intensity 5, 12; see also intonation
intonation 4, 12, 36, 119, 136; see also
prosody
irony 119
irregularity, of spelling 165-6, 168-9, 171,
184, 195
Irwin, David 174
Italian 13, 86, 227, 229
Jabberwocky 117
James, William 153
Japanese 25,86,11.2,162-3,169,173-4
Javanese 50
Johnson-Laird, Philip 125
Jones, Sir William 227
Jordan, Michael 212
Jusczyk, Peter 17, 22
kanji 163
katakana 162
knotted cord 230
Kuhl, Patricia 28
Kutas, Marta 111
language, evolution of 226
Latin 227
learnability 44, 48
letter-naming 199, 201-2
Levelt, Willem 157-8
lexical access 5, 7, 68-77, 8(}-2
acoustic mismatch 73-7
see also mental lexicon
lexical decision 71, 73, 79
lexical entry 77-8
activation of 177
see also lexical access
lexical search, see lexical access
Liberman, Alvin 24
linguistics 3-4, 99-100, 116
literacy 178-9
Lithuanian 227
logogram 54, 163, 169, 174
look-and-say 165
loudness 12, 141
MacDonald, Janet 23
Malay 230
Markman, Ellen 38
Marslen-Wilson, William 61, 69-70, 72-3,
75
Mashtots, Mesrop 231
Maynard Smith, John 160
McConkie, George 175
meaning 33-4, 66-7, 69, 71, 73, 77-81,
87,97-100,102,117-37,184,188-9,
205
acquisition of 36-41
in neural networks 218-19
of words 124-2
of written words 166, 170-3, 178
Mehler, Jacques 13-15, 17-18, 57
melody 157
memory 126, 129
mental lexicon 22, 64, 68, 71, 78, 80, 87
access code 55-61, 63
see also lexical access
mental model 126-31, 136, 140, 142
mental representation 99-100, 129
Meyer, Antje 158
migration 227
Miller, James D. 28
Miller, Joanne 30
mind 121
Mongolian 227
monkeys, Macaque 31
Morais, Jose 179
Morgan, James 48-50
morpheme 66
morphology 66-8, 88
Morton, John 70
Nahuatl 230
Naigles, Letitia 40
Nakhi 231
naming deficits 187-9
neural activity 120-2, 127-9, 134-5,
145-7,153,155,158,168,173,205
neural circuitry 7(1-1, 77, 81, 120, 152-5,
188, 201
neural connection 120, 146, 155, 188, 206
neural network 207-18
coding sequential structure 211-13
copy neurons 212
learning in 210-11
neuron 120, 205-7
New Guinea 229
non-nutritive sucking 5-6, 13, 15
North American Indian 227
noun 36-7,39,40-1,45,86
object 43, 86, 146
Olson, Richard 200
optimum viewing position 177
O'Regan, Kevin 177
Oxford English Dictionary 65, 76, 80, 119
papyrus 160
past tense 51, 67
pause 156-7
Pavlov 121, 135
Philippines 52
phoneme 23, 25-6, 56, 60, 63, 74, 87, 149,
152, 154-5, 162, 179, 230; see also
categorical perception
phonics 165-6, 170
phonological skill 198
phonology 194
pictogram 231
picture naming 158
pidgin 52
pigeon 38
Pinker, Steven 45, 47, 51
pinyin 162
pitch 4, 11-12, 48, 141, 162; see also
intonation
Plato 179
plausibility 89, 97, 110
plural 67, 230
Portugal 52
predictability 132-6, 172, 177
prediction 133-5, 168, 169, 219-21
in neural networks 214-18
prefix 66, 151
preposition 86, 88, 114
prepositional phrase 86, 114
priming 6, 7, 71-2, 74, 157-8
cross-modal 7, 72-3, 78, 81
production 139-59
deficits of 189-92
Prometheus 179
pronoun 104-8
reflexive 105-7
pronunciation 76-7, 168
prosody 12, 15-16, 19-21, 48-50, 97-9,
141
Quechua 230
question 108-12, 143
queue, mental 147, 150, 152-5, 157
rat 38
Rayner, Keith 175-6
reading 156-7, 164-78
see also dyslexia, developmental
recognition, of words 69-71, 73-4, 134
reference 104, 124, 130-1, 144, 161
relative clause 94-5, 104, 109
rhyme 179
rhythm 5, 12, 20, 52-3, 56-8, 157; see also
intonation
time 200
role assignment 87-9, 97, 101, 103,
107-16,128,219-20
Romany 228
rule, linguistic 42-3, 51, 75-7, 223
Rumelhart, David 211
Russian 13
saccade 173-4
Samoan 50
Sanskrit 227-8
sarcasm 119
Schriefers, Herbert 158
sclera 95
Semitic languages 67
sentence 85, 87, 103, 113, 123, 131
Sequoyah 231
shadowing 70
Shillcock, Richard 7, 81
sight vocabulary 166-7, 198-200
sign language 16, 52, 104
silence 119
Socrates 179
sounding out 165, 195
Spanish 86, 227
speaking, see production
speech errors 144-5, 147-51
exchanges 147-51, 154
like-for-like constraint 151, 154
speech rate 30-1, 154
spelling errors 198; see also dysgraphia
Spooner, Reverend William 144, 149
stages, in production 149, 150-2
stem 66-7, 149
stress 12, 57, 98-9
stroke 182, 194
stutter 203
subject 43, 45, 86-7, 145
subvocalization 172
suffix 66-7
Summerfield, Quentin 29
Swinney, David 78-9
syllabary 162-3, 169, 174, 178, 231
syllable 12, 17-19, 21, 48, 52, 56-63, 141,
150,152,154-5,162-3,168,179,
200, 230
syllable-monitoring 58, 62
synaptogenesis 35, 47
syntactic category 43, 80, 99, 216-17
syntactic complexity 93, 100
Tagalog 66
Tanenhaus, Michael 79-80, 110- 11
tense 43, 92, 148
Thai 25-6, 230
Thatcher, Margaret 141, 143-4
thought 121
Treiman, Rebecca 200
Turkish 42, 86, 112, 227
Uralic languages 227
van Orden, Guy 171
van Turennout, Miranda 158
verb 37, 39-41, 45, 86-7, 96, 115
vocabulary
rate of learning 34-5, 119
size 54
vocal fold vibration 11, 23-5, 150
vocal organs 119
vocal tract 59
voice onset time 23-5, 29-30, 74, 150, 152
>
vowel 19, 28, 67; see also co-articulation
Warren, Paul 61
Welsh 86, 227
whole-word method 165-7, 170
Williams, Ronald 211
Wodehouse, P. G. 203
word blindness 187
word deafness 186
word-monitoring 70
word order 42, 52, 86, 145
words, see lexical access, morphology,
vocabulary
writing systems 160-3, 166, 178
Zwitserlood, Pienie 72-3, 79
1 The square brackets mean that the item they enclose should be taken to be a sound (or sequence of sounds)-'pat' would refer to an actual word, while [pat] would refer to the corresponding sounds.
2 There is a convention to refer to phonemes by enclosing the appropriate symbol in slashes. Just as one can distinguish between a word and the sound of that word, so one can distinguish between a phoneme (e.g. /p/), and the sound of that phoneme (e.g. [p1).
' The first word could be 'time', as measured by a watch, or 'time' as in 'time that athlete', or 'thyme' (the herb) if spoken. 'Flies' could be what a plane does, or it could be an insect, or the zipper on a trouser (in British English). A native ofJapan, who would not distinguish between /1/ and /r/ (see Chapter 3) could interpret the spoken fomi of'flies' as 'fries' (which are either potato chips or the way you cook chips). 'Time flies' could be a kind of fly, a command, a new kind of zipper (similar in principle to a 'time lock'), or a subject and its verb. 'Like' could be what fruit flies think of bananas, or it could mean 'in the same way as' ('watch him like a hawk'). 'Arrow' could be the thing that is shot from a bow, or the thing that directs you in one direction or another. And there must be at least one person called Ann Arrow somewhere in the world. And should you 'watch him like a hawk would' or 'watch him like you'd watch a hawk'? Combine these possibilities together in all the different ways that the grammar of English permits, and you end up with more than 50 different interpretations (more than 80 if you are Japanese). It does not stop there - anything following 'a' or 'an' could refer to a specific thing, or any example of that thing ('he's looking for a book' could mean any book would do, or that he is looking for a specific one). Finally, the spoken version could even be understood as 'time flies like a narrow ...' and 'time flies liken arrow(s to ...)', giving a total of around 180 different interpretations.
° This example is borrowed, with thanks, from Alan Gamham, a psycholinguist working on aspects of text understanding.
5 This sketching-out framework owes much to Merrill Garrett, now at the University of Arizona, and subsequently Gary Dell, at the University of Illinois. Almost all contemporary models of speech production borrow something from their work.
' William James described this same idea in 1890 in his two-volume work Principles of Psychology.
' Letters in upper case will be used here to transcribe written words. Words in quotes (e.g. 'dog') will generally refer, for the purposes of this chapter, to the spoken form of the word. Letters in slashes (e.g. /d/) refer to phonemes, as before.
Table of Contents
In the beginning
1: Looking towards Babel
2: Babies, birth, and language
3: Chinchillas do it too
4: Words, and what we learn to do with them
5: Organizing the dictionary
6: Words, and how we (eventually) find them
7: Time flies like an arrow
8: Who did what, and to whom?
9: On the meaning of meaning
10: Exercising the vocal organs
11: The written word
12: When it all goes wrong
13: Wiring-up a brain
14: The descent from Babel
Bibliography
Index
_link_
The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind, and Understanding Page 31