The Ascent of Babel
The Ascent of Babel
An Exploration of Language, Mind,
and Understanding
Gerry T. M. Altmann
Illustrations by
Andrea Enzinger
Oxford New York Tokyo
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1997
Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dares Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan
Oxford is a trade mark of Oxford University Press Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York G. Altmann (text), A. Enzinger (illustrations), 1997
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ISBN 0 19 852378 5 Typeset by Footnote Graphics, Warminster, Wilts Printed in Great Britain by Bookcraft Ltd., Midsomer Norton, Avon
for Sam
Preface
Most people I meet stop to think about language for no longer than it takes them to notice that the instructions on how to program their CDplayer have been written in a language that defies understanding. They care more about how their CD-player should work than how their language actually works. When I started writing this book I wanted to rise to what I saw as a challenge: to write the equivalent of a manual that would explain not the insides of a CD-player, and how it turns thousands of little indentations on the surface of the CD into sound, but the insides of the human mind, and how it turns thousands of little vibrations on the surface of the ear-drum into meaning. The difference is, CD-players are simple, even if their instruction manuals are not. Minds are complex, and they do not come with instructions. That, of course, is what makes them so challenging, and so exciting.
I wanted to write this book so that it would be readable by nonspecialists. I wanted to convey to them the excitement and challenge of psycholinguistics-the study of how the mind turns language into meaning, and back again. I am mindful of the preface to Doris Lessing's The golden notebook, where she invites the reader to skip as much of the book as is necessary in order to maintain interest. The reader of this book should also skip as necessary. Or at least, skip any chapters that seem less interesting. The first chapter, `Looking towards Babel', is an attempt to convey the excitement of psycholinguistics, and the mysteries that are on offer. Probably, it should not be skipped, except in emergency. The other chapters fill in the details. I have written each chapter so that it is self-contained, although occasional pointers are given, both forwards and backwards, if there is relevant material in other chapters. Inevitably, because different chapters are about different topics, some may seem, to different readers, more interesting than others.
I have also written this book for my students, who are a good example of a non-specialist, although admittedly captive, audience. Many students find psycholinguistics a mysterious and impenetrable subject. So I have designed this book so that it could in principle accompany the kinds of psycholinguistic courses they may take. It is not written like a textbook (nor is it written in textbook-speak). There are no references in the text, just at the end, in the chapter-by-chapter bibliography. There are pointers there to general non-specialist reading matter and, separately, to the academic articles that contain the original material I have described in the main text. I have tested out the manuscript when teaching both introductory and advanced courses (as a supplementary text), and am grateful for the positive feedback I received.
I have been necessarily selective with the material I have chosen to describe. It is impossible to write a single comprehensive chapter on topics which deservedly fill entire shelves (and more) in our academic libraries. I have, however, attempted to identify the current issues and the state-of-the-art. Some of the chapters inevitably reflect my own interpretation of that state-of-the-art. The chapter on meaning, for example (my personal favourite), contains a very different perspective on that topic than the one to be found in the psycholinguistic textbooks. That is primarily because the textbooks borrow heavily from work in logic, philosophy, and linguistics. I doubt very much that the human mind should be described using logical formulae, philosophical speculations, or linguistic idealizations. Instead, I have borrowed from insights that have been developed in the field of artificial neural networks-computer-simulated systems that bear some superficial resemblance to the simplest workings of interconnecting neurons. The penultimate chapter, `Wiring-up a brain', reflects these insights quite explicitly. The final sections in that chapter are pure speculation on my part. But where the material is speculative, I have said so.
There are, inevitably, a whole host of people without whom this book would not have been written. First and foremost, my psycholinguistic colleagues who have made the field what it is, and provided the raw materials that I have worked with here. My more immediate colleagues, at the Universities of Sussex (where I worked until Chapter 9) and York (Chapter 10 onwards) provided much support and encouragement, as well as useful advice. The first four chapters were in fact written whilst I was on sabbatical at the Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne, Australia. Chapters 7 and 8, as well as the final draft, were written whilst I was a visiting scientist (on two separate occasions) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Both places provided a rich environment within which to think about the issues I was writing about.
Various chapters have been tested out on different people (not just my students), and I should like to thank them for their valuable comments. And many other people responded to requests for further information, or made useful suggestions. They are: Simon Altmann, Edith Bavin, Heike Behrens, Holly Branigan, David Caplan, Rachel Clifton, Stephen Crain, Anne Cutler, Zoltan Dienes, Andrew Ellis, Caroline Gale, Alan Garnham, Simon Garrod, Esther Grabe, Geoffrey Hall, Shaun Hellman, Glynn Humphries, Matt Lambon Ralph, Peter Jusczyk, Willem Levelt, William Marslen-Wilson, Joanne Miller, Jane Oakhill, Gavin Phillips, Philip Quinlan, Ardi Roelofs, Eleanor Saffran, Dan Slobin, Maggie Snowling, Lesley Stirling, Michael Tanenhaus, Ian Walker, and, of course, everyone at Oxford University Press. Andrea Enzinger's creativity kept us smiling.
Finally, there are a number of psycholinguists (some were on that list, some were not) who have, over the years, played a significant part in my own psycholinguistic upbringing. They have inspired me through the psycholinguistics they did
, their enthusiasm, or simply their personal encouragement and friendship. I consider myself fortunate to know them. But even more fortunate to know Sue, and of course Sam.
September, 1996 G.T.M.A.
Contents
In the beginning xi
On the nature of the ascent
1: Looking towards Babel 1
Introducing the mysteries ofpsycholinguistics
2: Babies, birth, and language 10
What babies learn about language, even before they are born
3: Chinchillas do it too 22
Learning to discriminate between different sounds
4: Words, and what we learn to do with them 32
Learning about words, and how to combine them
5: Organizing the dictionary 54
Phonemes, syllables, and other ways of looking up words
6: Words, and how we (eventually) find them 65
Accessing the mental representations of words
7: Time flies like an arrow 84
Understanding sentences I: coping with ambiguity
8: Who did what, and to whom? 102
Understanding sentences II: identifying who is being talked about, what they are doing, and who they are doing it to
9: On the meaning of meaning 117
The concepts associated with `understanding' and `meaning'
10: Exercising the vocal organs 139
How we produce words and sentences
11: The written word 160
Writing systems, reading, eye movements, and Socrates
12: When it all goes wrong 181
Disorders of language
13: Wiring-up a brain 205
Artificial brains and language learning
14: The descent from Babel 226
Not all languages were created equal
Bibliography 234
Index 253
In the beginning
According to Biblical legend, God saw that the people of Earth were building a tower in order that they might reach His Heaven. To prevent this, He spread chaos and confusion amongst them. He scattered them throughout the Earth, and forced on them different languages so that they would be prevented from communicating with one another and building another Babel.
Stories such as this caused the tower at Babel (there really was such a tower) to symbolize not just the origins and diversity of the world's many languages, but language itself. The ascent of Babel symbolizes something else. In part, it symbolizes a quest, not for a glimpse of Heaven, but for a glimpse of those facets of the human mind that enable us to produce and understand language. But it also symbolizes the progression that we each undergo, from birth onwards, as we learn our own mother tongue. As babies and infants we play at the base of the tower. As adults, we stand at its summit. And when we hear a language, the sounds of that language enter our ears and evoke an ascent of yet another kind-the progression from sound to meaning. And when we study language, we discover that, like the tower at Babel, it is built upwards, with one structure resting on another, and another. The foundations of that structure are cast in sound. The summit of that structure is cast in meaning. And in between are syllables, words, and sentences.
In the chapters that follow, we shall attempt the psycholinguistic ascent-to understand better the mental processes that underlie our use of language. The first few chapters are structured according to the infant's ascent from the in utero world of the unborn baby, and what can be learned even there, to what older infants have to learn so that they can pick up the rudiments of a vocabulary and the rudiments of a grammar with which to use it. From Chapter 5 onwards, we leave behind, temporarily, what has to be learned, and examine how a vocabulary can reside in the mental structures of the brain. We go on to consider the conventions we share that enable us to convey meaning, not simply with individual words, but with those words ordered in particular ways. We explore the nature of grammar-what it is good for, and what it is not. We then examine the nature of language understanding, and what that involves. In Chapter 9, we reach a plateau, as we explore what understanding actually is-what meaning is, and how it can reside not just in the mental structures, but also in the neural structures of the brain.
Extracting meaning from language as we listen to it is only half the story-we also convey meaning as we speak it. How we do that is the subject of Chapter 10. After that, we consider language not as it is spoken, but as it is written. Finally, in Chapters 12 and 13 we consider brains (again): what happens to language when real brains go wrong, and what happens with language when artificial, computer-simulated, brains go right. Chapter 14 is mercifully short, on the evolution and diversification of human language. We end our ascent with a final view from Babel-a look at the true significance of language.
So where, amongst all of this, shall we discover Babel's summit? Perhaps surprisingly, its summit lies at its foundations, amongst the chaos and confusion of the infant's first steps up through Babel. There lies the secret of language, and there can be found the key that unlocks the final mystery. For that mystery, as we shall discover, is not about language, but about learning. About how babies learn. About how children learn. And most of all, about how brains learn. But that is for later. First, and before we even start our ascent, we need to understand better the nature of the mysteries that await us on Babel's slopes.
Looking towards Babel
Someone once said that a good title for a book about language would be Teach your dog to talk. It has all the ingredients necessary for instant mass appeal; dogs are popular, and teaching them to do just about anything at all is a challenge. So teaching a dog to talk would really be something. The title would convey instant mystery; how could anyone teach a dog to do that? The trouble is, another title that would be at least as appealing would be Teach your dog to juggle. Who really cares about talking? We all manage pretty well at it, without even being taught how to do it. So a whole book about talking, and how we do it, sounds about as interesting as an entire book on walking, and how we do that. Juggling, on the other hand, is something else.
Language, unlike juggling, is a human faculty that we take for granted, like having two legs, two arms, one head. Nobody taught us to have two legs, just as no one taught us to listen, to understand, to make sense of a whole jumble of sounds. Imagine what it must be like, worldwide, for the 180 or so babies born each minute to suddenly hear such a cacophony of noise. Obstetricians say that the reason a newborn baby cries when naked is that it is cold. It has never felt that before. It has never seen bright lights. It has never heard the sound of a human voice, the sound of its own voice, a dog's bark, the cars outside, the aeroplane overhead. And yet somehow, it manages to make sense of the different sounds it hears; it learns to hear patterns in those sounds, and associate meanings with those patterns, and even produce new patterns itself. It learns to communicate. As adults, we carry around knowledge about tens of thousands of different words: what they mean, how they should be spelled, how they sound, how to move the muscles in the lips and tongue to pronounce them, how to join them up to form sentences; in short, how to use them. As infants, we acquire that knowledge. How? No one questions that incredible feat. But learning to juggle, that really is something, apparently, to write home about.
We take our ability as a species to speak and hear (and understand) so much for granted that, more often than not, we fail to see the real mystery surrounding how we manage to do this. How is all that information about all those words stored in the brain? How do we use that information? We can hardly open up a brain like a book and look up the words in the same way that we thumb through a dictionary. Even using a simple dictionary that you can thumb through involves knowledge about the way the dictionary is organized, the nature of the alphabet, the shapes of individual letters, and so on. So if we could thumb through a brain, and look up the information that it contains, where would all this other knowledge, about how to use the braindictionary, be? And wherever it is, where did it come from?
&n
bsp; We rarely appreciate how overworked our babies are; they have to do much more than just use their brain-dictionaries, they have to create them in the first place, and figure out a way of using them. And who helps them? Making sense of the spoken language we provide them with is hardly an easy task. Speech is quite unlike writing. Its words are quite different:
therearenospacesbetweenthembutthatisprobablytheleastoftheproblems.
The majority of the spoken language that we hear around us is one long continuous, changing sound just listen to someone speaking a language you have never heard before. Basically, language is a nightmare. Yes, da Vinci and Einstein were clever, but your average baby is not that far behind.
So the mystery is there, and like any mystery, it has its fair share of intrigue, excitement, discovery, argument, and counter-argument. Just as cosmologists and quantum physicists search for a unified theory of the universe, so psycholinguists search for a unified theory of how we produce and understand language. The scientific methods used in their search can be just as rigorous and scientific, and the theories just as plausible (or implausible). The excitement is just as great. When scientists discovered that the background radiation in the universe was not uniform, but had ripples in it (much like ripples in water), it made front page news in many of the world's major newspapers; the excitement this news generated arose because it told us something about how the universe was constructed. That knowledge alone was worth telling to the world. And yet, language, like ripples in the radiation bathing the universe, can tell us something about the mind, and how it is constructed. At the end of the day, it comes down to simple aesthetics; you may be excited by the mysteries of the cosmos, or the mysteries of the mind. Psycholinguists are excited by the mysteries of language.
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