOj A deletion ahead of its time. Cog,, 8, 389-416. Mayer, J. W., Erreich, A., and Valian, V. (1978) Transformations, basic operations and language acquisition. Cbg,,’6, 1-13. Pinker, S. (1981) A theory of the acquisition of lexical-interpretive grammars. In J. Bresnan (ea.), 7%e Mental Representatbn of GrammaticalRelatbns. Cambridge, MIT Press. Slobin, D. 1. (1973) Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In C. A. Ferguson and D. Slobin (wk.), S&dies Qliki LanguageDevelopment. New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Valian, V. (1981) Syntactic categories in the speech of young children. Unpublished manuscript. New York, Columbia University. V&n, V., Winzemer, J., and Erreich, A. (1981) A ‘Iittle linguist’ model of syntax learning. In S. Tavakolian (ed.), Law AcquWion and L&uistic Theory. Cambridge, MIT Press. Wexler, K., and Cuhcover, P. (1980) Formal l+inciples of LunguageAcquisition. Cambridge,MIT Press. Winxemer, J. (1981) A lexical-expectation model for children’s comprehension of whqil.%tions. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. New York, CUNY Graduate Center.

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Cbmition, 10 (1981) 331-336 @Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne - PGnted in The Netherlands

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Human memory and the information-processingmetaphor MICHAEL J. WATKINS* Rice University

Cognition: Au International Journal of Cognitive Psychology is healthy at ten. It was born in a veritable explosion of cognitive research, research that for the most part was cast within an information-processing framework. As the pages of this and other cognitive journals testify, this framework has fared extraordinarily well over the ensuing years, not least in my own area of: research, the psychology of memory. Indeed, it appears that research not conceptualized in information-processing terms is all but extinct. That much of the research from our laboratory provides something of an exception would seem to call for comment, and such comment forms the substance of this statement. One of the weaknesses of an information-processing approach to the study of memory is that it is so successful. It is hard to think of a finding it cannot accommodate. Select any experimental finding from the memory literature and any information processor worth his salt will have no trouble in putting together a combination of mental processes and structures to serve as a theory for it. Moreover, an information-processing theory is not only easy to create but, once created, any encounter it may have with data is unlikely to prove fatal, It might seem that we should leave such a happy state of affairs well alone, but I suspect there may be room for skepticism. A key factor in the survival of information-processing theories is the odd way they have of proving to be more subtle than they at first appear. All too often it turns out that the critic of a theory has overlooked an implicit assumption or some other subtlety. Also, in the rare case where a theory is conceded to be at variance with the data, the problem is usually resolved with only minor tuning. Another reason for the immunity of an informationprocessing theory to effective criticism is that it is unlikely to attract much attention. This is because the information-processing era has brought with it the luxury of personal theories, so that researchers reserve most of their attention for their own, special theory. The upshot of this state of affairs is that theories typically survive as long as, but no longer than, the active interest of their creators. It can, of course, be questioned whether the proliferation of personal theories is really undesirable, for, after alI, research still gets done. A perspec*Reprint requests should be sent to: M. J. Watkins, Department of Psychology, Rice University, Houston, Texas 77001, U.S.A.

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tive on this question can be gained by imagining the consequences of imposing sever12 restrictions on the amount of theorizing allowed in research reports. Natlurally, authors would still be responsible for reviewing relevant previous research, but suppose they were permitted on’ry minimal space to interpret, explain, rationalize, or otherwise discuss their findings. It seems to me that the !::onsequences might not be unduly harmful. I find it curious that we resi?arch psychologists often have such a hard time understanding the theory in each other’s articles yet feel competent to evaluate the reported research on the basis of the -method and results alone. The question arises, therefore, of whether the benefits of contemporary theorizing are worth the efforts required to read it or indeed the cost of publishing it. Moreover, there is a fur&r cost of persona.-1 theories that, though perhaps less obvious, is probably more important. Testing the predictions of personal theories usually involves complex designs and a concern with high-order interactions. In other words, personal theories lead to personal research, which means that when the interest of the theorist ebbs, not only his theory but also his rearch is in danger of being left high and dry. Over the past few years it has increasingly become our practice to report research with as littfe theorizing as editors will let us get away with. We now tend to avoid using reghtration, encoding, storage, retrieval, and other information-proce-csing terms. Clearly, we face the question of whether we are overreacting. In particular, is there anything to be gained by totally excluding the information-processing language rather than using it sparingly? I beIieve that perhaps there is, that it may be important to see just how far it is possible to get aloh.g with a COK;’ +te abstention from information-processing constructs This belief rest;, m part on a suspicion that there may be some fundamental weaknesses in the conceptual underpinnings of the entire information-processing approach. UnderEying the shortcomings of information-processing theorizing is its adoption of the spatial mode1.l According to this model, memory involves three distinct stages. First, information is put ‘into’ memory; then for some period of time this information is retained ‘in” memory; fmally, recollection O~CWSwhen information is taken ‘out of’ memory. This spatial conception of memory is, of course, by no means an invention of the information processors, for it was at least imp&d in earlier theories. Nevertheless, information processors have based their theorizing more squarely on the model than have most previous theorists, drawing a sharp distinction between its stages 1

spatial model of memory has recently been discussed by Roediger (1980), though it sh.ould be mHed that I use the term in a brwder sense than Woedigerdoes, ;io that I would call spatial some of the metapbxs (such as the lock-and4cey and the resonance metaph,hors) that he c& non-spatial.

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and assigning to each an explanatory role. Indeed, with the informationprocessing approach to memory the spatial model has become the foundation of a gigantic theoretical edifice, and as such it would seem prudent to inspect it for possible structural flaws. One potential flaw in the spatial model concerns its elaborateness relative to that of the basic memory paradigm. The basic memory paradigm involves simpl>r one or more ‘treatments’ or subjects, which typically include the presentation of to-be-remembered material in the form of a study list, followed by the measurement of recall urz3er one or more test conditions. Typically, the findings submit to more than one inteTretation within the framework of the spatial model: This is true not only for the elaborate versions of tht: model given in personal theories, but even for the model in its raw unelabclm rated form. I have discussed this point elsewhere (Watkins, 1978), and it L enough for now to illustrate it with an example. Suppose that two groups of subjects are presented with, and then tested for recall of a word list, and that at all phases of the procedure the two groups are treated identically with the single exception that for one group the words have a high frequency of everyday usage and for the other they are comparatively rare. Suppose further that, as seems likely, the group given the more common words tends to recall more. This frequency effect could be attributed to the input stage of meTory, in that encoding could be richer or deeper for common words, Alternatively, the effect could ar..se at the retention stage, in that during retention subjects in the high-frequency condition are likely to encounter more stimuli or think of more ideas that are associatively related to the to-be-remembered words, and such encounters or thoughts could strengthen the memory traces. 14nd of course the frequency effect could also be attributed to the output stage, as with the assumption that common words a-e more easily located within the memory system. Although such interpretations may d.iffer in their plausibility, it may not be possible to design an experiment that would fbrmally distinguish between them. If so, even the basic ve.rsian of the spatial model would seem to have a superfluity of explanatory power. Such problems notwithstanding, the three-stage model of memory is SO well ingrained that the possibility of doing without it may not be entirely obvious. To illustrate this issue, consider the concept of storage and its status in memory theorizing. More specifically, consider the argument that if we witness an episode and can later recall it, then surely we must in some small way have been changed by that episode, we must have had stored within US information pertaining to it. With.out wishing 110challenge the reasonableness of this argument, I am of the view that whether it is essential for our theories to incorporate the idea of storage depends upon the function they

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are intended to serve. If they deal with the physiological substrate of memory then it is indeed hard to see how they could avoid including reference to storage, though it is of interest to note that the physiological psychologists who use such theories think in terms of procedures for examining storage directly. For most other experimental psychologists, however, the purpose of a theory of memory is to bring order to data concerning the relation between what the ej;perimenter does to the subject and the subject’s subsequent behavior, and here reference to storage would seem to be optional. Much of the research from our laboratory can be seen as relevant in one way or another to the evaluation both of this option in particular and of the three-stage model in general. For instance, in several studies of recognition memory we have shown in a variety of ways that recognition performance v&ties with test condition, especially with the context in which the test item is presented (e.g., Todres and Watkins, 1981; Watkins, 1974; Watkins, Ho, and Tulving, 1976; Watkins and Tulving, 1975). Contrary to a not uncommon assumption, these findings, along with those of studies from many other laboratories (see, e.g., Watkins and Gardiner, 1979), demonstrate that as a test of whether an item is ‘available in storage’, the recognition procedure is no more adequate thaa any other we know about. Given, then, the difficulty in operatioiralizing even the essential components of the three-stage model of memory, we hat/e spent considerable energy exploring the option of rejecting this model, and therefore the entire information-processing approach, in favor af a simple, functional approach. This exploration has involved (1) gathering experimental evidence on some of the more obvious questions that arise when memory is considered in the context of t5r,ebasic memory paradigm; (2) considering how, in the absence of the mechanisms of the informationprocessing approach, the facts of memory might be explained; and (3) seeing whether a :functional approack to memory can be usefully applied to phenomena that appear particularly well suited to an infocmation-processing interpretation. I will briefly sketch these three endeavors irr ,tum. From the standpoint of the basic memory paradigm, it would seem to be important to know about how item recall is affected by the conditions under which the items are both studied and tested, Of the two, we probably know less about the effects of test conditions, ani su it is here that, to date at least, we have concentrated our major efforts.2 For the most part, these efforts have consisted in determining the relative effects of various types of cues and the contingency relations among them (e.g., Tulving and Watkins, 1975 ; WatzThk is not to deny, of course, that any conclusions about the effects of test conditions have to be quaWkd with aspect to study conditions (see Tulving and Thomson, 1973).

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kins and Todres, 1978). It should be noted that I am using ‘cues’ very broadly, broadly enough to include the free recall instruction and the test item of the recognition procedure (see Watkins, 1979). Determining the effectiveness of varic us study and test conditions does not, of itself, provide a means of explaining memory, of accounting for why some things are remembered and others forgotten. Indeed, if we are to forgo the mechanistic, information-processing explanations, it is not even clear what form explanation should take. This is too big an issue to address here, but for our part we have sought explanation in terms of laws or principles, by referring the particular to the general. A generalization we have found especially useful is one we refer to as the cue-overload principle, according to which the probability of a cue effecticg recall of a given item varies inversely with the number of items the cue subsumes.” This principle can be invoked as a ready interpretation of the list-length effect, the advantage of using categorically structured lists, subjective organization, the effects of extralist cuing, and various paired-associate findings (see Watkins, 1979). Moreove; we have applied it to, and confirmed its predictions concerning, the buildupand-release-from-proactive-inhibition effect (Watkins and Watkins, 1975) and the inhibitory effect of part-set cuing (Mueller and Watkins, 1977; Todres and Watkins, 1981; Watkins, 1975). I should add that we have also used the cue-overload principle to develop a retroaction procedure for exploring the functional relation between cues (Watkins and Watkins, 1976). Some idea of how widely our relatively atheoretical approach to memory may be usefully applied can be gained by seeing how well it copes with topics that seem well suited to an information-processing approach. For some time now we have been studying two topics, sensory memory and rehearsal, that regularly furnish textbook illustrations of this approach (Craik and Watkins, 1973; Watkins and Graef’e, 198 1; Watkins and Todres, 1980; Watkins, Watkins, and Crowder, 1974; Watkins and Watkins, 1980a, B). In reporting this research we have, over the years, gradually reduced the amount of reference made to information-processing constructs, and I now believe that, as in our more recent reports, all $uch references could Ive been omitted without obvious loss. Although the future is something l prefer to let take care of itself, I can ski that for the present we are continuing with most of these areas of research. Just how far we can get with our functional approach to memory remains an open question, but at the very least, the mere appreciation of its 3 It is perhaps appropriate to suggest that the cue+verload principle should not be regardedas a personal theoty. Not only is it a simple idea, but it constitutes the common ground to a variety of more specific ideas put forward by a large number of researchers in the contexts of a variety of relatively specific domains.

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limitations should help clarify the advantages gained from theorizing in elaborate information-processing terms. Indeed, just as fish may have a hard time coming to grips with the cloncept of water, so may we lose our grasp of the information-processing metaphor under the sheer vastness of its popularity.

Refermces F. 1.

Watkins,

The role

verb. Behav.,12.599-607. Mueller, C. W., and Watkins, M. J. (1977) Inhibition from cuing with recall targets: A cuesverload intezpretation. (. verb. Learn.verb. Behav.,I6,699-709. Roediger, H. L (1980) Memory metaphors in cognitive psychology. Mem. Cog., 8, 231-246. Todres, A. K., and Watkins, M. J. (In press) A part-set cuing effect in recognition memory. J. exper.

Psychd.: Hum. km. TuSv&

Mem.

E., and Thomson, D. M. (1973) Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory. Aychol. Rev., 80,352-373. Tubing, E., and Watkins, M. 1. (1975) Structure of memory traces. Psychol. Rev., 82, 261-275. Watkins, M. 3. (1974) When is recall spectacularly higher than recognition? J. exper. Psychol, 102, 161 -163. Watkins, M. 3. r.h975) Inhibition in recall with extralist ‘cues’. J. verb. term. verb..Behuv.,I#, 294303. Watkins, M. J. (1978) Theoretical issues. In M. M. Gruneberg md P. E. Morris teds.), Aspects of humanmemury. London, Methuen. Watkins, M. J. (1979) Engrams as cuegrams and forgetting as cue overload: A cueing approach to the structure of memory. Jn C!. R. Puff ted.), Z&e stnrciure of memory. New York, Academic Press. Watkins, M. J., and Gardh%er, J. M (1979) An appreciation of generate-recognize theory of recall. J. ve& bn. verb. Behav., 18,687-704. Watkins, M. i., md *Zraefe, T. M. (In press) Delayed rehearsal of pictures. J. verb. Ileum. verb. Behov. Watkins, V 3., %, Z., and Tulving, E. (1976) Context effects in recognition memory for faces. J. ve& km. verb. Behav., i&505-517. Watkins, M. J., and Todres, A. K. (1978) On the relation between recall and recognition. J, verb. L&uri.wrb. Behav., 17.621-633. Watkins, M. J., and Todres, A. K. (1980) Sufhx effects manifest and concealed: Further evidence for a 2O-seco& echo.4 verb. Learn..verb. B&tntv..19.46-53. Watk& %f.+ J., and Tulving, E. (1975) Episo&c memory: When recognition fails. J. exper. Rychol.: Gen.. IW, 5-29. Watkins, M. J., and Watkins, 0. C. (1976) cue-overload theory and the method of interpolated attributes. BuQ plyahort, &x.. 7.289-291. Watk& If. J., Watkins, 0. C, and fiowder, R G. (1974) The modality effect in free and serial recall as a function of phonological similarity. 1. verb. lkwm. verb. Behav., 13,430-447. Watch% 0. C, and Watkins, M. J. (1975) Buildup of proactti inhibition as a cueoverload effect. 1 cxpa. &ycM.: Burr. Leant. Mem.. I, 442-452. 0. C, and Watch M. J. (1980~) Echoic memory and voice quality. Mem. Qg., S,, 26-30. 0. C., and Watkins, M. J. (198Ob) The mod&y (effect and echoic persistence. J. exper. Agcird.: Gen., 109.251-278.

Cognition, 10 (1981) 337-340 @ Elsetier Sequoia &A., Lawanne - Printed in The Netherlands

337

A position note on natural language understanding and artificial intelligence YQRICKVJILKS” University

of Essex

What .follows is in no sense a ,logical questions I am agnostic, though admitting that, whatever dislalmers their promake/ all artificial intelligence (AI) in fact incorporate example, even th3se at what one might call the “engineering” spectrum of AI research disclaim all theory-tend nonetheless to construct English, say, that from left-to-right, suggest that rightleft processing certain constructions explain such a preference. towards that end of the spectrum myself, opposite which I tend to identify systems independent of their instantiation in machines, humans or animaZs. This is an AI version of linguistic competence theory, and no m3re appealing for that: it is liable to miss the distinctively AI insights that come precisely from consideration of processing constraints. But, I repeat, whatever an .\I worker’s chosen place on that spectrum, doing psychology is not his job. Whether one calls it division of academic la bour, or mere trades unionist protectionism, I believe psychological speculation and testing is best left in the hands of psychologists. Some fifteen years ah, I, began to publish papers on programs to “parse English text semantically”, an enterprise that has been widely misunderstood since then: as, for example, claiming that such a program could not take account of the (syntactic) fact that, say, English determiners tend to occur to the left of adjectives. This was clearly a misunderstanding; no more was intended by the original claim than that the work of parsing English can be done via a structure that is plausibly semantic in nature, with no autonomous syntactic component. This claim still seems to me plausible and proof against Katnian knock-down answers in terms of arms and weapons having “the same meaning” while be;ng associated with different syntactic features. ---

*Reprint requests should be sent to Y. Wilks, Department of Language 8s Linguistics, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Cokhester CQ4 3 SQ, England.

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Y. Wilks

I feel under no obligation to agree that they “have the same meaning” and, moreaver,, it now seems to me that the recent emphasis on “perspectives” in AI 6.a~in Bobrow and Winograd’s HRL language) can offer a formalism in wlmichto make such a position concrete: the knowledge and meaning structures of armr and weapons could plausibly differ if only one of them could “seen from the perspective”’ of countability. Let me restate the principles behind that fifteen-year old approach to “semantic parsing”: (a) that language is fundamentally a linear, segmentable, phenomenon, even at the semantic level, rather thau a hierarchical one; (b) semantic and knowledge-structure dictionary entries are the fundamental data structures for parsing, but there are items in the system (“meaning skeletons”’ for phrases and clauses) that are not reducible to dictionary entries: I called these temp2ates. In brief, this approach does not accept a simple version of the Fregean “principle of compositionality”. (c) there is a very general algorithm for selecting fillers for slots, and hencp overall structures of sentences and texts: I called it “preference”. It was based on a notion of semantic coherence-in short, accepting the semantically densest reading-and never rejected readings, only preferred some to others. (It was, in a clear sense, the opposite of what is known as “constraint analysis”: that alttznatives are counted out not in). These principles still seem to be broadly correct. and I take encouragement not only from, say, recent work on the key role semantically coherent noun groups play in garden path sentences and hence in parsing generally, but also from the general drift of linguistic theory in the last ten years. By that I mean the move towards a more surface-orientated syntax, concerned with th.e role of dictionary entries and slot fiig rather than transformations. If it be replied that one who argues for “semantic parsing” can hardly be cheered by a move towards a surface syntax, I demur. Semantic parsing of the type I intend is deep& superficial. until extended by inference structures and knowledge bases, and I would maintain that even against those who have done the same kind of parsing as that I advocate and called it “conceptual” and “deep”. I have many times pointed out in print its relentlessly, and in my view quite correct, superficial properties. The key question will be the ability of those now engaged in syntactic parsing, such as Marcus, to produce interesting and significant generalizations not

reducible to semantic ones. We are hovering near an old problem: th;tt of semantic primitives. I think it is now clear that there are a lot of b.ad ways of defending such entities: as part of an innate brain language, for example. That does not mean that there are not good ways, and I think one of those: is to be found near the phrase “I%oceduraISemantics”. I have attacked a number of expositions of this no-

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tion, but I think it still offers a potential coup to AI: the construction of a distinctive theory of meaning (which would, ambulando, give procedural meaning to such items as semantic primitives) which was formal and defensible while not being, at bottom, reducible to model theoretic semantics, verificationism, or the banality of brain (or machine) hardware. Another good AI idea that still has much to offer, I believe, is frames, or scripts. I have never accepted that these still insufficiently defined items can guide parsing or be proto-text grammars. The evidence is too strong that we can do what is needed, in initial parsing at least, with weaker structures. Where I do believe them essential, however, is in the stage that immediately succeeds initial parsing. Only with their aid, I have argued, can we make sense of the very simplest utterances that break what I would call preference restrictions. Many such phenomena would be called syntactic by others, but no matter. On my view John ran a mile breaks the pre-reference of run for no object, and is, in that sense, preference breaking or metaphoric. Even such trivial cases can, I believe, be profitably subsumed under a general pattern-matching algorithm (forwhich I have specified a sample version) %iiatmatches preferencebreaking items (the above as much as “my car dzinks gasoline”) against fi-amelike structures to determine an interpretation via what is normally the case for the mentioned entities: gas is normally used by a car (so that interpretation is substituted in a text representation of the sentence), just as running normally extends a distance such as a mile (with corresponding effects on the representation). This sort of approach is, I believe, the appropriate use of frame-like stru= tures (incorporating detailed factual knowledge about the world) in the oralysis of sentences and texts, given a very general assumption that language is inherently, not incidentahy, metaphoric or boundary breaking, and that human comprehension is mapped by a general knowledge-based procedure imposing top-down coherence on what we read and hear. One final area of research, now booming in AI, should be mentioned: the analysis of conversation in terms of plan structures, beliefs and perspectives, loosely what has been known in philosophy and linguistics as speech acts. “Speech acts are dead” said an eminent linguist to me the other da;, which I would interpret bysayingthat philosophyandlinguistics encountered problems with the notion that their theoretical machineries did not allow them to solve. In the case of philosophy, the assumption of an irreducible and knowableby-others notion of intention seems intractable for any procedural account. In the case of linguistics, the machinery of generative grammar made it impossible to bring belief structures (particularly of different individuals, including their beliefs about each other) to bear on the “analysis of utterances.

I believe AI work in this area will be very fruitful and am actively concerned with it myself: partly because the notion of plans can assimilate speech to non-linguistic action in the $vayAustin originally intended, and partly because the perlocutionary effect-the goal of the act of uttering-can be kept firmly in view in an AI account, whereas it tends to get lost in accounts where the goal of speaking seems only to be understood, rather than to achieve some concrete end. I do not believe that such AI work will justify any particular theory of speech acts; on the contrary, I anticipate that the existing philosophical distinctions and tern.inology will disappear, or, at best survive as primitives of system organization. There might well be a group of rules clustered under the label THREAT or PROMISE in a useful system of conversational analysis of t!;e future or, on the other hand, the rule taxonomy used might have no commonsense interpretation. I hope devoutly for the former outcome, bc t we shall see. One danger I see to theoretically interesting natural language analysis in AI is the trend to expert systems: on that view, language about car repair or electrical circuits, say, becomes no more than a side-effect (the word is much used) in a system that plans such activities. This would be a parody world of Wittgensteitian linguistics, and some AI workers, seeing the effect of this trendsatisfying as it may be to commercial interests and Government sponsors -may soon come flocking back to the shelter afforded by the skirts of “generalized competence” and an “innate language faculty”! i ’

Cognition

341

Cumulative Author Index of Volumes The volunte numbers are in boldface type and followed by the page rtumber. Ades, Tony, lo,7 Alegria, Jesus, 7,323 Allen, Rhianon, 6,189; 8,175 Ammon, Mary Sue, 7,3 Amsel, Eric, 7,99 Anderson, John R., 8, ‘73 Antinucci, Francesco, 7, 145 Baars, Bernard J., 4,177 Bacharach, Verne R., 4 281 Bpddeley, Alan, IO, 17 Baron, Jonathan, 2,299 Beardsley, William, 6, 117 Bellugi, Ursula, 1, 173; 3,93; 4,45 Bertelson, Paul, 7,323 Bevel, Thomas G., 3,83 Biederman, Irving, 7,285 Binks, Martin G., 5,47 Blums!ein, Sheila E., lo,25 Bonvuhan, John D., 2,435 Boons, Jean-Paul, 2,183 Bornstein, Marc H., 6,89 Bower, Thomas G. R., 1, 47,165; 3,29 Brainerd, Charles J., 2,349 B$ansford, John D., 1,211 Br,egman,Albert S., lo,33 Bresnan, Joan, lo,39 Broadbent, Donald E., 10, 53 Bronckart, J. P., 2,1Q7 Brown, Roger, 4,125; $73,185 Bruner, J. S., 3,254; Bucci, Wilma, 6,55 Byrne, Richard, 5,287 .

Caplsn, David, 2,269 J 10,59

Caramazza, Alfonso, 3,227; 6,117;9,117 Carello, Claudia, 10,3 13 Carr, Thomas H., 4,28 1; 9,73

Cary ,

Luz, 7,323 Chomsky, Noam, 1 , 1 1,407 Clark, Eve V., 2,161 Clark, Herbert H., 8, 111; 9,311 Cohen, Gillian, 9,59 Cohen, L. Jonathan, 7,385; 8,89 Cooper, William E., 6, 135 Croft, Karen. 8.369 Cutler, Anne, 7,49; lo,65 Cutting, James E., lo,71 Delis, Dean, 5, 119 Deutsch, Werner, 6,155 Dickson, W. Patrick, 5,215 Donaldson, Margaret, 3,341 Dore, John, 2,45 1 Dover, Arlene, 7,99 Dresher, B. Elan, 4,32 1; $147,377

Duranti, Allessandro, 7, 145 Edwards, Derek, 2,395 Ehrlichman, Howard, 4,3 1 Eimas, Peter D., lo,79 Ellis, Andrew W., 7,413 Erdelyi, Matthew Hugh, 4, 311;9,23 Erreich, Anne, 6,1; 7,317 Evans, J. St. B. T., 1,373; 3,141,387; 5,265

Fairweather, Hugh, 4,23 1 F’auconnier, Gilles, LO,85 Finkelstein, Shira, 4,3 11 Fischer, Susan, 1,173 Fischler, Ira, lo,89 Flavell, John H., 8,369 Fodor, Janet Dean, 6,291; 8,417 Fodor, Jerry A., 1,83; 6,229; ‘7,49,93; 8,263; 9,139 Ford, Marylin, 6,35 Forster. Kenneth I., 2,3 19 Franks, Jeffery J., 1,211 Frazier, Lyn, 6,291; 8,417 Freeman, N. H., 8,243 Frenk, Samy G., 1,97 Garrett, Merrill F., 1,359; 8,263; lo,97 Garvey, Catherine, 3,227 Gebert, Lucyna, 7,145 German, Rachel, 4,189 Glass, Arnold L., 3,3 13 Gleitman, Henry, 1,137 Gleitman, Lila R., 1,137; 10,103

Goldin-Meadow, Susan, 4, 189 Goldstein, Louis M., 2, 279 Goodluck, Helen, 7,85 Green!, Bert, 9, 117 Grieve, Robert, 5,235 Grober, Ellen H., 6,117 Grosjean, Francois, 5,lO 1 Gross, Charles G., 6,89 Hakuta, Kenji, 9,197 Hamburger, Henry, I), 389 Hamlyn, D. W., 10,115

CumulativeAuthor Index

342 Hampson, P. J., 6,79 Hatano, Giyoo, S,47 Healy, Alice F., 10,119 Herrell Nadeanne 4,3 ! 1 Hermsiein, 8. J., i, 301, 419 Hi&, William, 4,215 Hobbs, S. B., 6,15 Hochberg, Julian, 10,127 Holmes, Virginia M., 6,35; 7,363 Holyoak, Keith J., 3,313 Hoogenraad , Robert, 5, 235 Hopkins, J. Roy, 2,385 Hornstein,Norbert,4,32:, 5,147,377

Horton, Marjorie S., 8, 227 Hughes, Jennifer, 3,41 Hupcey, John A., 3,307 Ibbotson, N. R., 9,125 fnhelder, Barbel, 3, 195 hwin, David E., 10, lit5 Jacobson, Sandra, 2,385 Je?nnerod, Marc, 53; 13,135 Jensen, Arthur R., I, 427 Johnson- Laird, Philip N., 1,s:; 5,189,& ify of Chile) Size constancy and the problem of perceptual spaces,97 JONAS LANGER (University of California) and SIDNEY STRAUSS (Tel Aviv University) Appearance, reality and identity, 105 LILA R. GLEITMAN, HENRY GLEiTMAN and ELIZABETH F. SHIPLEY fUniversityofPennsy/vanial The emergenceof the child as grammarian, 137 T. G. R. BOWER and JENNIFER G. WISHART lUniversity of Edinburgh) The effects of motor skill on object permanence, 165 URSULA BELLUGI and SUSAN FISCHER (The Salk lnsrjrute for P&logical Studies) A comparison of sign language and spoken language, 173 JAM ES R . LACKN ER (blassachusetis Institute of Technologyj An auditory isiurcionof depth, 201 JOHN D. BRANSFlORD (State University of New York at Stony Bnaok) and JEFFERY J. FRANKS Waederbilt

University~

The abstraction of linguistic ideas: A review, 211 DAVID PREMACK ((University of Celifomia, San& Barbara) Concordant prefferencesas a precondition for affective bL( not fir svmboiic communication (or How to do experimental anthropology), 251 DAVID LAYZER ~1yerverd Coltqw ObservatoryJ Science or superstition? (A physical scientist looks at the IQ contro&rsyj, ‘265 R. J. HERRNSTEIM (Harvard Unhwrsity) Whatever heppened to vaudeville? A reply to Professor Chomskv, 3C 1. A. N. LEONTIEV and A. R. LURIA (Moscow Univ8rsity/ Some notes concerning Dr. Fodor’s ‘Reflections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and language’, 311 H. SINCLAIR fUnivars!ty of Genev8) Some comments on Fodor’s ‘Reflections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought 8nd 18nguage’, 317 SIDNEY STRAUSS (Tel-Aviv University) Inducing cognitive development and learning: A review of short-term training experiments. 1. The organismic developmental approach, 329 J. R. LACKNER and M. F. GARRETT &4wachusetYs lnsritufe of Technology1 Resolving ambiguiv: Effects of biasing contexa in the unattended ear, 359 J. ST, 8. T. EVANS (Sir John Cass School of Science and &hnology, City of London &ifl=hnicl On ehe problems of interpreting reasoningdata: Logical and psychologicel approac;ies.373

Cbmulotive Contents

T. SHALLICE (University College London) The Ulster depth Interrogation techniques anti their relation to sensory deprivation research, 385 NORM CHMSKY fM&sac~u&?rtsIffstitute of Technology) tXwxwnt$ on He&stein’s response,407

R. J. HERRNSTEIN fHafvard University) Comments on Professor Layzer’b ‘Science or superstition’, 419 DAVID LAYZER fH8nfard University) A rejoinder to Professor Harmstein’s comn;ents, 423 ARTHUR R. JENSEN (University of California, Berkeley) The IQ colrtroversy: A reply to Lavzer, 427 DAVID LAYZER (Hart%& iiniversity) _ Jensen’sreply: The sounds of silence, 454

Volume 2 Editorial, 7 JOHN KIMBALL (Indiana Ut?iuersity, Blo~mk?gtonl Seven principles of surface structure parsing in natural lar!guage,15 R. MILLEF (Universiisy of Witwatersrandl The use cf concrete and abstract concepts bv children and adults, 49 PHILIP BilEBERMAN (University of Connecticut, Stofrs~ On the evolution of language: A unified view, 59 C. A. PERFETTI luniversity of Pittsburgh) Ret&&al of sentence relations: Semantic vems syntactic deep structure, 95 J. P. BRONCKART and H. SINCLAIR lUniversit& de GenBvel Time, tense and aspect, 107 H. PUTNAM Marx& UnivsrrityJ Raiuctionism

&?ltdthe rutun, of PS@lolO#,

rg1

H. B. SAVIN IU~imwst%y .Tf Pennsylvania) Professorsand psychological researchers:Conflicting values in conflicting roles, 147 EVE. V. CLARK (Stanford University) Non-lingristbz strategies and the acquisition1of word meanings, 161 JEAN-PAUL BOON§ fUniver&y 0.f Paris) AcoegEebwty, intwpmt&mn ar!j knowledfp of the world: Remarks on the verb PLANTER (to plmtL 383 HARRIS 8. GAVIN {University of Pennsylvanktl Meanings and concepts: A review of Jerrold J. Katz’s Semantic theory, 213 P. C. VAN DUYNE (Uniwrsity College, London) A abrt nc)mz+ on Evans’ criticism of re&;oning experiments and his matching responsehvpothesis, PHILIP G. ZlBlBARDO /Stanford University/ On the ethii of intervention in human psychological research: With special reference to the Stanford prison experiment, 2413 HARRIS B. SAVIN lUniversity of PbnnsylvanisJ Ethics for godsand men, 267 DAVID CAPLAN iMcGil/ Medical &h&J A wte on the abswact read& of verbs of perception. 269 LOUIS M. GOLDSTEIN and JAMES R. LACK.NER fhndeis Univefsity~ Alterations of the phonetic coding of speech sounds during repetition, 279

Cognition

JONATHAN BAF’ON lMctl#aster University) Semantic components and conceptual development,

347

299

KENNETH I. FORSTER and ILMAR OLBREI fMonash University) Semantic heuristics and syntactic analysis, 319 CHARLES J. BRAINERD /University of Alberta) Neo-Piagetian training experiments revisited: stage hypothesis?, 349

Is there any support for the cognitive-development

A. SCHAERLAEKENS (University of Leuvenl A generative transformational model for child language acquisition, 371 PHILIP R. ZELAZO, J. ROY HOPKINS, SANDRA JACOB”ON and JEROME KAGAN Univ ?rsityj Psychological reactivity to discrepant events: Support for the curvilinear hypothesis, 385

,lHarvard

DEREK EDWARDS 0Jniversity of Sussex) Sensoory-motor intelligence and semantic relations in early child grammar, 395 KEITH E. NELSON and JOHN D. BONVILLIAN (Stanford University) Concepts and words in the lB-monthold: Acquiring concept names under controlled cor7ditions. 435 0. TERENCE LANGENDOEN (City University of New York), NANCY KALISH-LANDON bLoyo/a University) and JOHN DORE fCity University of New York) Dative questions: A study in the relation of acceptability ‘:_:grammaticality of an Er;:lish sentence type, 451 STEVEN P. R. ROSE (The Opm University) and HILARY ROSE (London School of Economics) ‘Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault in realitv’ - Ideology in neurobiology, 479

Volume 3 JONAS C-ANGER (University of California, Berkelyj lneeractional aspects of cognitive organization, 9 PIERRE MOUNOUD (University of Geneva) and T. G. R. BOWER (University of Edinburgh) Conservation of weight in infants, 29 JENN: FER HUGHFS (Medical Research Council Developmental Psychology lJn,‘t, Lo&on) Acquisition of a ,lon-vocal ‘language’ by aphasic children, 41 TENON W. PYLYSMYN (University of Wastern Ontario) Minds, machines and phenomenology : Some reflections on Dreyfus’ What computers can’t do, 57 ROGER SCH NAITTC R (Illinois Wesleyan University) The decline of reason, 79 THOMAS G. BEVER iColumbia Reason and un-reason, 83

University) and JACQUES

URSULA BELLIJGI (The Se/k Instituttv~. EDWARD and PATRICIA SIPLE (University of Rochester) Remembering in signs, 93

MEHLER

S. KLIMA

(C.N.R.S.)

/University

of CMfurnia,

JOSE MORAIS (Universiti libre de Bruxellesj The effects of ventriloquism on the right-side advantage for verbal material, 127 P. C. WASON (University College London) and J. ST. B. T. EVANS Dual processes in reasoning?, 141 SIDNEY STRAUSS ITel-Aviv A reply to Brainerd, 155

0Vymouth

Polytechnic)

University)

ANNETTE KARMILOFFSMITH and BARBEL INHELDER “If you want to get ahead, get a theory”, 195

(Univvrsity of

Geneva!

San Dies$

Cumuktive Contents

348

DANIEL N. OSHERSON (University of Pennsylvania) and ELLEN MARKMAN Language and the ability to evaluate contradictions end tautologies, 213 CATHERiNE GARVEY, ALFONSO CARAMAZZA and JACK YATES SitYl Factors influencing assignment of pronoun antecedents, 227

(University of Illinois)

(The Johns Hopkins Univer-

STEPHEN WILCOX and DAVID S. PALERMC‘ (The Pennsylvania State University) ‘in’, “on’, and ‘under’ revisited, 245 J. S. BR!UNER (University of Oxford) From communication to language - A psvchofogical perspective, 255 ANDREii LUGG Wniversity of Ottawa) Putnam on reductionism, 289 HI LAR Y PUTNAM Harvard Reply to Lugg, 295

University)

ULRiC NEISSER and JOHN A. HUPCEY fCorne// University) A Sherlockian experiment, 307 ARNOLD L. GLASS and KEITH J. HOLYOAK (Stanford University) Alternative conceptions of semantic theory, 313 JAMES McGARRIPLE end MARGARET Conservation aL*-lents, 341

DONALDSON

(University of Edinburgh)

SANFORD A. PQiANE, BERNARD TRANEL and HARLAN LANE lllnlversity San Diego) On the psychological reality of a natural rule of syllable structure, 351

of CafifornB

at

PHILLIP SHAVER, LEE PIERSON, and STEPHEN LANG (Columbia University, New York City) Converging evidence for the functional significance of imagery in problem solving, 359 A. R. LURIA Wniversity of &scowl Scientific perspectives and philosophical dead elnds in modern linguistics, 377 J. St. 6. T. EVANS (Plymouth Polytechnic) On interpreting reasoning data - A reply to Van Duyne, 387

Volume 4 Editorial, 7 KATHERINE NELSON /Yale UniversiQ.1 Some attributes of adjectives usad by young children, 13 SUSAN L. WEINER (Educationa/ Testing Swvi&?l and HOWARD New York) Ocular motility and cognitive process, 31 EWVARD S. KLIMA flJnivtWty of Wtiwnia et Snn D&O) Institute for Bii?logica Studies) Poetry and song in a language without sound, 45 JONAN

SUNDBERG

IRoya/

lnniture of Ttidobgy,

EHRLICHMAN

and URSULA

Stockholml and BJ6RN

(City University af

BELLUGI

LINDBLOM

(The Wk

(Stock.

h@h Universityj _ Generative theories in language and music description, 99 ROGER BROWN ftfarvard Unive&yl Referenoe - In memorial tribute to Eric Lenneberg, 125 VIRGINIA VALIAN (CUNY Gmd~te Cantar, lllrw Ywk) and ROGER WALES llJnbe&y of St Andnmr) What’s !&ht: talkers help listeners hpar and understand by clarifying sentential relations, 155

Cognitiffn 349

MICHAEL T. MOTLEY and BERNARD J. BAARS /University of California) Semantic bias effects orbthe outcomes of verbal slips, 177 SUSAN GOLDIN-MEADOW,

MARTIN

E. P. SELIGMAN

and ROCHEL GELMAN

(University

of

Pennsylvania)

Language in the two-year old, 189 DANIEL N. OSHERSON ilJniversity of Pennsylvania) and THOMAS WASOW f%anford Universityj Task-specificity and species-specificity in the study of language: A ~methodologicalnote, 203 ELIZABETH SPELKE, WILLIAM Skills of divided attention, 215

HIRST, and UI..RIC NEISSER ICornell University, New York)

HUGH FAIRWEA iER (Universities of Oxford.and Bologna) Sex differences in cognition, 231 THOMAS H. CARR (George Peabody College, Nashvillej and VERNE

R. BACHARACH

(Acadia

University. Wolfvillej

Perceptual tuning and conscious attention: Svstems of input regulation in visual information processing, 281 JAMES R. LACKNER Mrandeis University and Massachusetts lnstitutc of Technologyj, and BETTY TULLER (Brandeis University, The influence of syntactic segmentation on perceived stress,303 JOHN MORTON (MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge) On recursive reference, 399 MATTHEW HUGH ERDELYI andSHlRA FINKELSTEIN IBrooklyn Co/lose), NADEANNE HERRELL, BRUCE MILLER and JANE THOMAS (The Stare University, Rudgersj Coding modality vs. input modality .in hypermnesia: Is a rose a rose a rose?, 311 B. ELAN DRESHER (University of Mas~chusettsj, NORBERT HORNSTEIN (Harvard University) On some supposed contributions of artificial intelligence to the scier 1ific study of language, 321

Volume 5 MARC JEANNEROD IIMSERM Lyon1 Sur la nature de la connaissanceempirique, 3 A tribute to H. L. Teuber (1916-1977) MARY-LOUISE KEAN &fassachussetrsInsriruta of Technologyj The linguistic interpretation of aphasicsyndromes: Aggrammatism in Broca’s aphasia,an example, 9 GIYOO HATANO (Dokkyo University, &pan), YOSHfO MIYAKE (Nati~naf tnstitute for Educational Research, Japan) and MARTIN G. BINKS (The university of Liverpooij Performance of axpert abacus operators, 47 SANDY PETREY (State University of New York lbStony Brook) Word associationsand the development of lex Sal memory, 57 ROGER BROWN end JAMES KULIK 0farva d UnhwsWl Flashbulb memories, 73 FRANCOIS GROSJEAN and HARLAN LANE fNohheastern Universityj Pausesand syntax in American sign language, 101 DEAN DELIS and ANNE SAXON SLATER (University of Wyomingj Toward a functional theory of reduction transfprmations, 119 ROGER C. SCHANK and ROBERT WfLENSKY (Yale University) Response to Dresher and Homstein, 133 B. ELAN DRESHER (Unfwrsfry of M~husatts, Amherst) and NORBERT HORNSTEIN (Harvard Univarsityj

Reply to Schank and Wilenrkv. 147

Cumulative Contents

350

TERRY WINOGRAD Branford University) On some conteSted suppositionsof generative linguistics about scientific study of language, 151 PETER SCHdNBACH ff?uhr-Universitir Bochum) In defense of Roger-Brown einst himself, 184 ROGER BROWN (Harvard University) In reply to Peter SchQnbach, 185 PHILIP N. JOHNSON-LAORD fliniversify of Sussex) Procedural semantics, 189 BV. PATRICK DICKSON si’ry of Tokyo) Referential relativiw:

lU;nivers;ty of Wisconsinl NAOMI

MIYAKE

and TAKASHI

MUTO fUniver-

Culture-boundedness of analytic and metaphoric communications,

215

ROBERT GRIEVE, ROBERT HOOGENRAAD and DlARMiD MURRAY &/niversify of St. Andre& On the young child’s use of Iexis and syntax in understanding locative instructions, 235 VIMLA P. VADHAN and DANIEL Attention and cognition, 251

W. SMOTHERGILL

&yracuse University)

J. St. B. T. EVANS and S. E. NEWSTEAD iPlymouth PolyfecE?nic) Language and reasoning: A study of temporal factors, 265 RICHARD BYRNE (Universiry of St. Andraws Planning meals: Problem-solving on a real data-base, 287 ARTHUR S. REBER and SELMA LEWIS (Brooklyn College of CUNY) Imp!!& kerning: An analysis of the form and structure of a body of tacit knowledge, 333 E. J. 7IOBlNSON Development

and W. P. ROBINSON (Macquarie University, Australia) in the understanding of causes of success and failure in verbal communication,

B. ELAN DI:ESHER l&own Reply to Winogred, 377

JlJJlJ;U$NZEMER Transformations,

Universiryj and NORBERT

MAYER,

ANNE

ERREICH

HORNSTEIN

and VIRGINIA

363

(Harvard University)

VALIAN

(CUNY Graduate Center,

basic operations and language acquisition, 1

W. A. PHELLIPS, S. B. HOBBS and F. R. PRATT &Wing

University, Stirling1

Intellectual realism in children’s drawings of cubes, 15 MARYLIN FORD and VIRGINIA M_.HOLMES (University of Melbourne, Parkville. Vie.; Planning units and syntax in sentence production, 35 WILMA BUCCI (State UnFfersity of New York, Downstate Medical Center) The interpretatior! ;,i universal sffirmative propositions, 55 P. J. HAMPSON and P. E. MORRIS lUniversify of Lancaster, lancasrer1 Unfulfilled expectations: A criticism of Neisser’s theory of imagery, 79 MARC H. BORNSTEIN, CHARLES G. GROSS and JOAN 2. WOLF (Princeton University) Perceptual similarity of mirror images in infancy _89 ELLEN H. GROBER, WILLIAM BEARDSLEY an j ALFONSO University) Parallel function strm in pronoun assignmenr. 117

JOHN M. SORENSEN.

WILLIAM E. COOPER ar4d JEANNE Tmhnoiogyj speech timing of grammatical categories, 135

CARAMAZZA

M. PACCIA

(The Johns Hopkins

Wssachuserrs

WERNER DEUTSCH ltWx-P/anckCesWzhaft~ and THOMAS PECHMANN lahnl Ihr, dir, or mirf On the acquisition of pronouns in German children, 155

(Universitit

lnsfitufe of

Marburg/

Cognition 35 1

ULRIC NEISSER (Cornell University) Anticipations, images, and introspection,

169

JOHN L. LOCKE i/ns?itufe for Child tj)ehevior end Development, Champeign, 111.1 Phonemic effects in the silent reading of hearing and deaf children, 175 ARTHUR S. REBER (Brooklyn College of CUNY) ,md RHIANON ALLEN (ClJ/VV Graduete Centre) Analogic and abstraction strategies in synthetic grammar learning: A funct,ionalist interpretation, l&9 DAVID NAVON (University of Heife) On a conceptual hierarchy of time, space, and other dimensions, 223 J. A. FODOR (M8ss8chusetts Institute of Technology) Tom Swift and his procedural grandmother; 229 P. N. JOHNSON-LAIRD (Laboratory nf Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex) What’s wrong with Grandma’s guide to Procedural semantics: A reply to Jerry Fodor, 249 DANIEL N. OSHERSON (~8ss8chusetts institute of Technologyl Three conditions on conceptual naturalness, 263 LYN FRAZIER and JANET DE.AN FODOR (University of Connecricurl The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model, 291 KENNETH WEX LER lUniversiry of Celifornia, lrvinel A review of John R. Anderson’s Language, Memory, and Thought, 327 HERMAN H. J. KDLK (University off [imegen, The Netherlands) The linguistic interpretation of Broca’s aphasia. A reply to M.-L. Kean, 353

VDCm?@a Editorial,

1

MARY SUE AMMON and DAN I. SLOBIN (University of Californie, Berkeley) A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences, 3 ANTHONY F. JORM (Deekin University, Austr8lie) The cognitive and neurological basis of developmental review, 19

dyslexia:

A theoretical

framework

a&

HUGO VAN DER MOLEN and JOHN MORTON lMRCApp/ied Psychology Unit, Cambridge) Remembering plurals: Unit of coding and form of coding during serial recall, 35 ANNE CUTLER and JERRY A. FODOR (~8ss8chusett /nstitu.Ze of Technology1 Semantic focus and sentence comprehension, 49 JOHN KLOSEK (Gredwete Center, CUNY) Two unargued linguistic assumptions in Kean’s “phonnlogical”

interpretation

of agrammatism, 61

MARY-LOUISE KEAN (University of Celifornie, Irvine) Agrammatsim: A phonological deficit?, 69 HELEN GOODLUCK (University of Wisconsin, Medisonj M8ss8ChUSetts, Amherst) A reevaluation of the basic operations hypothesis, 85

and LAWRENCE

SOLAN

JERRY A. FODOR (M8S8chusetts Institute of Technology) In reply to Philip Johnson-Laird, 93 THOMAS R. SHULTZ, ARLENE DOVER and ERIC AMSEL lMcGi// University) The logical and empirical bases of conservation judgements, 99 ANAT NINIO (The Hebrew University, Jenrselem) Piaget’s theory of space perception in infancy, 125

(University

cf

Cumulative Contents

FRANCESCO ANTINUCCI (CNR, Rome), ALLESSANDRO DURANTI (University of Rome) and LUCYNA GEBERT lUniversity of Genoa) Relative clause strqcture, relative clause perception, and the change from SOV to SVO, 145 MARK S. SEIDENBERG (Columbia Univafsity) and LAURA A. PETITTO (New York UniVafsitY) Signing behavior in apes: A critical review, 177 STEVEN PINKER (Harvard University) Formal models of language learning, 217 TIMOTHY E. MOORE (Glendon Co/&e, York University) and IRVING BIEDERMAN lState University of New York) Speeded recognition of ungrammaticality : Double violations, 285 STEPHEN P. SCHWARTZ flthaca Col/ege) Natural kind terms, 301 ANNE ERREICH, JUDITH WINZEMER MAYER and VIRGINIA VALIAN (CUNY Graduate Centef) Languageacquisition hypotheses: A reply to Goodluck and Solan, 317 JOSE MORAIS, LUZCARY,JESUSALEGRIAandPAULBERTELSON iUniversitiLibredeBruxe/kw~ Does awarenessof speech as a sequenceof phones arise spontaneously?, 323 GUY WOODRUFF and DAVID PREMACK Wniversity of Pennsy/vanial Intentional communication in the chinlpanzee: The development of deception, 333 ,‘, LANGFORD and V. M. HOLMES (University of Melbourne) Syntactic presupposition in sentence -.amprehension, 363 L. JONATHAN COHEN (Oxford Univer&:yj On the psychology of prediction: Whose is the fallacy?, 385 DANIEL KAHNEMAN Wniversity of British CoJumbiaj and AMOS TVERSKY &anfofd Universityl On the interpretation of intuitive probability : A reply to Jonathan Cohen, 499 ANDREW W. ELLIS (Univwsity of Lancaster) Develapmental and acquired dyslexia: Some observations on Jorm (19791,413 ANTHONY F. JORM (Damkin Universityj The nature of the reading deficit in developmental dyslexia: A reply to Ellis, 421

Volume 8 WILLIAM MARSLENWILSON and LORRAINE KOMISARJEVSKY TYLER (Max-P&nck-fnstitut f6r Psycholinguistik, N&genj The temporal structure of spoken languageunderstanding, 1 JOHN R. ANDERSON fCarnt@e-Me//on University) On the merits of ACT and information-processing psychology: A response to Wexler’s reviaw, 73 L. JONATHAN COHEN (Oxford University) Whose is the fallacy? A rejoinder to Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, 89 MICHAELSTUDDERT-KENNEDY (QueensCollegeandGreduataCentar, CUNM Languageby hand and by eve. A review of Edward S. Klima and Urt!ula Bellugi’s, The Signs of Language,93 HERBERT H. CLARK and DALE H. SCHUNK &anford University) Polite rasponfasto polite raquasts, ii 11 LANCE J. RIPS (Univers?ty of Chicago,land WILLIAM TURNBULL l&non Fraser University) How big is big7 Relative and absolute properties in memory, 145 RHIANDN ALLEN (Tha Gmduata Center of CUNY) and ARTHUR S. REBER 43fooklynCollege of CUNY) Very long term manory for tacit knowledge, 175

Cognition

ANN M. PETERS (University of Hawaii) and ERAN ZAIDEL and Division of Biology, California Institute of Technology1

(University

353

of California, Los Angeles

The acquisition of homonymy, 187 ERIC WANNER (Sussex University) The ATN and the SausageMach ne: Which one is baloney?, 209 ELLEN M. MARKMAN,

MARJORIE

S. HORTON and ALEXANDER

G. McLANAHAFJ (Stanford

University)

Classes and collections: Principles of organization in the learning of hierarchical relations, 227 N. H. FREEMAN, S. LLOYD end C. G. SINHA (Department of Psychology, University of Bristol) Infant search tasks reveal early concepts of containment and canoi>ical usage of objects, 243 J. A. FODOR, M. F. GARRETT, E. C. T. WALKER and C. l-l. PAFIKES (Psycho!ogy Department, Mawhusetts

Institute of Technology)

Against definitions, 263 JOHN H. FLAVELL, SUSAN 3. SHIPSTEAD and KAREN CROFT (Stanford University) What young children think you see when their eyes are closed, 369 HENRY HAMBURGER INationalScience Foundation) A deletion ahead of its time, 389 JANET DEAN FODOR (Universityof Connecticut) and LYN FRAZIER (University of Massachusetts) Is the human sentence parsinjl mechanism an ATN?, 4’17

Volume 9 ULRIC NEISSER (Cornell University) John Dean’s memory : A case study, 1 MATTHEW HUGH ERDELYI and JUDY B. STEIN (Brooklyn College of CUNY) Recognition hypermnesia: The growth of recognition memory (d’l over time with repeated testing, 23 DANIEL N. OSHERSON Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and EDWARD E. SMITH (Stanford University and Bolt Beranek and Newman, Inc.) On the adequacy of prototype theory as a !neory of concepts, 35 GILLIAN COHEN (University of Oxford) Inferential reasoning in old age, 59 THOMAS H. CARR (Michigan State Univarsity) Building theories of reading ability: 3n the relation between individual differences in cognitive skills and reading comprehension, 73 ALFONSO CARAMAZZA, MICHAEL McCLOSKEY and BERT GREEN (The Johns Hopkins University) Nal’ve beliefs in “sophisticated” subjects: misconceptions about &ectories

N. R. IBBOTSON /Lambridge

Medical School)

and JOHN MORTCN

of objects, 117

ftl4.R.C. Applied Psychology

Unit, CambrIdge)

Rhythm dnd dominance, 125 J. A. FODDR l#asmchusetts Institute of Technology)

and Z. W. PY LYSHYN iUniversity of Weste, -

Onteriol

How direct is visual perception?: Some reflections on Gibson’s “Ecological Approach”, 139 KENJI HAKUTA fYa/e University) Grammatical description versus configurational arrangement in language aquisition: The cese of relative clausesin Japanese, 197 M. T. TURVEY &Jniversity of cbnnecticut, Sfvrrs, C4nnecticutand HaskinsLaboratories, Nev;Heven, Connecticut), R. E. SHAW (University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticutl, E. S. REED @eerier

CIrmulutive Contents

354

for ReseamtiinHuman Learning, Minneepolis. Minnesvta~ and W. M. MACE (Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut1 Ecological laws uf perceiving and acting: In reply to Fodor and Pylyshyn (19811,237 SUSAN KEEPER and DAVID THISSEN (University of Kansas) How polite?: A reply to Clark and Schunk, 395 HERBERT l-f. CLARK (Stanford University) and DALE H. SCHUNK Politeness in requests: A rejoinder to Kemper and Thissen, 311

(University of Houston)

Volume 10 Editorial, 1 TONY ADES &?rigMon. Englandl Time for a purge, 7 ALAN BADDELEY (MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge) The concept of ‘working memory: A view of its current state and probable future development, 17 SHEILA E. SLUMSTEiN i&own University) and KENNETH of T’hnc 3gy) Phcnatrc features and acoustic invariance in speech, 25

N. STEVENS

lMas.sacItusetts InstitMe

ALBERT S. BREGMAN (McGi// University) Chomrky without language, 33 JOAN BRESNAN ikkssachusetts Institute of Technology) An approach to universal grammar and the m#ental representation of language, 39 DONALD E. BROADBENT lUniversity of Oxford) Seieztive and control processes, 53 DAVID CAPLAN &%tawa Civic Hospital) Prospects for neurolinguistic theory, 59 ANNE CUTLER /University of Sussex) Making up materials is a confounded experiments at al in 1999?, 95

nuisance, or: Will we be able to run any psycholinguistic

JAMES E. CUTTING fComt#/ Universitv) Six tenets for event perception, 71 PETER 0. EIMAS (Brown University) Infants, speech, and language: A look at some connections, 79 GILLES FAUCGNMIER Wniversit~de Paris/ Pragmatic function; and mental spaces, 85 IRA FISCHLER Wniversity of Florida) Research of context effects in word recognition: Ten years back and forth, 89 MERRILL F. GARRETT Wssachusetts Institute of Technology) Objects of psycholinguistic enquiry, 97 LILA R. GLEiTMAN lllniversity ofPennsylvania Maturational determinants of language growth, 103 0. W. HAMLYN @irkbeck Q//age, University of London1 Cognitive systems, ‘folk psychology’, and knowledge, 115 ALICE F. HEALY IYak Unirerrty) cogcfiitkre processes in reading text, 119 JULfAN HOCHBERG ICo/umbia University) Or3 cognition in perception: Perceptual coupling and unconscious inference, 127 MARC JEANNEROD fl,/V.S,E.R.M., Lyon) Specialized channels for cognitive responses, 135

Ciqfnition 355

PHILIP N. JOHNSON-LAIRD fUniversity of Sussex) Cognition, computers, and mental models, 139 JOHN JONIDES and DAVID Capturing attention, 145

E. IRWIN

lUniversity of Michigan)

ANNETTE KARMILOFF-SMITH (Sussex University and Max-Plan&-lnstitut Getting developmental differences or studying child cevelopment?, 151

fiir Psycholinguistik)

FRANK KEI L (Cornell University) Children’s thinking: What never develops?, I59 WILLIAM KESSEN (Yale University/ Early settlements in New Cognition,

I67

STEPHEN MICHAEL KOSSLYN fBrandeis University) Research on mental imagery: Some goals and directions, I73 JONAS LANGER (University of California, Berkeley) Logic in infancy, 181 WI LLEM J. M. LEVELT Dg& vu?, 187

(Max-PAanck-lnstitut

for Psycholinguistikl

ELIZABETH F. LOFTUS Wniversity of Washingron) Natural and unnatural cognition, 1!33 H. CHRISTOPHER LONGUET-HIGGINS (Universityofsussex) Artificial intelligence - a new theoretical psychology?, 197 DAVID McNElLL (Universiry of Chicago) Action, thought and language, 201 JOHN C. MARSHALL and FREDA NEWCOMBE {The Radcliffe lnfirmary, Lexical access: A perspective from pathology, 209

Oxford)

GEORGE A. MILLER {Princeton University) Trends and debates in cognitive psychology, 215 JOHN MORTON lMf?C Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge) Will cognition survive?, 227 DONALD A. NORMAN and DAVlD E. RUMELHART (University of California, San Diego) The LNR approach to human information processing, 235 DANIEL N. OSHERSON hllassachusetts institute of Technology) Modularity as an issue for cognitive science, 241 STEVEN PINKER (Harvard University) What spatial representation and language acquisition don’t have in common, 243 DAVID 8. PI SON I (Indiana University) Some current theoretical issues in speech perception, 249 MICHAEL I. POSidcR (University of Oregon) Cognition and neural systems, 261 ZENON W. PY LYSHYN Wniversiry of Western Ontariol Psychological explanations and knowledge-dependent

processes, 267

DAN I, S LO8 I N (University of California, Berkeley) Psychology without linguistics = language without grammar, 275 DAN SPEREER 1C.N. R.S. and Universith London) Pragmatic% 281

de Paris) and DEIRDRE

JOHN E. R. STADDON (Duke Universifyl Cognition in animals: Learning as program assembly, 287 SIDNEY STRAUSS (Ttrl Aviv University) Cognitive development in school and out, 295

WILSON

(UniversitY

Cole,

Cumuhtive

356

Con

tents

MICHAEL STUDDERT-KENNEDY (Gueens College and Graduate Center, CUNY and Haskins Labontories! The emergence of phonetic structure, 301 DAVID SWINNEY (Tufts University) The prmsof language comprehension; an approach to examining issues in cognition and language, 307 MICHAEL T. TURVEY (University of Connecticutandlfaskins Nhhersity of Connecticud Cognition: The view from ecological realism, 313

Laboratories) and CLAUDIA

VIRGINIA VALIAN (Columbia University) Linguistic knowledge and language acquisition, 323 MICHAEL J. WATKINS (Rice University) H!~man memory and th information-processing

metaphor, 331

YORICK WILKS (Univershy of Essexj A position note on natural language understanding and artificial intelligence, 337

CARE LLO