JCL Monograph Series NO.13 专著系列 13 卷 – 1999

Abstract 摘要
Half a century ago, psychologists hardly discussed the issue of language study; instead, they talked about verbal learning and verbal behavior from the associative perspective. The cognitive revolution in the 60’s had given birth to an exciting new interdisciplinary perspective, in which psychologists and linguists were brought together to ask the same questions regarding the nature of human mind. They had developed complementary and potentially synergistic methods of inquiry into the biological bases of language. Indeed, convincing evidence had also quickly accumulated to show that such an interdisciplinary endeavor resulted in fruitful conceptualization of the relationship between cerebral organization and various language functions.

In December of 1993, a group of researchers, consisting of cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, and speech scientists, participated in a symposium, which was held in the Grand Hotel of Taipei, to discuss the biological bases of language from the perspective of Chinese language. The Chinese language has what may be the simplest and most austere grammatical system in the world. While most of the world’s languages offer a wealth of different markers on nouns, pronouns, adjectives and /or verbs, Chinese has essentially no verb conjugations and no noun declensions of any kind. Furthermore, although the Chinese grammar does provide for a set of standard word orders, it is also the case that word order can be varies in a number of ways if the speaker wants to emphasize one element more than another. These properties of Chinese grammar raise some fascinating questions concerning the interaction of language-specific features and language uses with respect to various cognitive functions.

In his well-articulated paper, Alvin Liberman set the path for the symposium participants to follow: Is there a linguistic mode (i.e., a specifically linguistic way of doing things) at the level of action and perception? He contrasts the horizontal theory of speech against the vertical theory, and he asks seven questions concerning the organized components of the larger specification for language. He carefully considers how each theory would answer these seven questions and concludes that only the vertical view is appropriate for linguistic processing from a biological point of view.

If one takes the position that speech is special in its linguistic operation, then how script is mapped onto it becomes critical because the view would require that uncovering the special speech code is critical for beginning readers in mastering reading skills. Indeed, in contemporary research on alphabetic reading acquisition, the notion of “phonological awareness” has been a cornerstone in the theoretical construction. In this respect, one should examine the acquisition process of children learning to read the Chinese writing system, which is logographic in nature and thus notorious for its opaque script/speech relationship. Bertelson, Chen, Tseng and Ko carried out a comparative study on this particular problem and they concluded that their results created strong difficulties for the current tendency to minimize differences between the process of word identification involved in Chinese vs. alphabetic reading. Using data from bilingual (Chinese/Dutch) studies, Beatrice de Gelder proposes several alternatives for the relation between phonological awareness and speech processing.

But what is the unit of Chinese word recognition? Characters are orthographic units, which are separated from other writing units by spaces at both sides. Words, on the other hand, are linguistic units, which are listed as an entry in the lexicon with its syntactic, semantic, and phonological information. There have been many contradictory reports in Chinese word recognition and the reason may lie in the inconsistency between Characters and words as unit of perception and reading. Using special experimental paradigms, Hung, Tzeng, and Ho were able to show words were more salient than characters in Chinese word recognition. Such a finding supports the hypothesis that word recognitions mediated by morpheme construction in Chinese. It is important to note that reading a logographic script, such as the one represented by the visually distinctive characters, taps the underlying speech segments and uncovering the effects of the script/speech mapping should give clues to the discussion of the biological foundation of language.

To find out how early childhood experience in acquiring a visually based language (i.e. sign language used among the deaf) modified learners’ perceptual categorization ability in the relevant domains, three experiments were carried out by Klima, Tzeng, Fok, Bellugi, Corina and Bettger with special stimulus displays. That is, stimulus characters were presented one at a time as a continuous dynamic point-light display of movement. It was found that native deaf signers showed superior performance in the reconstruction of the original target. Such an enhanced ability suggests a greater neuronal plasticity in the human brain.

Contemporary discussion of the biological foundation of human language has to deal with the touchy issue of innateness under the theoretical conceptualization of Universal Grammar and modularity. As cogently pointed out in Tai’s paper, “The issue at stake is whether there is a language-specific faculty in our brain/mind that is modularized and independent of other cognitive abilities of human beings. Or, can language faculty be derived from human’s perceptual and general cognitive categories, memory capacity, processing strategies, and conversational structures between hearer and speaker? In other words, the issue centers around whether or to what extent Chomsky’s ‘innateness hypothesis’ is necessary for explaining patterns of human language.”

Tai’s own position on the issue of innateness is quite clear. His careful examinations of the spatial and temporal expressions in the Chinese language let him to conclude that its grammar is, to a great extent, not arbitrary and not autonomous from human’s conceptualization of the physical world. He is able to show that the three important cognitive bases (namely, space and time, categorization, and iconicity) play an important role in Chinese grammar. Kess and Miyamoto reach a similar conclusion based up results obtained from several different popular paradigms, namely, sentence processing in left-branching vs. right-branching language (i.e. English vs. Japanese. Respectively), the reaccessibility of empty categories, and syntactic comprehension impairments exhibited by Japanese aphasics. Indeed, the results suggest that the informative strategies in natural language processing are language-specific and such language-specific differences demand a processing model that would allow for variability rather than absolute uniformity.

The theme of language-specific property is picked up again in Lien and Wang’s paper, in which the unique problem of shape classifiers in Mandarin and Taiwanese is critically examined from a psycholinguistic perspective. The point is clear: Specific language features are essential keys to the discussion of Universal Grammar and learnability.

Ogura’s paper deals with a much profound aspect of the language change. Instead of the much-studied phonological change, she makes a courageous attempt to uncover the universal property of semantic change. It was certainly not an easy job because out understanding of word meaning is much obscure and little orderly knowledge, such as that observed in the case of phonological change, is available. Orgura examined how word frequency and environmental factors act together to determine the leaders and laggers in the metaphoric transfer of sensory terms in English, Japanese and Chinese, and in the development of speech act verbs in English and Japanese and modal auxiliaries in English.

These are all the papers included in the monograph. Together, they highlighted the importance of looking at biological bases of language from the Chinese language perspective. Authors of all these papers make great contributions for our scientific understanding of language processing. They deserve our applause. But for me personally, I thank their patience.