Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [351]
The universality does not, of course, involve grammar and vocabulary; in those respects English, Swahili, and Basque, for instance, have nothing in common. Yet children who grow up hearing each of those languages recognize, without being taught, the difference between singular and plural forms of a noun, the verb forms that denote present and past, and so on, and construct for themselves the rules governing their language. Similarly, they intuit the basic rules governing word order and are able to construct simple declarative sentences made up of words in the proper sequence. No child of English-speaking parents ever says, “Milk more some want I,” nor does a child of parents who speak any other language get its basic word order wrong.
Psychology had little relationship to linguistics before midcentury, but in the dawn of the cognitive revolution some cognitive psychologists and linguists dimly saw that new developments in each of their disciplines called for explanations by the other one. For instance, certain new theories of the linguists about how grammar works implied that the mind, when dealing with concepts, performs complex manipulations that are not accounted for by behaviorist psychology. In 1953, a number of psychologists and linguists held a conference at Cornell University, discussed their areas of common interest, and adopted the term “psycholinguistics” to designate the study of the psychology of language.
Psycholinguistics was still a little-known discipline when, four years later, a twenty-nine-year-old member of the Harvard Society of Fellows published a monograph that thrust the subject into the limelight. The theory proposed in that monograph has been called one of the two most important developments in psychology in that era (the other being artificial intelligence).58 Its author was Noam Chomsky, some of whose ideas we heard about earlier.
Chomsky, a shaggy-haired, bespectacled, rumpled genius—the Central Casting stereotype of an intellectual—very nearly did not become a psycholinguist.59 He grew up during the Depression years in the radical Jewish community of New York; his father, however, was a distinguished Hebrew scholar, and even as a youth Chomsky picked up some knowledge of the structure of the Semitic languages and some idea of what linguistics was about. These two themes, radical politics and language, have dominated his life ever since. His work in linguistics, the basis of his renown in cognitive psychology, came about when he met Zellig Harris, a professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Harris, who got him excited about linguistics, was trying to develop a system based on behaviorist principles—a system that could account for language patterns without reference to meaning. But his scheme was flawed, and for some years Chomsky labored diligently in the effort to make it work. When he could not, he abandoned Harris’s theory and within two years had developed his own. It is ironic that Chomsky is a leftist; the central thesis of his theory, advanced in his monograph Syntactic Structures, is that certain aspects of linguistic knowledge and ability are innate, not learned, a doctrine that leftists, liberals, and behaviorist-trained psychologists considered mentalistic and reactionary.
The child, Chomsky maintained, makes sense of heard speech and acquires language not by means of the grammar of the language (“surface grammar,” in his terminology) but by an inherent ability to recognize deep-lying syntactical relationships among the component phrases of the heard sentence—what he calls the “deep structure” of the underlying connections. As evidence he points to the ease with which children understand what is meant when one form of sentence