Psychological Reality

The question o f the nature o f evidence has been often highlighted in terms o f

psychological reality (Chomsky 1980). By hypothesis, I-language in our minds is primarily an object with a psychological reality. A piece o f evidence is psychologically real when it is “true”. Psychological reality (or unreality) o f phonological and morphological processes has attracted wide interest and generated a large volume o f literature in the debate over the gap between derivational theories and their psychological evidence. Most o f these studies aim to test the question o f whether speakers have internalized knowledge o f phonological processes as part o f their ‘competence’ to test the implicit assumption that speakers have the rules in question stored in their minds. Consequently, hypothesized productive rules have been put to the test in various psycholinguistic experiments, (e.g. Zimmer 1969; Hsieh 1970, 1976; Hale, Bresnan and Miller 1978; Linell 1979; Hayes, 1990; Lima, Corrigan and Iverson 1994; Tsay and Myers 1996, among others). Apart from Berko’s (1958) study which has provided support for the psychological reality o f Enghsh plural formation, most o f the results o f psycholinguistic experiments have shown that at least some supposedly productive rules lack psychological reality. The arguments have been concerned not

Chapter 5 - Psycholinguistic Issues

only with the data themselves but largely with the interpretation o f the data and implications for the theory o f generative phonology/morphology that these results reflect speaker’s ‘performance’ rather than ‘competence’. A well-attested example is the phonological process o f Taiwanese Tone Sandhi. It has been argued that this is an epiphenomenon o f morpheme alternants in the lexicon rather than a set o f ‘psychologically real’ rules o f grammar (Hsieh 1970, 1976; Tsay and Myers 1996). It is certainly true that tiie output o f the grammar is not entirely free from other behavioral and circumstantial factors as well as some extra-grammatical knowledge. Competence/performance tension has always been a concomitant o f I-linguistic experiments testing the postulated productive rule. Nevertheless, the only way to offer a synchronic account o f rdk is to conduct an I-linguistic investigation to see to whether rdk is a part o f psychologically real grammar.

As we have seen in the earlier chapters, the E-linguistic description o f rdk clearly shows that it is not a ‘unitary’ phonological process. It is widely irregular due to a number o f conditions. Furthermore, there are different occasions in which rdk is taught explicitly or implicitly to the learner o f Japanese. Otherwise, most native speakers seem largely unconscious or uncertain about their knowledge o f rdk yet some others seem to have a vague rdk-handling strategy. For instance, the researcher’s own judgment about non-existent forms like ori-kami and yaki-zoba (in contrast with ori-gami and

yaki-soba) would be that ori-kami is a perfectly acceptable, possible, well-formed compound while yaki-zoba is almost certainly unacceptable, impossible and ill-formed. When it comes to a pair like kutu-himo (‘shoelaces’) vs. kutu-bimo, where the former is the existing form, a judgment becomes fuzzier: kutu-bimo is judged perfectly possible but less acceptable. It is not at all clear-cut in forms like san-kai and san-gai (‘third

Chapter 5 — Psycholinguistic Issues

floor’); he is not even sure what his own form is. Different judgpients are also expected from different speakers o f Japanese. Such ‘delicate judgments’ and ‘inconsistent judgments’ are well-reported in syntax (see Smith 2002 for examples), but by no means confined to it. In phonology. Yip (2003) provides an example o f a post-consonantal glide /y / and discusses that the lack o f decisive evidence leaves room for variation in different structures among different speakers. A ll these facts support a possibility that different learners may construct widely different I-linguistic generalizations.

Smith and Cormack (2002) propose the idea o f param etric poverty^ a circumstance in which the data is too sparse to assure parameter settings, leaving some parameters indeterminate not only in child language, but in adult language too. Smith and Cormack propose two plausible scenarios: ‘random settings’ and ‘no settings’. Random settings, in which the same parameter is assigned different values on the basis o f the same input, is supported by well-known cases in adults language o f dialectal and idiolectal differences, such as individual differences in the sequence o f tense possibilities. In the following sentences (Smith 2002; Smith and Cormack 2002): D id you know that Emily is ill? vs. D id you know that Emily was ill?, the authors have split judgments: for one, the former D id you know that Emily is ill? is simply ungrammatical, whereas for the other, both are acceptable. This is a case o f a randomly fixed parameter. The less orthodox ‘no settings’ is demonstrated by Cowart (1997) (cited in Smith and Cormack 2002) in ‘t/iat-trace’ effects in judgments over sentences like Who do you think (*that) left where many informants are widely inconsistent. As mentioned above, these phenomena are extendable to phonology as Yip’s example shows. The researcher’s vacillating judgment over san-kai and san-gai (‘third floor’) also qualifies as an example o f the unset parameter hypothesis where he is simply not sure o f his own

Chapter 5 - Psycholinguistic Issues

intuition. In case o f rdk, the controversy over the nature o f such judgment is this: “is this a true introspection o f one’s grammar or simply a reflection o f lexical knowledge, e.g. a matter o f frequency or generality in the mental lexicon?”

It is still an open question as to how individual speakers treat rdk, but it is plausible that rdk may not necessarily be part o f one’s grammar, i.e. the reflection o f the productive rule o f grammar. It could be a part o f the memory-based knowledge, i.e. some generalizations in the lexicon, which influences the speaker’s judgments on the outputs o f the grammar. In order to verify a hypothesis about I-language, one should seek as much evidence as possible. In case the native speaker’s intuitions are not decisive, alternative sources o f evidence, namely, external (empirical) evidence must be considered. They include language acquisition, language variation and change, and language pathology. In this way, one can strive for a synchronic account o f rdk process and grammar, which are both psychologically acceptable and empirically justifiable.