Editorial
Hiroshi Faculty Tokyo Hongo, Tokyo,
Azuma of Education, University, Bunkyo-ku, Japan
Richard Cromer MRC Developmental Psychology Unit, Drayton House, Gordon Street, London, WCIH OAN, Ct. Bn’tain
Paul Bertelson Laboratoire de Psychologie Exp&imentale, Universite Libre de Bruxelles I 17, Av. Adolphe Buyl, B-I 050 Bruxelles, Belgique
Peter D. Eimas Walter S. Hunter Laboratory of Psychology, Brown University, Providence, R.I. 02912, U.S.A.
Ned Block Dept. of Philosophy, M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A.
Gunnar Fant Lab. of Speech Transmission, Royaljmtitute of Technology, S-10044 Stockholm 70. Sweden
T. G. R. Bower Dept. of Psychology, University of Edinburgh. 60, Pleas&e, Edinhurgh EH8 9 TJ, Gt. Britain
Jerry Fodor Dept. of Psychology, M.I.T. EIO-34 Cambridge, Mass. 02139,
Franqois Bresson Laboratoire de Psyehologie 54, bvd. Raspail, F-75006 Paris, France
Kenneth Dept. of Monash Clayton,
Roger Brown Dept. of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. 02138, U.S.A.
Merrill Garrett Department of Psychology, M.I.T. EIO-034, Cambridge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A.
Jcromc S. Bruner Dept. of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, South Parks Road, Oxford, OXI 3UD, Gt. Britain
Lila Glcitman GraduateSchoolofEducation, University of Pennsylvania, 3700 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, U.S.A.
Peter W. Carey Laboratoire de Psychologie, 54, bvd. Raspail, F- 75006 Paris, France Noam Chomsky Dept. Modern I,anguages and Linguistics, M.I. T., Cambridge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A.
U.S.A.
Forster Psychology, University, Vie. 3168, Australia
board
David T. Hakes Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin, Tex. 78712. U.S.A. Henry Hecaen Directeur d’Etudes, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Unit4 de Recherches Neuropsychologiques. I.N.S.E.R.M., 2, rue d’Al&ia. F-75014 Paris, France Michel lmbert Laboratoire de Neurophysiologie, College de France, I I, place Marcelin Berthelot. F-75005 Paris, France BSrbel Inhelder Faculti de Psychologie et des Sciences de I’Education, UniversitP de GenPve, CH-I2 I I GenPve I4, Suisse Marc Jcanncrod Laboratoire de Neuropsychologie Expe’rimentale, Doyen L&pine, F-69500 Bron, France James Jenkins Center for Research and Human Learning, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. 55455,
U.S.A.
Pierre Grcco Laboratoire de Psychologie, 54, bvd. Raspail, F- 75006 Paris. France
Philip Johnson-Laird Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, Centre for Research on Perception and Cognition, Sussex University, Brighton BNI 9QG, Gt. Britain
Jean-Blaisc Grize I, Chantemerle, Neuchdtel, Suisse
Daniel Kahneman Dept. of Psychology, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Jerrold J. Katz Dept. of Philosophy, M.I. T., Cambridge, Mass. 02139, U.S.A. Fduard Klima Dept. of Iinguistics, La Jolla, University of California, San Diego, Calif: 92037, U.S.A. Alexci Leonticv Faculty of Psychology, University of Moscow, I3, b’runze Street, Moscow G.19, U.S.S.R. Wilhelm Levclt Psychological Laboratory, Nijmcgeen University, basmuslaan 16, Nijmegm, Netherlands A. R. Luria Faculty of Psychology, University of Moscow, 13, Frunze Street, Moscow G. 19, U.S.S.R. John Lyons Dept. of Linguistics, Adam Fcrguson Building, Edinburgh EIf8 9I,L, Ct. Britain Humbcrto Maturana Escuela de Medicina, Universidad de Chile, A. Sanartu 1042, Santiago, Chile David McNeil1 Department of Behavioral Sciences, Committee on Cognition and Communication, University of Chicago, 5848 South University Avenue, Chicago, Ill. 60637, U.S.A. John Morton Applied Psychology Unit, 15, Chaucer Road, Camhridgc CB2 I?SF, Ct. Britain George Noizct I,ahoratoirc de Psychologie Exp&imortale, F-13 Aix en Provence, France
Daniel Osherson Department of Psychology. University of Pennsylvania, 3813.15 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa. I9I 74, U.S.A.
Robert Shaw Center for Research and Human Learning, University of Minnesota. Minneapolis, Minn. 55455,
Domenico Parisi Istituto di Psicologia, Consiglio Nazionale delle Richer&e, Piazzale delle scienze 7. Rome. Italy
Dan 1. Slobin Department of Ps,ychology, Universit_v of California, Berkeley, Calif, 94720, U.S.A.
Michael Posner Dept. of Psychology. University of Oregon, Eugene, Ore. 9 7403, U.S.A. Zcnon Pylyshyn Department of PsycholoKy, The University of Western Ontario, London 72, Ont., Canada Martin Richards Unit fbr Research on Medical Applications of Psychology, University of Camhridze, 5. Salish&~Villas, .’ Station Road, Camhridge CBI 2JQ, Gt. Britain
stcven Rose Biology Dcpartmcnt, The Open Universit_v, Walton Hall, .2lilton Keynes MK I 6AA, Gt. Btitain Nicolas Ruwct Dept. de I,inguistique, Ccntre Univ. de Vincennes, 12, Rue de Tourelle, E‘-7SOI 2 Paris, /Trance Harris B. Savin Dept. of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa. 19104, U.S.A. Tim Shallice Psvchology Department, The National Hospital fi)r Nervous Diseases, Queen Jyuare, I.ondon, WC1 Gt. Britain
U.S.A
Jan Smedslund Institute of Psychology, Universitct i Oslo, Box 1094, Oslo 3, Norway Sidney Strauss Department of Educational Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Ramat Aviv, Israel Alina Szcminska Olesiska 513, Warsaw, Poland Yoshihisa Tanaka Dept. of Psvchology, University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokvo II3, Japan Hans-I.uka\
Tcuber
nept. of
P.s.vcllolo~_v, M. I. T. El 0 034,
Cambridge, Mass. 02139,
U.S.A.
Virginia Valian Ph.D. Pro.cram in Psychologv, C.U.N. Y. ?;raduate Center. 33 West 42nd Street, Newt York, N. Y. 10036, U.S.A. Peter Wason Ps.vclloli,zgrtistics Universitv College London, Research’ Unit, 4, Stephenson Way, I.ondon NW1 ZHE, (;t. Britain Ilcrmma Sinclair dc Zwrt Centrr d’I
Cognition, 5 (1977) 3-7 OElsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausannc
1 - Printed
in the Netherlands
SW la nature de la connaissance
empirique
A tribute to H. L. Teuber (1916-1977) MARC JEANNEROD INSERM Lyon *
L’histoire des idCes se rCpitte. Les mimes dCbats animent les esprits ti travers les Cpoques et les champs d’application. Ainsi, la controverse ti laquelle prit part Hans-Lukas Teuber Porte-t-elle, mutatis mutandis, sur le meme contenu que celle qui opposait W. James g Helmholtz, ou que celle qui aurait pu opposer Condillac d Maine de Biran’. Cette Cnum&ation est l’histoire (moderne) du concept de sensation. Que les philosophes aient drC&d6 les savants ne surprendra personne: c’est l’ordre habitue1 des chases. La sensation est la base de la connaissance empirique, le jugement, de la connaissance pure. A la jonction des deux, le sujet, autant mat&e qu’esprit, autant cerveau que pen&e. Mais pourquoi 1’idCalisme de Kant a-t-i1 tourn g 1’idCologie dualiste, au contact de la psychologie? 051 se trouve 1’6quivoque? Dans la notion de sensation? Pour Locke, pour Condillac, c’est le materiau de notre connaissance2. “Sensations are the stable rock”3. Mais qu’est-ce que sentir? On confond souvent la sensation avec son objet, I’organisation temporo-spatiale du monde physique. Pourtant, la qualit pure appartient au monde physique, et non ti la sensation. La repr6sentation interne, la perception que le sujet a du monde physique constitue une exp6rience, qui ordonne et qualifie les attributs des objets. Entre attributs et perception, la sensation, abstraction pure, que le sujet ne pourra isoler que par un retour rCflexif sur le perqu, et qu’en s’interrogeant sur tel attribut particulier. En d’autres *Editor’s Note - This memorial having been written by a French colleague of the late Hans Lukas Teuber, we have opted to lcave it in French, a language much cherished by H. L. Teuber. English translation is available from the author, at the following address: Laboratoire de Neuropsychologie Expirim;ntale, 16 avenue Doyen L&pine, 69500 Bron, France. Condillac est mort cn 1780, Maine de Biran, n6 cn 1766. La discussion de Condillac par Maine dc Biran date des ann&s 1800. “‘La plus Id&e attention doit nous faire connaitrc que, quand nous apercevons de la lumi&e,dcs coulcurs, de la soliditd, ccs sensations ct autres scmblables sont plus que suffisantcs pour nous donner toutes les id&s qu’on a communCment des corps”. Condillac, Essai sur I’Origine des Connaissances Humaines, ouvrage oti I’on rCduit B un seul principe tout cc qui conccrne l’cntendcmcnt humain (1746); PrcmiGre Partie: Des matdriaux dc nos connaissanccs et particuli&ement des opCrations de I’i~‘c; Chapitrc II, Des sensations. All we can say now is that sensations arefirst things in the way of consciousness. Before conceptions can come, sensations must have come; but bcforc sensations come, no psychic fact need have existed, a nerve current is enough”. W. James, The Principles ofPs~vholog_v (1870); Chapter XVII, Sensations, 1: The cognitive function of sensation.
4
Marc Jeannerod
termes, la sensation ne peut se dkfinir que dans un contexte expdrimental particulier, celui de la psychophysique. La sensation n’est pas le stimulus, et r&iproquement. On veut placer la source des sensations “A l’ext6rieur”. A 1’extCrieur du corps? Mais le corps, surface de contact entre le sujet et le milieu extCrieur, est aussi un objet du monde. Le corps est le lieu des sensations: c’est par lui que je les Cprouve, par lui que le monde m’atteint. A l’inverse, c’est aussi par son intermidiaire que j’atteins le monde. Je ne suis done jamais “Ctranger” h mes propres sensations. Le sujet n’est cependant pas un pur receptacle de sensations, il agit, et la sensation le guide. Mais l’action, g son tour, engendre des sensations. Comment respecter le postulat dualiste ? L’action est pensee, projet, volontf5. Peut-il done exister des sensations hors du corps, et qui soient du domaine de l’esprit? La sensation d’effort, qui s’impose avec autant d’evidence que celle de chaleur ou de douleur, suppose bien un rapport entre “l’etre qui meut ou qui veut mouvoir et un obstacle quelconque qui s’oppose d son mouvemenT4. Sur ce point, I’analyse de Maine de Biran est pt%trante: “sans un sujet ou une volontC qui determine le mouvement, sans un terme qui rCsiste, il n’y a point d’effort, et sans effort point de connaissance, point de perception d’aucune sorte”‘. L’activitt? est constituante du moi: par elle, le sujet se manifeste ZIlui-meme comme agent ou comme cause de son acte. Par la sensation de mon effort, je me connais agissant. La volonte, effet de l’ime, est done aussi du domaine de l’aperception immediate’j, puisque je sens mes efforts de volont6. Cette “sensation d’origine centrale” (Wundt7), ce sont les Willensimpulse de Helmholtz8, c’est la 1’Efferenzkopie de Von Hoist”. Pour “corollary discharge” de Sperry’,
4Maine de Biran, Influence de I’fkbitude sur la FacultP de Penser (1803). 5“Si l’individu nc vouluit pas ou n’dtait pas dttermin< j commcnccr de sc mouvoir, il ne connaitrait ricn. Si rien nc lui rCsistait, il ne connaitrait rien non plus, il nc soupqonncrait aucunc existence, il n’2urait mt%e pas I’idPe de la sicnnc proprc”. Idem, Ibidem. Maine de Biran; De I’Aperception IrnmPdiate (1807). ‘Wundt: tit@ dans W. James, The Principles of Psychology, (1890). ‘“The sensations, which enable us to pcrccivc change of position of the parts of the body through muscular action arc known as the muscular feeling. This term includes, howcvcr, scvcral csscntially different sensations that have to be distingui\hcd. Thus, wc may perceive: 1. the intensity of the effort of will, whcrcby WC cndcavour to bring the muscles in action; 2. the tension of the muscles, that is the force by which they try to act; and 3. the result of the effort,... Trcatisc of Physiological Optics (1$67). English Translation, Dover (1962) Volume III. R. W. Sperry, Neural basis ot the spontaneous optokinetic response produced by visual inversion. J. Comp. Physiol. Psychol. 43, 482484. ‘%I. Von Hoist and H. Mittelstaedt, lilt Reaffkrcnce Principle (1950). English translation in The Behavioural Physiology of Animals and Man, London: Methucn (1973) p. 139 173.
Sur la nature de la connaissance empirique
5
Teuber,il Ctait logique d’en rechercher le correlat physiologique, comme pour les au tres sensations, “comme un signal, une marque physiologique, pour ainsi dire, de ce qui est volontaire dans le mouvement volontaire”“. “Le sentiment intime de la cause ou force productive... est le moi meme identifie avec son effort”‘*. A cette cause, un effet, la sensation qui correspond a la contraction de l’organe musculaire. Les deux (cause et effet) sont si intimement lies et “dans un rapport de causalite si necessaire qu’on ne saurait absolument faire abstraction de la force ou cause sans changer ou denaturer m&me entierement l’idee de son effet”‘*. La sensation musculaire est une sensation “orthodoxe”, puisque centripete. Sherrington, dualiste convaincu, lui donne son statut physiologique en 190013. Pour W. James, c’est la seule issue14. Mais la connaissance de l’effet ne supprime pas la necessite de connaitre la cause. Seul, l’enchainement de la cause et de son effet peut reveler le mouvement “actif’: l’effet seul est passivite. “La sensation musculaire cessant d’etre... causee par le vouloir... ne serait plus qu’une impression purement passive, comme le sont les battements du coeur ou les mouvements convulsifs que nous sentons sans les produire”15. L’erreur de W. James, et apres lui, de Bergsonl’j, sur ce point est significative. Pour eux, la sensation d’effort est centripete et non centrifuge, et l’effort est ramene a un seul de ses corollaires, la sensation musculaire. “Nous n’avons pas conscience d’une emission de force, mais du mouvement des muscles qui en est le resultat”“. Si, dans la paralysie d’un membre, d’un oeil, on sent, on voit l’intention de produire un mouvement (alors qu’il ne se pro-
l1 C’est la le point de vue le plus constant et le plus “avancd” de H. L. Tcuber sur cc probl&ne. On en rctrouve I’cxpression dans dc nombrcux textes (voir par exemple, l’Hypoth&e des Ddcharges Coroll$es, dans La Foncfion du Regard, Paris: Editions INSERM (1971) pp. 187-198). Maine dc Biran: Nouveaux Essuis d’Anthropologie (1823). l3 Voir par cxcmple C. S. Sherrington, The Muscular Sense, in Schtifer’s Textbook of Physiology, Lp4ndon: Pentland (1900). James donne a sa discussion unc tournure dogmatiquc “A priori, as I shall show, there is no reason why there should be a consciousness of the motor discharge... The presumption is thus against the existence of the feeling of innervation; and the burden of proving it falls upon those who believe in it. There is a certain a priori reason why the kenaesthetic images ought to be the last psychic antecedents of the outgoing currents, and why we should expect these currents to bc insentient; why. in short, the soit disant feelings of enncrvation should not exist... The consciousness of muscular exercise, being impossible without movement effected somewhere, must bc an affcrent and not an cffercnt sensation; a consequence, and not an antecedent, of the movement itself”. The Principles of Psychology, (1890) C@pter XXVI, Will. Maine de Biran,&‘ouveuux Essais dibzthropologie (1813). l6 Bergson se contente de reprendrc I’argumentation de W. James, et d&lam scs opinions conformcs alI? “doctrine” de cc dcrnicr. H. Bergson, Essuis sur les DonnPes ImmPdiutes de la Conscience (1888); Chapitrc I: DC l’Intcnsit@ dcs Ktats Psychologiques.
6
Marc Jeannerod
duit pas18), ce serait done parce que le sujet, dans son effort pour bouger, contracte quelque autre muscle non paralysC et exkute quelque autre mouvement. Le principe dualiste serait alors sauf. Mais pourquoi penser que I’effort doit s’exercer g I’exthieur? Qui penserait que le muet ne connait pas son dCsir de parler, meme s’il est sans voix? Mon corps lui-mime peut r&ister, etre inerte, faire obstacle 2 mes propres efforts. La fatigue, la paralysie n’althent pas ma volontt?: elles l’exacerbent. Le terme qui rhiste 6 mes efforts peut Ctre mon corps hi-meme. Le mouvement actif est done le signe suffisant, mais non nkessaire, de ma volont.5: comme on peut confondre la sensation avec son objet, on peut aussi confondre la volontk avec son effet”. La lecture de Maine de Biran par J. Lagneau refkte des difficult& d’un autre ordre. La sensation, dit-il, ne fait pas atteindre son objet: “elle est en nous sans nous”. Le pur sentir n’est qu’une abstraction, qu’il faut interpre’ter pour lui donner corps. “L’idCe, c’est de l’Ctre, la perception, c’est de l’apparence”20. Ainsi, dans I’action, la sensation musculaire n’est qu’un 61Cment subordonni, puisque la modification qui survient dans nos muscles pendant I’action est identique g ce qu’elle serait sans I’intervention de la volontC: la sensation de I’effet ne peut donner I’idee de l’action. “Pour que l’idke que l’action produit un effet soit like i la sensation de cet effet, il faut que cette action nous soit r&ClCe autrement que par son effet, qu’elle nous soit r&CEe en elle-mime. Se sentir actif, ce n’est pas seulement eprouver une sensation, c’est affirmer la liaison d’une sensation avec une idCe sous laquelle un effet a &5 poursuivi. Se sentir actif, c’est plus que sentir, c’est connaitre”*‘. De cette analyse, nous tirons une confirmation ~ il ne faut pas confondre la sensation musculaire avec le sentiment de I’action. Mais elle reckle un doute: I’action ne peut Ctre sentie. “Nous ne nous sentons pas actifs, nous nous jugesons tels”*‘. I8Unc grande partic de I’argumcntation utilisdc par Hclmholtz. James, Bcrgson, Von Ho&, Tcubcr, prcnd appui sur dcs observations simplcs ct aisdmcnt rcproductiblcs. Un sujet distingue cn cffet sans ambigultt: un ddpiaccmcnt dc son regard d’un d&placcmcnt dc I’environncmcnt, nlors quc pourtant dans Its dcux cas I’imagc dc? objets sc d&place sur sa rdtinc. L’ambigui’td apparait cepcndant lorsquc I’ocil cst ddplacd non plus volontaircment, mais passivemcnt (cn prcssant avcc Ic doigt par cxemplc), puisque dans ce cas, c’est I’cnvironncment qui parait bouger. DC mCmc, dcs sujcts portcurs d’unc paralysic pdriphdrique rdccntr d’un muscle extra-oculairc rcsscntcnt un d&placement du monde cxtdricur au moment de I’cffort de bougcr Its ycux du cGttA paralysd. L’intcntion motrice cst done pcrque, alors m?me qu’cllc n’aboutit pas. Bien plus, le fait quc le mondc rcstc fixc quand I’intention aboutit, ct cc ddplacc quand cllc n’aboutit pas, ou quand I’oeil cst dGplacd de faqon non intcntionnellc (passive), scmblc montrer que I’intcntion dc bougcr ICF yeux est pcrCuc comme une anticipation dcs changcments qui vent rksultcr du mouvemcnt: de tcllc sortc quc lorsquc le mouvcment cst rffectivcmcnt ri:alisb cettc anticipation dquivaut g la pcrccption dc la stabilitd. Voir M. Jcanncrod, 1:space et Regard. in: Neuropsychologie de la Perception Vwelle, H. Hdcacn (ICd.). Paris: Masson. l9 Behaviourismc? “J. Lagncau. Cours sur la Pcrccption (1890): In J. Lagneau, Mkbres I,gons ef Fragments, Paris, Prcecs Univcrsitaires de France (1964).
Sur la nature de la connaissance empirique
7
Admettre comme J. Lagneau que je ne peux sentir mon action, c’est dire que la connaissance que j’en ai ne peut etre le produit que d’un jugement. Retour a Kant”. Pourtant, le caractere ontologique du mouvement volontaire est le seul fondement possible de la realite du corps agissant. Le mouvement doit done etre connu par lui-meme et non par autre chose, qu’il s’agisse de la sensation musculaire chez les empiristes, ou de l’intelligence, de la representation ou du jugement chez les idealistes. Entre le sujet et son corps, pas de discontinuite: par I’effort, le mouvement appartient a la subjectivite comme a la corporeite. Introduire la subjectivite dans le corps (c’est-a-dire, dans la physiologie), c’est admettre la materialit de l’ame. C’est admettre par consequent que I’introspection n’est pas le seul acces aux processus psychologiques ou cognitifs; que ceux-ci n’existent que comme une des expressions possibles du sujet a travers son corps, et non comme des processus “superieurs”. Comme la volonte est effort, puis mouvement, l’intelligence peut Ctre pensee, puis langage. L’apport de Teuber aura CtC de mettre en oeuvre cette conception, et d’en proposer un mode d’approche exphimental. 11 connaissait la signification profonde de sa demarche: en rejetant I’hypothese dualiste, il nous a appris a reunifier le sujet.
*’ On peut trouver une remarquable discussion de la Philosophic de Z’Efforf de Maine dc Biran et de son interprdtation par J. Lagneau, dans M. Henry, Philosophic et PhtnomPnoZogie du Corps, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (1965). Chapitre II, Le Corps Subjectif.
Cognition, 5 (1977) 9-46 @Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne
2 - Printed
in the Netherlands
The linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes: Agrammatism in Broca’s aphasia, an exa’mple*
MARY-LOUISE Massachusetts
KEAN Institute
of Technology
Abstract One of the most striking characteristics typical of the speech of Broca’s aphasics is its agrammatism - the omission of ‘function’ words and inflectional morphemes. Agrammatism is generally viewed as being symptomatic of a syntactic deficit. We argue here that such an account lacks grammatical systematicity, and that the only uniform and systematic interpretation of this deficit is in terms of phonological structure. A natural class consisting of ‘function’ words and some bound morphemes can be defined with reference to the junctural properties of sentences which characterize phonological words. It is this class of elements which tend to be omitted in agrammatic speech. The goal of this paper is not only to provide an hypothesis for the interpretation of one aphasic syndrome, but also to test and illustrate the efficacy of paying close attention to substantive universals of grammatical structure in proposing accounts of linguistic deficits.
0. Introduction Traditionally the most prominent area of study of the biological foundations of language has been research on the neuroanatomical localization of linguistic functions. The question that was raised for us in this area was: can one provide accounts of linguistic deficits caused by focal lesions in the brain which are rigorous in terms of universal theories of the knowledge and use of language? We had no doubt that clinicians employ essentially universal characterizations of aphasic syndromes, but it was unclear to us that these could be ‘translated’ into the terms of current linguistic theory in a way which was not trivial and which’ offered meaningful new insights into the neuroanatomical organization of linguistic function. *The research
reported
here was supported
by a grant
from the Sloan Foundation.
10
Mary-Louise Kean
Our approach to this topic was to first establish to our satisfaction that there were qualitative differences in the linguistic deficits associated with lesions in various areas of the brain. Having done that, we then focused on one particular aphasic syndrome to see whether or not a perspicuous characterization of that syndrome could be given with respect to linguistic theory. The main body of the text which follows deals with the latter enterprise. The aphasia we considered was Broca’s aphasia. We argue here that recent characterizations of this syndrome as a language deficit involving the compromise of phonetic, phonological, syntactic, and semantic functions is untenable. It is our hypothesis that the manifested linguistic deficits of Broca’s aphasics can only be accounted for in terms of the interaction between an impaired phonological capacity and otherwise intact linguistic capacities. Our argument for this hypothesis is two pronged: on the one hand, we argue that this is the only possible grammatical interpretation of the syndrome, and, on the other, that this is the only systematic account of the syndrome which is consistent with what is known of the structure of the language processing system. Our argument is first made in terms of the grammatical system. We begin by discussing certain aspects of the linguistic deficits of Broca’s aphasics which are fairly generally taken to be evidence of a phonological deficit. We then turn to those aspects of the observed behaviour of Broca’s aphasics which have been argued to be evidence of compromises to other aspects of the normal linguistic capacity. We focus in particular on agrammatism, the tendency of Broca’s aphasics to omit grammatical morphemes and function words in their speech. We argue that the pattern of omissions can be given a uniform account as the phonological simplification of a sentence into the minimal string of ‘phonological words’ within the sentence. Having given this grammatical account of the syndrome, we then show that the capacity to construe items as phonological words is part of the normal capacity for linguistic processing. It is our argument that by assuming all aspects of the language faculty to be intact, save for the phonological, we can predict that there will be a systematic variation in the likelihood of omission of function words and grammatical morphemes which parallels the variation in the way these elements are treated within the normal language processing system. The data on language processing are not only consistent with our claim that Broca’s aphasia is a purely phonological impairment, they- also directly support that argument in that they show that many of the ‘deficits’ of Broca’s aphasics are, in fact, simply a reflection of the functioning of the normal language processing system.
Linguistic interpretation
1. Distinguishing
of aphasic syndromes
11
Among the Aphasias
1. I In normal adults the left hemisphere of the human brain has a privilege for language not shared by its right counterpart. The fact that aphasias typically arise from damage to the left hemisphere, but not the right, gives witness to this functional asymmetry. Having ‘localized’ language in the left hemisphere, the question arises as to whether linguistic function is neuroanatomically represented as an equipotential function for all components of the system across some area of the left hemisphere, or whether various components of linguistic function [e.g., phonology (for production or perception), syntax] are distinctly represented neuroanatomically. In the case of phonetic functions, we know that there is not a single phonetic center in the left hemisphere, but rather one for the control of the movements of the vocal apparatus (in the lower portion of the motor strip), and one for the control of speech recognition (in the temporal lobe). Thus, we know that there is not complete equipotential representation of linguistic functions. However, what we do not know is whether the ‘higher’ linguistic functions are also characterizable in terms of distinct neuroanatomical domains. There is good clinical evidence that there is some neuroanatomical division of linguistic domains; above the level of phonetics, focal damage in the left hemisphere does not lead to an across-the-board reduction in linguistic capacity. Lesions in different areas of the left hemisphere lead to qualitatively distinct aphasic syndromes. For example let us consider the two most commonly known aphasias: Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia. In the aphasia literature there is a considerable amount of terminological diversity in the designation of these two syndromes. Broca’s aphasia is also known as motor aphasia, a contiguity disorder, etc.; Wernicke’s aphasia is also referred to as sensory (motor) aphasia, syntactic aphasia, receptive aphasia, poterior aphasia, etc. (Goldstein, 1948; Head, 1963; Jakobson, 1956, 1964; Luria, 1966, 1970; Weisenberg and McBride, 1935; Wernicke, 1874). Clinicians distinguish these two syndromes behaviorally in terms of such things as a patient’s speech fluency. Fluency does not refer to the contentfulness or appropriateness of a patient’s speech, but rather to such factors as the typical length and grammatical well-formedness of the patient’s utterances. Wernicke’s aphasics typically are fluent; their utterances are fairly long, and their sentences are generally well-formed. Broca’s aphasics are typically nonfluent; they speak in short, halting phrases, and their sentences are generally not syntactically well-formed on the surface. In spite of this variance in fluency, it is Broca’s aphasics, and not Wernicke’s aphasics, whose verbal output is more generally appropriate and makes sense. Broca’s aphasics tend to speak in an interrupted sequence of noun(ish) words which
12
Figure
Mary-Louise Kean
1.
are h propos to the discourse in which they are engaged; Wernicke’s aphasics often speak at length in a discourse (having what is known as a press of speech), but their discourses are often like a sequence of non sequiturs, to the extent that they are germane, and jargon words (words which have the form of e.g., English words but which are in fact not English words) are used. In normal adults, Broca’s aphasia arises from a lesion in what is typically called Broca’s area, the posterior part of third (inferior) frontal gyrus (Brodmann’s areas 44 and 45) immediately in front of the motor area controlling the vocal tract (see Figure 1). Wernicke’s aphasia is generally associated with a lesion in Wernicke’s area (Brodman’s area 22) in the temporal lobe in the auditory association cortex adjacent to the auditory cortex (Heschl’s gyrus). While there is some debate in the literature over the exact circumscription of the cortical areas associated with these syndromes, in the clinical reports that we are aware of the occurrence of these syndromes is associated consistently with brain damage involving these areas. The precise definition of these areas is a problem for neuroanatomy; it is sufficient for our present purposes that there are qualitatively distinct syndromes associated with distinct areas of the brain. While characterizations of the verbal behavior of Broca’s and Wernicke’s aphasics such as those given above are clinically viable, they are not perspicuous in terms of our understanding the exact linguistic functions of these areas. Having observed that there are distinc-
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
13
tions to be made in the performance of aphasics, we must ask in what sense are the areas correlated with these deficits committed to linguistic functions. We must inquire, for example, as to whether we can associate each of these syndromes with particular aspects of linguistic capacity. This is essentially to ask if particular areas of the left hemispheres have differential commitments to various linguistic functions, e.g., phonological production, syntactic perception, etc. I.2 It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider each of the aphasias. Therefore, we will focus in detail on one syndrome, Broca’s aphasia, as an example of this type of inquiry. Broca’s aphasia is generally characterized in terms of the ‘typical’ difficulties of Broca’s aphasics in language production. One of the most striking characteristics of the speech of Broca’s aphasics is the relatively high frequency of segmental (literal, phonemic) paraphasias - e.g., saying [ taynl for [ taym] , ‘time’. These segmental substitutions are taken as providing evidence that in Broca’s aphasia there is at least a phonological deficit (Jakobson, 1968; Lecours and Lhermitte, 1969; Blumstein, 1970, 1973a). This hypothesis is further supported by the fact that there is typically no phrasal or sentential stress or intonation in the sentences produced by these patients So-called word-boundary bound morphemes (i.e., they are dysprosodic). (e.g. the plural marker, -s in English as in boys, the tense marker, e.g., -ed in wanted, the comparative marker, -ey in taller, etc.) are often omitted, and it has been argued from this omission that Broca’s aphasics also have a morphological deficit (Goodglass and Berko, 1960;Gleason, et al., (1976). In addition, it has commonly been agreed that Broca’s aphasics have a syntactic deficit (Goodglass, 1973; Goodglass, et al, 1972) because of the typical agrammatism (telegraphism) of the sentences they produce, The term agrammatism is usually employed to refer to both the putative morphological deficit and the omission of ‘function’ words, e.g., the, will, in sentences. Finally, it has been suggested that Broca’s aphasics also have a lexical deficit because they experience word finding difficulties (Zurif and Blumstein, 1976). Each of the deficits listed above shows up not only in speech, but also in other modalities of language use. The types of errors observed in the reading aloud and writing of Broca’s aphasics parallel those of their spontaneous speech. In comprehension tests there is evidence of lack of attention to word-boundary morphemes and function words (Parisi and Pizzamiglio, 1970; Lesser, 197t; Goodenough, et al, forthcoming). On socalled metalinguistic tasks (for example, tests which require a subject to parse a sentence) Broca’s aphasics also show inattention to word-boundary morphemes and function words (von Stockert, 1972; Zurif, et al, 1972). All
14
Mary-Louise Kearl
the linguistic behavior of Broca’s aphasics is generally effortful and labored, and typically they are acutely aware of their linguistic deficit. This picture is further complicated by the results of some recent phonetic studies on articulation and perception. Blumstein, Cooper, Caramazza and Zurif have found that the speech production of Broca’s aphasics is somewhat different than that of normal subjects (as shown by comparitive acoustic analyses), and that while Broca’s aphasics categorially perceive speech segments, they have difficulty in correctly identifying them. These data have been taken as showing that Broca’s aphasics have a phonetic deficit. Table 1. (Spontaneous) Speech
Writing
Reading Out Loud
Reading Silently
•t
+ +
+ + + +
+
_ Effortful Segmental Paraphasias Dysprosody Agrammatism
+ + +
f
Comprehension of Speech _____ +
+
The picture that emerges in the literature then is that of a syndrome which is characterized by impairment to all components of the linguistic system in all language modalities (see Table 1 for summary). It will be argued here, however, that the usual grammatical descriptions of the impairments of Broca’s aphasics do not accurately characterize their linguistic deficits. We propose that all the deficits of Broca’s aphasia can be characterized systematically in terms of the phonological component of the grammar. Furthermore, it will be argued that this is the only systematic interpretation of the syndrome which is plausible either in terms of the particular language of a Broca’s aphasic, or in terms of the theory of universal grammar. As the majority of the data available on the linguistic deficits of Broca’s aphasics is in the area of language production, we will focus on that data. Given that Broca’s aphasics appear to have parallel deficits in other language modalities, a theory which holds of one modality is a theory of the impairments to the others (see Kean (1977) for a review of the literature on the deficits of Broca’s aphasics in domains other than language production). 2. Broca’s Aphasia: a phonological
deficit
2.1 The phonological component of the grammar assigns to sentences their sound interpretation. On the one hand, it specifies the segmental sound shape of the individual words; for example, distinguishing the initial segment
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
15
(sound) of ‘pun’ from the initial segment of ‘fun’. On the other, it specifies stress and intonation patterns of the words in a sentence and of sentences as a whole. These two functions of the phonological component provide a natural context for explaining both the segmental paraphasias and the agrammatism of Broca’s aphasics. The phonological component of the grammar must provide a phonetically unambiguous interpretation of how sentences sound. There is a level of generalization at which we want to say that the initial sound of ‘pan’ is the same as the final sound of ‘nip’. However, in English, voiceless stops (p, t, k) are pronounced with aspiration when they are in initial position in words such as ‘pan’ (a comparatively large volume of air is expelled in their release) and without aspiration when they are in final position, as in ‘nip’. Consequently, a complete sound representation of a sentence which contains ‘pan’ will include the specification that the initial segment is aspirated; conversely, the sound representation of a sentence with ‘nip’ must include the information that the p is not aspirated. Among languages there is variation in the degree to which various phonetic properties of sounds are present in the realization of sentences. These variations are, however, consistent within languages. Thus, in English when a vowel is followed by a nasal sound (e.g., [ml, [n], or [J]) it is nasalized. (The former two symbols represent the sounds which we usually write with the letters m and ~1,and the last one symbolizes the nasal sound in ‘think’ and ‘thing’.) But when a vowel is flanked by nonnasai segments it is not nasalized at all. The degree of nasalization found in English vowels is less than that which is found in some other languages. For example, in Guarani (a South American Indian language), nasalization is a much more pervasive phenomenon. In articulatory terms variation in the degree of nasalization of vowels is a function of the amount of air which is allowed to pass through the nose during the articulation of the vowel. Since the degree to which a vowel will be nasalized varies from language to language, this variation must be specified within the grammatical system of the language by some system of rules which assigns scalar specifications to the properties of sounds. We have discussed two levels of segmental representations: the level of that the p’s in ‘pan’ lexical representations (where e.g., the generalization and ‘nip’ are the same is captured), and the level of phonetic representations where the presence or absence of the properties of speech sounds is specified in degrees (and the two p’s have different representations) - see Chomsky and Halle (1968) for further discussion of the distinction between lexical and phonetic representations. If there were a true phonological deficit, we would expect both these levels of representation to be affected. In cases
16
May-Louise
Kean
where the deficit is not so extreme as to leave a person without the ability to produce sentences, the deficit in phonetic representation would manifest itself as articulatory variation from the norm, in the degree to which (some) properties of sounds are present in a given segment. Thus, the data reported by Blumstein, et al (forthcoming), which show that the articulation of Broca’s aphasics (without articulatory deficits such as dysarthria) is deviant from normal segmental articulation, is consistent with the hypothesis that Broca’s aphasics have a phonological deficit. The discrimination and categorial perception of segments is a phonetic capacity; therefore, it would be expected that an individual with a language related deficit which is not perceptual or phonetic in character would perform normally on discrimination and categorial perception tasks. However, since the naming of a segment requires assigning a phonological interpretation to the perceived acoustic signal, an individual with a phonological deficit would be expected to perform more poorly than normals on tasks which involve the identification and naming of perceived segments. It is exactly this pattern in speech recognition that Blumstein, et al found, so these data too are consistent with the hypothesis that Broca’s aphasics have a phonological deficit. At the level of representation of segments in the lexicon, a phonological deficit would involve the incorrect ‘identification’ of a segment in a word, what we might think of as a misreading of the phonological information about a segment which is stored in lexical entries. Such misreadings would involve, e.g., ‘reading’ the voicing specification of the JI in ‘pan’ not as voiceless, but as voiced, leading the person to say ‘ban’ instead of ‘pan’. Thus, the fact that Broca’s aphasics typically make segmental paraphasias is also consistent with the hypothesis that they have a phonological deficit. 2.2 Not only can we distinguish between the degrees to which some sound has, or does not have, some phonetic property, we can also classify sounds with respect to the degree to which they are members of general classes. The ancient Sanskrit grammarian Panini organized the segmental system of Sanskrit in terms of what is known today as the sonorance hierarchy, a ranking of sounds from the most vowel-like (vowels) to the least vowel-like (stop consonants). The glides w and _Yare the most vowel-like nonvowel sounds, because in their articulation the air flow through the oral cavity is relatively unimpeded. Next in the ranking come the liquids, I and r; while the flow of air through the vocal tract is somewhat impeded in producing these sounds, it is not radically obstructed. Nasal consonants are ranked next; in their production the oral cavity is completely closed but the air flow is diverted through the opened nasai cavity. Fricative consonants (e.g. fl V, s, z) are ranked after the nasals; fricatives are produced with a radical, noise-producing obstruction, but not with a complete closure, in the oral cavity, and the
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
11
nasal cavity is blocked. Finally come the stop consonants (e.g. p, t, k, b, d, g) which are produced with a momentary, but complete, closure in the vocal tract. This sonorance hierarchy ranks sounds by what is traditionally called their ‘manner’ of articulation. Acoustically, the ranking correlates with the relative energy of a sound with respect to adjacent segments. In natural languages phonological processes which are sensitive to ‘manner’ (such as aspiration in English) never affect classes of segments which are not adjacent on the sonorance hierarchy. Thus, for example, no single rule of the phonology of any language applies only to liquids and stops. The sonorance hierarchy is frequently characterized in less detail than above as a ranking of three classes of segments: vowels and glides (no impedence of air flow); liquids and nasals (nonradical impedence of air flow); and fricatives and stops (radical impedence of air flow). Many of the morphological omissions of Broca’s aphasics are conditioned by the sonorance hierarchy. In general, consonantal morphemes, such as the -s of the plural in English, are least likely to be deleted in the speech of Broca’s aphasics after the most sonorant segments (vowels), and most likely to be deleted after the least sonorant segments (fricatives and stops). The likelihood of their deletion when preceded by liquids (and possibly nasals) appears to be greater than when preceded by vowels, but less than when preceded by consonants. Thus, for example, the subject studied by Goodglass, et al (1972) consistently produced killed and shoes, but said laugh instead of laughs and turn instead of turns. As far as we have been able to ascertain in reviewing the literature, this area has not been very extensively investigated beyond the basic research of Goodglass and Berko (1960) who found that post-vocalic consonantal morphemes were more likely to be retained than were post-consonantal (post-fricative,-stop) ones. Experimental paradigms already well established in aphasia research (e.g., repitition tasks) might provide appropriate frameworks for more detailed and systematic study in this area. 2.3 The examples of aspiration and nasalization given earlier illustrate that the phonological component of the grammar is context sensitive; that is, some of the properties of the sounds in a sentence are determined by the position of a given sound in a string of sounds. Let us now consider a somewhat more complicated case. The case in point is the contraction of is onto a preceding element, as is illustrated in (1). (1)
a. b. c. d.
Tom’s cooking dinner Bea’s on vacation Pat’s intelligent Bruce’s out to lunch
18
Mary-Louise Kean
As is shown in (2) the sound of ‘Sdiffers depending on the preceding sound. The ‘s in both (1 a) and (1 b) have the sound of z when said; however, in (1 c) ‘S has the sound of S, and in (Id) it is realized as a sequence of sounds [az]. a. Tom[ z] cooking dinner b. Bea[zl on vacation c. Pat [ s] intelligent d. Bruce[az] out to lunch These alternate realizations of the contracted is are regular in English: after strident coronals (segments produced with the tongue approaching the area ranging from the alveolar ridge across the hard palate, and with acoustic turbulence) it is realized as a syllabe, [az] ; after a voiceless segment other than a voiceless strident coronal it has a [s] sound; and after every other sound which is neither a strident coronal nor voiceless it is realized as [z] . There must be a level of grammatical representation in which all the sentences in (1) contain the verb is; the distinction between (1, 2) and (3) is relatively minor one. : Tom [Iz] cooking dinner a. Tom is cooking dinner (3) Tom’s cooking dinner : Tom[ z] cooking dinner b. Bea is on vacation : Bea [Iz] on vacation Bea’s on vacation : Bea[z] on vacation c. Pat is intelligent : Pat [Iz] intelligent Pat’s intelligent : Pat [ s] intelligent : Bruce [Iz] out to lunch d. Bruce is out to lunch : Bruce [az] out to lunch Bruce’s out to lunch The grammar of English must provide an account for these data. The account proposed has two steps: the first step, which describes a process called cliticization, attaches is (under certain conditions) to the preceding word; the second step is the specification of the sound realization of the attached is. By cliticization a structure such as (4a) is mapped onto a structure such as (4b). a. [s# [N#TOm #Nl ~~~~is ~~~1 [VP# cooking dinner #vpl #sl (4) (2)
b. [s# [N# [t&Tom #Nl is +f~l [AUX* AUI [vp# cooking dinner #VP I
#&I
At first it may seem odd to think of is becoming part of a noun. However, if we consider other areas of English we find strong support for this analysis. For example, consider the italicized words in (5), (6), and (7). : ham[z] a. two hams (5) : sea[z] b. the seven seas : cook[s] c. too many cooks : judge[az] d. hanging judges
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
a. Basil’s church b. the bee’s knees c. the cat’s meow d . Morris’s beard
(6)
a. b. c. d.
(7)
: : : :
Basil[z] bee[z] (note: cat[s] Morris [ az ]
19
knee[z])
the cad sometimes robs poor widows I don’t know what she sees in him Parthenia never rats on anyone he closes his mind to all innovation
: rob[z] : see[z] : rat[s] : close [az]
The nouns in (5) are regular plurals ending in -s; the nouns in (6) are marked by the genitive (possessive), ‘s; and the verbs in (7) all carry the third person singular present tense marker, -s. Just as is the case with contracted is, the phonological realization of these markers after strident coronals is as [az] ; after a voiceless segment which is not a voiceless strident coronal, they are realized as [s] ; and after neither a voiceless segment nor strident coronal, these markers, like contracted is, are realized as [z] . It is important to notice that no matter what sound ends a word which immediately precedes another word beginning with [az] , [s] , or [z] , these sounds are not altered, as is illustrated in (8) - (10). (The sentences in (8) (10) are organized in a parallel fashion to those in (2), (3), (5) - (7). The (d) sentences have words ending in strident coronals preceding the [s], [z], and [azl ; the (c) sentences have words ending in voiceless non-strident consonants preceding [sl, [zl, and [azl; and the (a) and (b) sentences have words ending in other segments preceding the [s] , [z] , and [az]. A * before a string means that it is ungrammatical.) a. * b. * c. * d.
Usric : [azlric the boss said that we should can Usric the boss said we should can [z] ric Arnold walked to Usric’s house Arnold walked to [z] ric’s house it’s not easy to survive with a name like Usric it’s not easy to survive with a name like [s] ric there are few people as clever as Usric
a. * b. * c. d. *
susceptible : [s] usceptible children are susceptible to colds children are [z] usceptible to colds generally susceptible to fungi generally [z] uscep tible to fungi children are not susceptible to root rot she is susceptible to flattery she is [az] usceptible to flattery
(8)
(9)
20
Mary-Louise Kean
(10) a. b. c. * d. *
zebra : [z] ebra a small zebra three zebras a ridiculously fat a ridiculously fat only mean people only mean people
zebra [s] ebra tease zebras tease [az] bras
Since we do not find the [s] , [z] , [az] alternation across words (examples (8) - (lo)), but do find this alternation in the suffixes of words (examples (5) - (7)), there is strong prima facie evidence that when is is contracted, it becomes a suffix of the immediately preceding word. Cliticization of is therefore can be seen as a process which takes a sequence of a word followed by is, and turns that structure into a word structure that is the same as that of a noun with a possessive or plural suffix or of a verb with the third person present suffix. The cliticization of function words is quite pervasive in normal spoken English; where cliticization is possible it generally occurs. The second sentence of each of the pairs in (3), and not the first, is typical of nonemphatic English. To provide a systematic description of the form of languages, it is necessary to develop notational conventions for representing the structure of sentences. For example, the symbols used to represent the sounds of language, e.g., p, are notational conventions, as is the use of [ ] to set off phonetic representations of segments, e.g. [p] , and the use of / / to set off phonological representations, e.g. /p/. As the examples just discussed show, we need some notation for distinguishing one word from another, a notation to separate words. The notation conventionally used in linguistics for this purpose is #; # (called a word-boundary) is assigned to the right and to the left of every word which is in a major lexical category. The major lexical categories are all the syntactic categories other than those of so-called function words; thus, noun (N), adjective (A), verb (V), and adverb (Adv) are major lexical categories, but determiner (Det) - the category of articles, ‘a’ and ‘the’ - preposition (P), etc. are not. The information specifying the category of a word is marked as a subscript on category brackets [ 1, which appear to the left and right, respectively, of words. Some examples of these notations are given in (1 1). (11)
[N #‘JOY [Det the iv #run [A #Soft [P up PI
#Nl Det 1 #vl #Al
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
21
The plural marker, the possessive, and the third person verbal marker all attach to words to make ‘new’ words. The structure of a word plus one of these suffixes is, by the notational system developed here, like that of the words in (12).
(12)
a. [N# [N# boy #N] s #N] (boys, plural, or boy’s, possessive) [v# [v# run #VI s #VI tmzs>
To account for the phonological similarity of contracted is and these markers, under contraction a word plus is is assigned an analogous structure. (13)
[N# [N# boy #N] is #N] (boy’s as in ‘the boy’s late for school’)
It is because of the occurrence of # between the word and its suffix in the items in (12) that the plural, possessive, and verb markers are called here word-boundary morphemes. Since the phonological structure of a word with contracted is is the same as that of a word with one of these suffixes, we can say that contracted is is a derived word-boundary morpheme. The similarity of the structure of the items in (12) and (13) is purely phonological. The affixes which Broca’s aphasics are typically most likely to omit are those which are phonologically word-boundary morphemes. Not all suffixes and prefixes are word-boundary morphemes. There is another class of affixes which we can see in such latinate words as permit, remit, submit, reject, subject, and object. Unlike e.g., the plural -s, the prefixes per-, re-, sub-, and ob- do not attach to words. (The prefix re- in remit is different from the prefix re- in rewind; while the latter re- roughly means ‘again’; the former does not synchronically.) These prefixes attach to stems, morphemes which do not occur on their own as words - e.g., -mit and -ject to make words. Our convention for the assignment of word boundaries (#) is that one is assigned to the right and one to the left of major lexical items. Since stems such as -mit and -ject are not major lexical items (i.e., they are not nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs) the prefixes which attach to them cannot be word-boundary morphemes. That is, by the notational conventions introduced above, a # will not intervene between one of these prefixes and the stem which follows it. Because e.g., sub- and -mit are independent formatives of a word and each can combine with other formatives e.g., -ject and per-, respectively, we want a notation which will capture the fact that these words do have internal structure. The symbol + (called a formative boundary) is used in characterizing the internal structure of such words; a + separates the prefix from the stem in e.g., [v # sub + mit # VI. In the speech of English speaking Broca’s aphasics non wordboundary morphemes such as these typically are not omitted.
22
Mary-Louise Kean
2.4 If the hypothesis that Broca’s aphasia is a phonological deficit is to be maintained, we must establish that there is an interesting phonological difference between words that have word-boundary affixes and words which have non word-boundary affixes. That is to say, there must be a phonological motivation for the notational distinction between + and #, and we must find this distinction realized in some fashion in the speech of Broca’s aphasics. In English, the basic difference between word-boundary affixes and non word-boundary affixes is that the former do not affect the stress pattern of a word, while the latter do. The nominalizing suffix -ness is a word-boundary suffix in English, and the adjectival suffix -ive is a non word-boundary suffix. When -yless is added to a word there is no change in the place where stress occurs on a word; but when -ive is added to a formative, there can be a change in the place where stress occurs, as is illustrated in (14). (14)
a. d&finite dksolate trepidacious b. d&finite illustrate c6ntemplate
definiteness d&olateness trepidiciousness definitive illtistrative contdmplative
We introduced the notion of word-boundary morpheme simply to identify affixes which attach to what we intuitively feel are words. Retaining the structure we assigned above to words with word-boundary morphemes, we will further refine the concept by saying that word-boundary morphemes are those affixes which do not affect the stress of a word (in English). This is to say that in the word definiteness that definite is phonologically a word, but that in definitive the word definite is not a word phonologically. The notion of ‘word’ we are using here is, of course, not the ordinary usage of that term; a phonological ‘word’ is the string of segments, marked by boundaries, which function in the assignment of stress to a word (in English). In definiteness (and all other -yless words) the presence of -yless is ignored phonologically for purposes of stress assignment, but in definitive the presence of -ive plays a crucial role in determining the placement of stress. The affixation of the plural, possessive, or verbal markers to a word never affects the placement of stress on an English word, nor does the cliticization of is. In the speech of Broca’s aphasics the stress pattern of words is normally retained. Therefore, we can say of English speaking Broca’s aphasics that they have a tendency to omit those affixes which do not play a role in the assignment of stress to words.
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
23
There are several different sources for words with word-boundary morphemes. Some words are derived morphologically by rules for the formation of lexical items; for example, plural nouns and words with -ness are derived by the word formation rules of the lexicon (see Aronoff (1976) for an extensive discussion of such rules). In other cases the presence of a word-boundary morpheme is a function of the syntactic structure of the sentence or phrase. For example, the gerundive morpheme -ing (as in ‘his singing is off key’) occurs only as a nominalizing suffix attached to verbs in certain syntactic configurations. Such syntactically derived morphemes are called inflectional morphemes and in English all inflectional morphemes are word boundary morphemes. The comparative marker (as in ‘happier’), the genitive marker, the progressive -ing (as in ‘she is singing’), the passive -ed (as in ‘that was cooked by Bocuse’), and the markers of present and past tense (‘she works hard’, ‘she worked on Saturday’) are all inflectional morphemes. A third source of words with this structure is the cliticization rule which attaches one word to another. Word-boundary morphemes form a natural class (that is, a unified class) only in terms of the phonological properties of a language. If we were to claim that the omission of wordboundary morphemes in Broca’s aphasia was a function of a deficit in word formation we would have no clear explanation as to why the formatives in words such as permit are not nearly so likely to be omitted; whereas, formatives such as -y1ess seldom occur: the rules of word formation are concerned with both types of words. Is is only in their phonological structure that these two classes are distinguished. Thus, in terms of the structure of English there are two arguments which support the hypothesis that the omission of wordboundary suffixes in Broca’s aphasia is the result of a phonological deficit: the first is that although there are many different sources for these affixes, what unifies them is their phonological properties; the second is that at some levels in the grammar, e.g. the level of word formation, there are different types of affixes which are effected differently in the verbal output of Broca’s aphasics and those classes can be distinguished in terms of phonological structure.
2.5 It has been observed that Broca’s aphasics generally retain proper word stress. This is, of course, consistent with our hypothesis that they ignore material which does not affect stress. In a sentence function words do not carry stress or affect the stress pattern of the sentence; for example there is no intonational difference in the sentences of (15) (where 1 represents the intonationally most prominent element of the sentence, and 2 and 3 represent decreases in relative prominence).
24
Mary-Louise Kean
(15)
a.
Biys climb tr:es
b.
B;ys rhn home
c.
The biy r&r to schbol
d.
The biys
climb up tries
Thus, function words, like word-boundary affixes, are not sensitive to stress. We noted in section 2.3 above that the # boundary was associated to the left and right of major lexical items, but not function words. To capture the phonological parallelism in stress sensitivity between function words and word boundary affixes, a # is assigned not only to the left and right of every major lexical category (N, A, V, and Adv), but also to the left and right of every phrase and sentence which contains a lexical category. By this extension of our notation, the sentences in (15a, c) will be assigned the structures in (16a, b). (In (16) S stands for ‘sentence’, NP for ‘noun phrase’, VP for ‘verb phrase’, and PP for ‘prepositional phrase’.) (16)
a.
]s# [N# [N# boy
%I s #Nl
[VP# [v# climb [N#
b.
[s# [NP#
bet
the Det 1 h#boY [PP#
#VI #Nls #Nl
[N#tree #Nl #NPI [VP#
[v#
[P to PI [N#
school
#VP] ran #VI
#Sl
#NJ #PP]
#sl
The structure of the phrase ‘the boy’ is the mirror image of the structure of the plural ‘boys’: in both cases we have a noun, boy, flanked by [# and #I , to which an element not flanked by [# and #] is attached. (17)
a. [#the [#boy #I #I b. [# [#boy #I s#l
Using the # notation and category brackets we can now make a general statement about the phonological process(es) which effect the placement of stress in English: the process(es) by which stress is assigned take into consideration only strings of segments which are flanked by [# and #], and between which no #‘s occur. The # symbol is simply a notational device which is used systematically to distinguish classes of structures in phonology. Recall that we said a phonological word was defined in English as the domain over which the assignment of stress took place. Given this characterization, function words, like the plural marker-s and the nominalizing suffixes -yless and -ing, are not phonological words. Having shown that function words, contracted is, and word-boundary affixes have the same phonological structure, i.e. they are not phonological words, we can now give a systematic account of the inattention to these items by Broca’s aphasics (agrammatism).
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
(18)
Items which are not phonological language of Broca’s aphasics.
words tend to be omitted
25
in the
The force of (18) is the claim that only those items which are phonologically the most salient are maintained with regularity in the speech of Broca’s aphasits . As we have stated it, (18) suggests that an English speaking Broca’s aphasic may reduce definiteness to definite, but will not reduce definitive to definite, or object to ob or ject. However, this suggestion can not be accepted; it is empirically falsified by the fact that suffixes such as -ive are deleted, in spite of the fact there is not typically an analogous truncation of words like object.. There is a fundamental difference between definitive and object. The lexical rules which account for the structure of definitive relate it to another word in English, definite; the rules which characterize the morphological structure of object do not, however, relate either ob or ject to some word (ob or ject, respectively) which does occur in English. Therefore, in terms of the structure of the lexicon, as characterized by the rules of wordformation, definitive and object are quite different (Aronoff, 1976). We therefore must revise (18). (19)
A Broca’s aphasic tends to reduce the structure of a sentence the minimal string of elements which can be lexically construed phonological words in his language.
to as
Embodied in (19) is the claim that there is no impairment to the grammatical structure of the lexicon in Broca’s aphasia. Thus, (19) correctly predicts that Broca’s aphasics will not speak in jargon. While jargon words have the phonological form of a word in a person’s language (e.g., blick has the form of an English word), they are not words - items in the speaker’s lexicon. If the grammatical structure of the lexicon were impaired in Broca’s aphasia, we would have no explanation as to why jargon is not found in the speech of Broca’s aphasics. It is also implicit in (19) that there is no syntactic deficit in the so-called agrammatism of Broca’s aphasics; the syntactic structure of the sentences of a Broca’s aphasic are assumed to be well-formed. The apparent lack of well-formedness arises not from a deficit which is intrinsically syntactic, but rather from the reduction of the phonological structure of a sentence. 3. Processes of Production 3.1
The structure of the mechanisms of language production (above the level of phonetics) is studied through the analysis of the spontaneous speech
26
MapLouise
Kean
errors of normal individuals (Fromkin, 1971, 1973; Garrett, 1975, 1976). The logic of this approach to the study of production is quite straightforward: if, as is assumed, the mechanisms of language production are structured, then the pattern of speech errors will not be random - the structure of the language production mechanisms will constrain the set of possible errors; therefore, speech errors will reflect the organizing principles of the system of language production. If Broca’s aphasia is truly only a phonological deficit, then all ‘nonphonological’ realizations of the deficit must be accounted for in terms of the interaction of the components of the language system, and in terms of the nonphonological resources of that system. Central to our hypothesis, (19), is the notion of ‘construal’ which is not a phonological concept. Therefore, to maintain (19) in its strongest possible form, it is necessary to show that ‘construal’ is part of the normal language system. Evidence that it is comes from the consideration of speech errors. The relevant class of errors are those which involve the exchange of two elements in a sentence; some examples of this type of error are given in (20). (20)
a. McGovern favors pushing busters b. I’m not in a read for mooding c. she’s already trunked two packs
(busting pushers) (mood for reading) (packed two trunks)
In normal speech errors one does not find nonphonological words exchanging with phonological words; thus, the examples in (21) illustrate impossible speech errors - errors which people do not make. (21)
a. * they paper-mitted subs to win b. * the ex-s boy-petted
Both sub and ex are possible (22). (22)
phonological
(submitted papers) (boys expected) words in English as is shown in
a. Rickover encouraged the senators more nuclear subs b. My ex’s new wife is a very attractive
to appropriate
funds
for
woman
The data in (22) would appear to refute the claim that the sentences in (21) represent impossible speech errors because they involve the exchange of phonological words with nonphonological words. However, there is a crucial difference between sub and ex in (21) and sub and ex in (22). In the former case sub and ex appear as prefixes in the words submitted and expected; it is because of the context of these occurrences and morphological conditions on possible words in English that the sub of submitted and the ex of expected cannot be construed as possible phonological words in (21). The data in (21) and (22) show that segmental isomorphism with occurring
Lirguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
27
words is not a sufficient criterion for delimiting the class of possible exchanges, and that the internal structure of possible words provides a determining factor. Consider now the following exchanges. (23)
stalls a. . ..be made a lot of money intelephoning (installing telephones) b. my frozers are shoulden (shoulders are frozen) c. I had instayed tending (intended staying)
In each of these exchanges a string of segments which is, phonologically, a possible word (though not an actually occurring one) has been exchanged with an actually occurring phonological word. In each case the material which has been ‘left behind’ consists of actual and possible word boundary morphemes. We can characterize a ‘possible word boundary morpheme’ in this context as a sequence of segments which has the phonological shape of an occurring word-boundary morpheme and which is in a context such that if it is construed as a word-boundary morpheme the prosodic structure of the whole word is not changed materially. For example, the word shoulders has the lexical structure [# [# shoulder #I s #I and is stressed on the first syllable (shoulders); in (23b) shoulders has been construed as if it had the structure [# [# [# should #] er #] s #I. The construal of er in shoulders as a word-boundary suffix is possible because there is an occurring suffix -er (as in dealers) and -er does not affect stress. It follows from our definition of possible word-boundary morphemes that when such a construal is made that the non word which is being treated as a word (e.g., [ # should #I ) has the phonological structure of a possible word; that is, if some element of a word is construed as a word-boundary affix, then the remainder of the word must be phonologically construable as a word itself. The reason for this is that if the segmental material not construed as an affix did not have the shape of a possible phonological word then it could not be stressed as a phonological word, and therefore there would be a change in the prosodic structure of the whole word. Given this analysis of the errors in (23) in terms of construal as a possible word-boundary morpheme, we can account for the nonoccurrence of errors such as that in (24). (24)
* they choring sals
(they sing chorals)
For such an error to occur it would require that sing be treated as if it had the structure [# [# s #I ing #I by analogy with e.g., [# [#want #I ing #I)
28
Mary-Louise Kean
and chorcils as if it had the structure [# [# [# char #I al #I s #] (by analogy with e.g., [ # [ # [ # arrive #I al #I s #I ). The word sing cannot be construed as [# [# s #] ing #] because [# s #] is not a possible phonological word in English and therefore cannot be prosodically analyzed as a word. The construal of chorrils as [# [# [# char #I al #] s #I is blocked for different reasons. While al has the segmental form of an occurring word-boundary suffix, and char has the segmental shape of a possible phonological word, the al of chorbl cannot be construed with the suffix -al because such a construal would require a material change in the prosodic structure of the word. The stress in chorbl falls on the last syllable(i.e., on al) and not on char; if chorals were construed as [# [# [# char #] al #I s #I then it would have to have the stress pattern chdruls. These data, (20 - 24), show that the construal of a string of segments within a word as a phonological word is part of the normal linguistic capacity of individuals. Under (19) this normal capacity for construal plays a crucial role in ho-w a Broca’s aphasic can minimize the phonological structure of sentences. The ‘strategy’ of language production employed by Broca’s aphasics is the maximization of the capacity for construal, consistent with the lexical morphological structure of a sentence.
3.2 It has been observed that English speaking Broca’s aphasics notice the omission of the genitive marker and the third person present verbal marker with far less frequency than they notice the omission of the plural marker (Goodglass and Hunt, 1958). This differential pattern of recognition of omissions which is paralleled in production (i.e., the plural is less likely to be omitted than the genitive or third person verbal marker) would appear to provide evidence against the hypothesis (19) since by (19) all three morphemes have the same status. However, rather than being evidence against (19), such data are in fact consistent with it; the differential pattern of ‘omissions simply reflects one aspect of normal language processing in production. In normal speech errors inflectional affixes (such as the genitive and third person verbal morphemes) pattern differently from derivational affixes (such as the plural). To use the apt terminology of Bradley (1976), derivational affixes are ‘epoxied’ to the words to which they are attached. This terminology is used not to suggest that there are no speech errors involving derivational affixes, but rather to capture the fact that derivational affixes are less likely to be moved or omitted than are inflectional affixes. In English this can be most clearly seen in errors involving adjective/noun words which are historically, but not synchronically, derived from verbs. There is in Engli:h a large class of adjectives which resemble the past participles of verbs in that they typically end in -eyE or -ed. That these adjectives are distinct from the past participle affix can be illustrated by adjectives
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
29
which end in -en/-ed but are not related to any actually occurring English verb. The first sentence of each set in (25) contains an adjective; and the second, the same adjective in a participial context. The (c) sentences contain an underived adjective to show, by way of contrast, that the -en/-ed adjectives of (a, b) have the same distributional properties of underived adjectives. (25)
a. Bedridden people must vote by absentee ballot * Glenda has bedridden for the last six years b. Underhanded deals happen less frequently than most cynics claim * The sleazy businessman has underhanded another deal c. Small people should not feel intimidated by tall people * Alice has small(ed/en) seven pounds on her latest diet
Some adjectives in -en/-ed are homophonous with the past participles of verbs. While these adjectives are historically related to verbs, in modern English they are not derived productively from verbs. Such adjectives have acquired special idiosyncratic meanings which are not transparent from the meaning of the verb. It is important to keep in mind here that most past participles can function as adjectives. Consider the pairs of sentences in (26).
(26)
a. A reserved book cannot be removed from the library Prof. Gril has reserved those books for students in his class b. A reserved manner is considered a virtue in many cultures * Prof. Grill has reserved his manner with students
In the sentences of (26a) the word reserved is the past participle of the verb reserve; in the sentences of (26b) reserved is not a past participle of resewe, rather it is an adjective in -en/-ed which is historically related to the verb, but which is synchronically a lexical item that is not productively derived from the verb. Just as there are ‘irregular’ past participles (i.e., ones which do not end in -ey1 or -ed - that dress has shrunk two sizes’), so too are there ‘irregular’ adjectives in the -en/-ed class. The adjective (/noun) drunk is an example of an ‘irregular’ lexical item which is related to a verb, but which is not productively derived from that verb in modern English. The lexical item drunk has a special meaning having to do with alcoholic beverages which the verb drink does not necessarily have. There is nothing odd about the sentence in (27). (27)
The family reunion was not half over before Uncle Fred had drunk too many mint juleps, and his grandson Willy had become sick from having drunk too many glasses of lemonade.
30
Mary-Louise Kean
In the context of (27) we might well want to call Uncle Fred a drunk, or say he got drunk, but we would certainly never say that Willy was a drunk or that he got drunk at the family reunion. Phonologically, the adjective/noun drunk has the same internal structure as the participial form of the verb drink. In modern English new past participles are formed by the suffixation of -ed (-en now being associated with an essentially fixed class of verbs). That both the adjective/noun drunk and the participle drunk have the same internal structure - the structure of participles - is illustrated by the speech errors in (28). (28)
a. I don’t have to get drinked to be silly (drunk, b. You’re the first Virginian I’ve met who’s drinked bourbon (drink/drunk, V)
A) [who
has]
never
The claim that derivational affixes (such as that in the adjective/noun drunk) are ‘epoxied’ and that inflectional affixes (such as that of the participle drunk) are not, is, extensionally, the claim that (29a) is not a possible speech error but that (29b) and (29~) are. (29)
a.* The scoundrel
stole the moneyed’s
drink
b.
The scoundrel
stole the money’s drunk
C.
Uncle Fred had martini-ed a drink
(drunk’s money) (drunk’s money) (drunk a martini)
In (29a) a derivational affix has been separated from drink, (in the noun drunk). It is an empirical hypothesis that (29a) is an anomalous speech error because of this separation. In (29b) the noun drunk has been exchanged with the noun money, stranding the inflectional marker -S of the genitive; in (29~) the verb drink has been exchanged with the noun martini, stranding the inflectional affix of the participle. In both cases the stranded material is not within the class of ‘epoxied’ derivational affixes. In fact when lexical items with inflectional affixes are exchanged the inflectional material must, in general, be stranded. In this respect function words are like inflectional morphemes in the way they are processed. Thus, (30a - c) are not ‘wellformed’ speech errors; the error paradigm for another, analogous, case is given in (30d). (30)
a.* The scoundrel
stole the money
b.* Uncle Fred had martini a drunk
drunk’s
(drunk’s
money)
(drunk a martini)
Linguistic interpretation
c.* The scoundrel d.
intended: I’m not in errors : I’m not in *I’m not in *I’m not in *I’m not in
stole money the drunk’s
of aphasic syndromes
31
(the drunk’s money)
the mood for reading the for for the
read for mooding reading the mood read the mooding reading for mood
There is a hierarchy of the degree to which a bound morpheme adheres to the item to which it is attached. The degree of separability is, first, determined by whether the morpheme is inflectional or derivational, only the former class being necessarily stranded. Among the derivational affixes themselves there is a hierarchy of strandability. The more productive a derivational affix in the language, the more likely it is to be strandable. Productive affixes are those affixes which can be freely and transparently used in linguistic innovations. Affixation which has as it’s phonetic realization a change in the vowel quality of an element of a word (e.g., foot; feet (foot#plural)) is totally unproductive in modern English; one would not, for example, make up a new word in English doot and assume that its plural form is deet. The most ‘epoxied’ of all derivational affixes are perhaps those where not only is there a change in vowel quality in an item but also that item has been lexicalized independently of its original ‘source’. The example drunk is such a case. At the other extreme is the plural marker -s; the -s plural is productive in English - the natural plural of doot would be doots ([duts] >. Even the plural marker -s, probably the most productive derivational affix in English, need not be stranded, though it can be. Thus, both (31a) and (3 1b) represent possible speech errors. (31)
a. . ..the unicorns b. . ..the unicorn
and the butterfly... (the butterflies and the butterflies... (the butterflies
and the unicorn) and the unicorn)
It is our hypothesis that Broca’s aphasics have a normal linguistic capacity in all domains save one, the phonological, and that the central realization of this deficit is in the minimization of the phonological structure of a sentence. Under this hypothesis, as we noted above (3.1), it is necessary to show that any aspects of the deficit which do not follow from the nature of phonological structure must be accounted for by, predictable from, nonphonological aspects of normallinguistic capacity. From the data on speech errors it
32
Mary-Louise Kearl
is predicted that inflectional affixes and function words (elements which are never ‘epoxied’) will be more ‘deletable’ than derivational affixes and that among the derivational affixes, productive affixes (such as the -s plural) will be deleted more often than affixes which are integral to the base word form of a lexical item. That is, we would predict that a Broca’s aphasic would not simplify the adjective/noun drunk as drink, and that the plural morpheme -s would have a more stable pattern of realization than the inflectional morphemes such as the genitive of the third person singular present verbal morpheme (subject, of course, to the phonological structure of the deficit, e.g., the sonorance hierarchy). On the basis of the conditions on syllable structure (the more syllabic an affix the more likely it is to be retained) we would expect that the verbal suffix -ing, which is always a syllable, would be more frequently realized than the verbal suffixes -s and -ed; because inflectional morphemes are more frequently omitted than morphemes with some nonsyntactic status, we would further expect that the progressive suffix -ing would be more likely to be realized than the gerundive -ing since the occurrence of the latter, but not the former, is completely predictable from the architectonic pattern of categories in syntactic structure. That this is, in fact, the pattern we find in the speech of Broca’s aphasics should not be viewed as merely a happy coincidence for the hypothesis we have put forward in (19). We could not maintain our hypothesis that Broca’s aphasia is a purely phonological deficit if it were found, for example, that the normal hierarchy of affixal adhesion is not retained in the language use of Broca’s aphasics. Given that there is a hierarchy in normal production of the degree to which an affix is attached to a word, it must be predicted that this hierarchy will be retained under the conditions of any deficit which is not a direct deficit to that aspect of the language system of which the hierarchy is a part. That is to say, in putting forward any hypothesis about the nature of a linguistic deficit it is necessary to show not only that the areas of deviance can be accounted for in terms of the hypothesis, but also that all other aspects of the normal linguistic capacity which are presumed to be intact do function normally. 3.3 We have as yet to offer any account for the dysprosody which is frequently associated with the speech of Broca’s aphasics. Whether or not a particular phrase or sentence is produced dysprosodically is a direct function of the rate of speech and fluency of the aphasic in producing that phrase or sentence. When a Broca’s aphasic speaks at a (near) normal rate over the duration of a phrase or a sentence, then normal intonation is present; but when a Broca’s aphasic speaks slowly, when speech production is effortful
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
33
and marked by pauses and hesitations between words, there is no normal phrasal or sentential intonation. The same contrast between the presence and absence of intonation arises in the utterances of normal speakers, depending on the rate of speech output. A normal speaker who pauses between words in a sentence, like the hesitating Broca’s aphasic, speaks dysprosodically when producing declarative sentences. In making a statement, a normal speaker who is pausing between words can only produce the focusing, or emphasizing, effects of normal sentence intonation by employing artefacts of intonation on single lexical items - increasing the pitch and/or loudness of a particular word or words. The statement as a whole appears to have no melody. The situation with questions is a bit more complex than that of statements. When pausing between words, a normal speaker will often produce a question with a parody of normal intonation. However, when this is done, the rate of speech of particular words within the question is lengthened. That is, to say ‘why are you going to the store?‘, pausing between words, but maintaining a semblance of normal intonation, the time which elapses over the production of each word in the sentence is lengthened both over that which is found in normal utterances and over that which is found when there are pauses between words and no intonation. Dysprosody, like the hierarchy of morphemic omissions, is then nothing more than a reflection of the intact components of the language capacity of the Broca’s aphasic. A Broca’s aphasic generally speaks slowly and in an effortful fashion as a consequence of his difficulties with coping with the phonological structure of language and his strategies for overcoming those difficulties. As a consequence of this, he is in essentially the same situation as the normal speaker who pauses between words in a sentence he is producing.
4. Predictions
for Languages Other than English
The last several sections have focused primarily on the structure of English. Our goal here is not however to simply provide an account for the verbal behavior of English speaking Broca’s aphasics, but rather an account of the syndrome which is general and independent of particular languages. By taking (19) to be such a general account, we make falsifiable predictions about the verbal behavior of all Broca’s aphasics, and not just those who speak English. In this section we will briefly consider some data from languages other than English to show that (19) does in fact make the appropriate predictions.
34
Mary-Louise Kean
In many languages there is a rich inflectional system on both verbs and nouns, the verbs being marked for number (singular/plural), person, tense, etc., and the nouns caring markings of number, gender, and case (nominative, genitive, accusative, etc.). Russian is such a language. In Russian by a productive process a stem may be inflected as either a noun or a verb, as is shown in (32). (32)
rod-
verb noun
xod-
verb noun
frant-
verb noun
rod + i + t’ rod+i+ 1 +a rod rod + a xod + i + t’ xod + i + t xod xod + a frant + i + t’ frant + i + t frant frant + a
‘to give birth’ ‘she gave birth’ ‘generation’ (nominative, masc.) ‘generation’s’ (gen., sing.) ‘to walk’ ‘he walks’ ‘walk’ (nom., sing., masc.) ‘walk’s’ (gen., sing.) ‘to act like a dandy’ ‘he acts like a dandy’ ‘dandy’ (nom., sing., masc.) ‘dandy’s’ (gen., sing.)
sing.,
As these examples show, the stem is segmentally isomorphic with the nominative, singular, masculine form of nouns; therefore, rod, xod, and frant are phonological words in Russian. By (19) it is predicted that Russian speaking Broca’s aphasics will generally delete all overt conjugational and declensional endings and their sentences will have the appearance of being a string of nouns in the nominative singular masculine. In fact, this seems to be what is found; to quote Luria (1970): “in attempting to repeat sentences, such a patient [a Broca’s aphasic] is only able to reproduce a few words, usually substantive [i.e., nouns] . His spontaneous speech is transformed into serial naming [nominativesl . ..verbs are altogether absent (so-called telegraphic style)” (p. 189). Thus, Luria’s characterization of the agrammatism of Russian speaking Broca’s aphasics is consonant with our predictions. In Russian, unlike English, the inflectional affix of the third person singular present tense form of the verb does play a role in the assignment of stress to a word. In our consideration of the agrammatism of English speaking Broca’s aphasics, the effect of bound morphemes on stress assignment was one of the central areas discussed. There is, however, no inconsistency in our analysis. In Engiish all inflectional morphemes are stress neutral word-boundary morphemes; this is a property of English and not a necessary property of all languages. In Russian, as is the general case in highly inflected languages, the inflectional morphemes are not stress neutral. There is in
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
35
languages a correlation between the richness of the inflectional system and whether or not inflectional morphemes are stress affecting morphemes. The claim made in (19) is totally independent of stress; what we claimed was that a Broca’s aphasic tends to minimize the phonological structure of a sentence in a fashion which is consistent with the structure of his language. A lexical entry is a complex structure (see Aronoff (1976)); it contains not a single word but also characterizes productive relations between words. There is an essential difference between the relation of e.g., the noun drunk and the verb drink in English, and that of the noun frunt (‘dandy’) and the verbs derived from the stem frunt- in Russian. It is only in the latter case that both items are productively part of the same lexical entry; presumably there is no lexical entry of the noun frunt which is independent of that of frant-. This is not the case with the noun drunk and the verb drink. To minimize the phonological structure of a word means here the selection of the phonologically simplest form within the lexical entry which includes the word in question. Since there are productive and systematic relations between major class items within a lexical entry, it is by strategies exploiting these relations that the meaning of an utterance is essentially retained even in the degraded production of Broca’s aphasics. Thus, one might think of agrammatism as the minimization phonological redundancy. We find a similar situation with Japanese which is unrelated to Russian and English. (33)
Japanese verb ryoori noun ai byooki
hukoo
verb noun verb adj. noun verb adj. noun
: ryoori : ryoori : : : : : : : :
+ suru
ryoori + na ai + suru ai byooki + ta byooki + na byooki hukoo + ta hukoo + na hukoo
‘cook(s)’ (pres.) ‘cooking’ (nom.) ‘cooking’s’ (gen.) ‘love(s)’ (pres.) ‘love’ (nom.) ‘is sick’ ‘sick’ ‘sickness’ (nom.) ‘is unfortunate’ ‘unfortunate’ ‘unfortunateness’ (nom.)
If (19) is the correct account of agrammatism, then it should be the case that the speech of Japanese speaking Broca’s aphasics, like that of those who speak Russian, is “transformed into serial naming”; that is, it is predicted that the nominative forms of nouns will predominate in their language use. Bearing this prediction out, Jakobson (1973) reports that a Japanese Broca’s aphasic “exhibits a considerable deficiency in suffixes” (p. 36).
36
Mary-Louise Kean
Based on our general hypothesis that Broca’s aphasia is a phonological deficit, and (19) as a specific characterization of agrammatism, we can make falsifiable predictions as to the types of errors which Broca’s aphasics who are speakers of languages other than English, Russian, or Japanese will make. In all cases we would expect there to be the same sorts of segmental deficits, e.g., segmental paraphasias. At the level of agrammatism we would expect a general tendancy to omit function words. It is in the case of agrammatism which arises from the omission of a bound morpheme that our predictions will vary. In the case of a language like Korean, which is in all relevant respects like Russian and Japanese we would predict that Broca’s aphasics would tend to produce nominative instead of inflected verb forms, genitive nouns, or derived adjectives. (34)
Korean yori
verb noun
: yori + ha + ta : yori
sarang
verb noun
: sarang + ha + ta : sarang
py 9
verb adj. noun
: pyq+i+ta : py3~ + tin : PY q
yori + ii
sarang + ii
pyog + ii
‘cook(s)’ (pres.) ‘cooking’ (nom.) ‘cooking’s’ (gen.) ‘love(s)’ (pres.) ‘love’ (nom.) ‘love’s’ (gen.) ‘is sick’ ‘sick’ ‘sickness’ (nom.) ‘sickness’s (gen.)
German nouns, like those of the other languages we have discussed in this section, are marked for case declensionally. The declensional paradigms of German nouns and the definite article are illustrated by the classic textbook examples in (35). (35)
a. sing. der Mann des Mannes dem Manne der Mann
Pl. die Manner der Manner den Manner-n die Manner
der Mann ‘the man’ (masc.) (nom.) (gen .) (dat.) (act.)
b. sing. die Frau der Frau der Frau die Frau
Pl. die der den die
die Frau ‘the woman’ (fem.) (nom.) (gen.) (dat.) (act.)
Frauen Frauen Frauen Frauen
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
sing. das Haus des Hauses dem Haus das Haus
C.
Pl. die der den die
Hauser Hauser Hausern Hauser
3’7
das Haus ‘the house’ (neut.) (nom.) (gen.) (dat.) (act.)
We would predict that German nouns would be realized by Broca’s aphasics in their nominative/accusative singular form, the phonologically simplest word in the paradigms. As a consequence of this coupled with the predicted failure to regularly realize function words (for example the definite article) distinctions between the gender of nouns would be expected to be effectively lost in the speech of German speaking Broca’s aphasics. German verbs are inflected for both number and person. (36)
sing. gehe gehst geht
Pl. gehen geht gehen
gehen ‘to go’
From simply inspecting the conjugational paradigm in (36) it is impossible to make any prediction as to what form of the verb is most likely to be realized in speech. The -en which occurs in the infinitive forms of verbs is not simply an inflectional marker of the infinitive, rather it is part of the lexical derivation of a word (analogous to the -s of the English plural in being a productive derivational affix). The -en is essentially a word forming suffix on verbal stems, and it is present on the surface in some forms and not others (see Aronoff (1976) for a discussion of the deletion of derivational material). Because -en is a derivational affix, and not an inflectional one, it is predicted that the predominate form of verbs in the speech of German speaking Broca’s aphasics will be the -ey2 form. We predict, for example, that a German speaking Broca’s aphasic will typically not say Er singt (‘he sings/he is singing’), saying instead (Er) singen.
In German, as in English, there is a prepositional particle, zu (‘to’), associated with the infinitive. Unlike to in English, zu only occurs in some surface syntactic constructions. (37)
a.
Er sagte, dass wir Peter halfen, die Geschichte helped the story he said that we
zu erzahlen to tell
b.* Er sagte, dass wir Peter halfen, die Geschichte erzahlen c. Er sagte, dass wir Peter die Geschichte erzahlen halfen d.* Er sagte, dass wir Peter die Geschichte zu erzahlen halfen
38
Mary-Louise Kean
Since zu is a function word, we would expect it to be typically omitted in the speech of Broca’s aphasics; that is, ceteris paribus, an agrammatic German speaker would probably use (37b) rather than (37a), but would not use (37d) instead of (37~). The nonconjugational -ey1 forms do not only occur as infinitives; they also occur as neuter nouns. The contrast between nominals and infinitives is illustrated in (38). (38)
a.
Das Singen ist mir immer eine Freude the singing is to me always a joy b. Es ist mir immer eine Freude, zu singen c.* Zu singen ist mir immer eine Freude d.* Es ist mir immer eine Freude, das Singen e.* Es ist mir immer eine Freude, singen
When the infinitive occurs in initial position in such sentences zu does not appear on the surface. Consequently, (39) is ambiguous between a nominal and an infinitival reading. (39)
Singen ist mir immer eine Freude .
(Liz) Being a function word, dus would be expected to be omitted in the speech of German speaking Broca’s aphasics. Therefore, (39) is the predicted realization of (38a) for Broca’s aphasics, ceteris paribus. The clearest evidence which is consistent with (19) comes from the rich literature on French speaking Broca’s aphasics. Lecours and Rouillion note exclusive production of that agrammatism is characterized by “near[ly] brief juxtaposed sentences . ..[and] deletions” (p. 104). They offer the following brief example as being typical of agrammatic sentence production in French; it is the comment of a subject on being asked to describe the events of May 1968 in Paris. (40)
Ah oui! Greve. Greve. Euh, marcher, drapeau rouge. Euh, matraque. Enfin, matraque, Faculte. Euh, ah oui: dix pour cent, salarie. Euh, bah! c’est tout.
This is just the sort of spontaneous speech we would expect - short phrases of an essentially nounish character. In French, as in the other languages we have been discussing, there is a productive stem relation between nouns and verbs. Hecaen and Angelergues (1965) note, as would be expected, that French speaking Broca’s aphasics rely heavily on the use of nouns and the nominal forms of verbs (p. 115).
Linguistic interpretation of aphasic syndromes
39
There have been in the French literature, as in the English literature, disputes over how agrammatism is to be functionally understood. Alajouanine and Lhermitte (1964) for example, dismiss the linguistic characterization of agrammatism in terms of the loss of function words and inflection on “would lead to the assumption of a the grounds that such an interpretation ‘grammatical function’ which has never been demonstrated” (p. 212). However, as the discussion in section 2, above, shows, there is indeed a in terms of which this class of elements can be “grammatical function” simply described. Others have held views of agrammatism which are more consistent with the position taken here. We are quite in agreement with Hecaen and Angelergues, for example, when they say: “les difficult& n’apparaissent que dans le developpement des phrases” (p. 115). The best evidence that the agrammatic speech of French speaking Broca’s aphasics is linguistically similar to that of English speaking Broca’s aphasics comes not from a comparison of descriptions, or from a consideration of interpretive arguments, but rather from the direct comparison of extended bodies of the spontaneous speech of both populations. That there is such a strong parallelism is illustrated by a comparison of the two passages given below; the French passage comes from HCcaen and Angelergues (p. 115>, and the English one from Coodglass (1973, p. 185). Tomber Singer entrer Madame oh oh... apres Madame Hopital Reims apres am... ambulance... bon... Monsieur Vilde... bon... opere... mais... ou... sans... plein, plein, plein, opere. Paris apres . . . apres opere... - Et depuis? - Mais... ah... pi...qtire comme ca... hein... gene gene... monot(e)... pariel... ah... fini... j’ai... j’ai... ficelle... ah comment... pas ca. - Ensuite, qu ‘est-ce que vous avez fait? Vow $tes retournb h - Qu’est;ce que vous avez fait ld-bas? Reims? - Oui... hopital... - Monsieur Vilde... hein... bon... Henri... c’est bon... bon... oui d’accord... fini... apresMonsieur Cocheme... hein... Henri... ah bon... lire... lire... Yes... ah... Monday... ah... Dad and Peter Hogan, and Dad... ah... Hospital... and ah... Wednesday... Wednesday, nine o’clock and ah Thursday... ten o’clock ah doctors . . . two... two... an’ doctors and... ah... teeth... yah. And a doctor an’ girl... gums, and I. [Upon questioning about his former employment in a paper mill] Lower Falls... Maine... Paper. Four hundred tons a day ! And ah... sulphur machines, and ah... wood... Two weeks and eight hours. Eight hours... no! Twelve hours, fifteen hours . . . workin’... workin’... workin’! Yes, and ah... sulphur. Sulphur and .. . Ah wood. Ah... handlin! And ah sick, four years ago.
40
Mary-Louise Kean
5. Conclusion
The linguistic deficits of Broca’s aphasia were outlined in section 1. Let us review those deficits in the light of the hypothesis that Broca’s aphasia involves an impairment of a physical system which subserves at least part of the phonological domain of the language responsible cognitive structure (LRCS). Phonology, as it is viewed by linguists, is not simply the study of the systematic relations which are found in the surface phonetic representation of language, though that is surely an important aspect of the study of phonology. The grammar must provide an account of the sound-meaning relationships of sentences in human language. As such the phonological component must be integrated into the whole theory of the structure of language, which includes the syntax and the morphology. It is because of this integration of the components of the grammar with each other that we can begin to understand why an array of seemingly disparate deficits have, in fact, an interpretation in terms of only one component of the grammatical system. The phonetic deficit of Broca’s aphasics is, we have claimed, a direct function of the fact that the phonological component of the grammar must provide a phonetically unambiguous representation of sentences. We have ascribed the frequent occurrence of segmental paraphasias (substitutions) to a more abstract level of representation, the phonological representation of words at the level of the lexicon; on this point we are in agreement with other proposed interpretations of Broca’s aphasia. It is in terms of this level of representation that we propose that the word finding difficulties of Broca’s aphasics are to be explained; to use Luria’s (1970) description, “the inner sound schemata of words” (p. 186) has been impaired. We have claimed that agrammatism can be accounted for on the basis of the sound structure which exists between words, and between a word and its affixes. of a The central concept developed in this regard was the notion phonological word; the domain of all phonological processes is characterized in terms of phonological words. The other apparently deviant aspects of the speech of Broca’s aphasics, e.g., dysprosody ~ are claimed to be not inherently deviant but rather to arise as a consequence of the interaction of normal intact components of the linguistic system with the impaired phonological component. We assume the hypothesis that the language responsible cognitive structure is essentially uniform across all normal members of the species. It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that there is an equivalence between the actual linguistic knowledge of, say, a speaker of French and a speaker of English - what a French speaker knows is French, not English, and what an
Linguistic interpretation
of aphasic syndromes
41
English speaker knows is English, not French. What they have in common, under our theory of language, is an equivalence in their capacities to acquire and use knowledge of a natural human language. Therefore, the knowledge of language which each acquires will be in terms of equivalent sorts of structures. That all Broca’s aphasics have qualitatively parallel deficits lends support to our general hypothesis of the uniformity of LRCS as a biological endowment. The phonological component of the grammar characterizes one of the domains of LRCS. The interpretation of Broca’s aphasia we have put forward here relies exclusively on universal aspects of word level phonological structure, segments, boundaries, and phonological words. Not only are these all aspects of phonology, they are the properties which define the domain of phonology. Thus, not only are we making the claim that there is a phonological deficit in Broca’s aphasia, but also the claim that this impairment is distributed across the entire domain of phonology. Consequently, we are making the implicit claim that there is, in some sense, a one-toone correspondence between the physical area known as Broca’s area and a single and complete domain of the theory of the cognitive structure of language. This is not to claim that Broca’s area is necessarily the only area of the brain which is involved in phonology, rather it is to say that Broca’s area is necessary to normal phonological capacity, leaving open the question of if, and to what extent, other areas might be implicated in normal phonological capacity. The fact that Broca’s aphasia can be identified with a. lesion involving a particular area of the brain is consistent not only with the hypothesis that LRCS is biologically uniform, part of the genetic program of normal individuals, but also with the hypothesis that LRCS is neuroanatomically uniform. Thus the theory of language we have adopted here has served an important heuristic purpose in furthering our understanding of the functional neuroanatomy of language. Bibliography Alajouanine, T. (1956) Verbal realization in aphasia. Brain, 79. Alajouanine, T., Ombredane, A., and Durand, M. (1939) Le syndrome de Za dtsintkgration phondtique dam I ‘ophasie. Masson, Paris. Alajouanine, T. and Lhermitte, I‘. (1964) Aphasia and the physiology of speech. In Rioch and Weinstein. Aronoff, M. H. (1976) Word&n&we. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. Baker, A. B. and Baker, L. H. (1971) ClinicalNeurology, Harper and Row, New York. Bastian, H. C. (1887) On different kinds of aphasia. Brit. Med. J., 2. Bastian, H. C. (1898) A Treatise on Aphasia and other Speech Defects. Lewis, London. Bay, E. (1964) Principles of classification and their influence on our concepts of aphasia. In de Reuck and O’Connor (Eds.) Disorders of Language, Little, Brown and Co., Boston.
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Benson, D. I:. (1967) Fluency in aphasia: Correlation with radioactive scan localization, Corfex, 3. Benson, D. I’. and Geschwind, N. (1971) The aphasias and related disturbances. In Baker and Baker. Bernard (1885) De Iilphasie et de ses Diuerses Formes, A. Delahaye and E. Lecrosnier, Paris. Bever, T. and Weksel, W. (Lds.) (In press) The Structure nnd Psychology of Language, Mouton, The Hague. Bloomfield, L. (1933) Language, Holt: New York. Blumstein, S. (1968) Phonological aspects of aphasic speech. In Gribble. Blumstein, S. (1970) Phonological Implications ofAphasic Speech, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Harvard. Blumstein, S. (1973a) A Phonological Investigation of Aphasic Speech, Mouton, The Hague. Blumstein, S. (1973b) Some phonological implications of aphasic speech. In Goodglass and Blumstcin. Blumstein, S., Cooper, W., Zurif, I. and Caramazza, A. (forthcoming) The perception and production of VOT in aphasia. Neuropsychol. Bradley, D. (1976) What derivational complexity won’t buy you. Unpublished Ms., MIT. Brain, R. (1961) Speech Disorders, Butterworths: Washington. Bresnan, J. W. (1973) Sentence stress and syntactic transformations. In Approaches to Natural Language. Proceedings of the 1970 Stanford Workshop on Grammar and Semantics. K. J. J. Hintikka, J. M. E. Moravcsik and P. Suppes (Eds.), Boston: Reidel. Broca, P. (1861) Remarques sur le siege de la faculte du langage articule, suivies d’une observation d’aphkmie. Bull. Sot. Anat. Paris. Brown, R. W. (1970) Psycholinguistics. The I’ree Press: New York. Carterette, E. C. (Ed.) (1966) Bruin Function, Vol. III, University of California Press, Berkeley. Chomsky, N. (1966) Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar, Mouton, The Hague. Chomsky, N. (1968a) Recent contributions to the theory of innate ideas. In Cohen and Wartofsky. Chomsky, N. (1968b) I,anguuge and Mind, Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich: New York. Extended edition, 1972. Chomsky, N. (1976) Reflections on Language, Pantheon, New York. Chomsky, N. and Halle, M. (1968) The Sound Pattern ofEnglish, Harper and Row, New York. Cohen, R. S. and Wartofsky, M. (Eds.) (1968) Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. III, D. Reidel: Dordrccht. Conrad, K. (I 954) New problems of aphasia, Brain, 77. Critchley, M. (1967) Aphasiological nomenclature and definitions, Cortex, 3. Critchley, M. (1973) Articulatory defects in aphasia: the problem of Broca’s aphemia. In Goodglass and Blumstein. Dejerine, J. (1914) Semiologie des Affections du Systeme Nerueux, Masson, Paris. De Rcnzi, E. and Vignolo, L. A. (1962) The token test: a sensitive test to detect disturbances in aphasics, Brain, 85. Dingwall, W. 0. (Ed.) (1971) A Survey of Linguistic Science, University of Maryland, Collcgc Park. Evarts, E. V. (1967) The output side of information processing. In Millikan and Darlcy. Pillenbaum, S., Jones, L. V. and Wepman, J. M. (1961) Some linguistic features of speech from aphasic patients, Lang. Sp. Flares d’Arcais, G. B. and L,cvelt, W. J. M. (Kds.) (1971) Advances in Psycholinguistics, North Holland. Amsterdam. Fodor, J. A. and Bever, T. G. (1965) The psychological reality of linguistic segments. J. Verb. Learn. verb. Bell., 4. Fodor, J. A. Bcvcr, T. G. and Garrett, M. I:. (1974) The PsychoZogJJ of Language, McGraw-IIill, New York. Ipromkin, V. (1971) The nonanomalous nature of anomalous utterances. Lang., 47. Fromkin, V. (Ed.) (1973) Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence, Mouton, The Hague. Fry, H. (1959) Phonemic substitution in aphasic patients. Lang. Sp., 2.
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interpretation
of aphasic
syndromes
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Garrett,
M. F. (1975) The analysis of sentence production. In G. Bower (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory, Vol. 9, Academic Press, New York. Garrett, M. F. (1976) Syntactic processes in sentence production. In Walker and Wales (Eds.) New Approaches to Language Mechanisms, North-Holland, Amsterdam. Geschwind, N. (1964) Development of the brain and evolution of language, Georgetown Monograph Series on Language and Linguistics, 17, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. Geschwind, N. (1965) Disconnexion syndromes in animals and man. Brain, 88. Reprinted in Geschwind, 1974a. Geschwind, N. (1966) Carl Wernickc, the Breslau School, and the history of aphasia. In Cartcrette. Geschwind, N. (1967) Brain mechanisms suggested by studies of hemispheric connections. In Millikan and Darley. Geschwind, N. (1970) The organization of language in the brain, Science, 170. Geschwind, N. (1974a) Selected Papers on Language and the Brain, D. Reidel, Dordrecht. Geschwind, N. (1974b) Wernicke’s contribution to the Study of Aphasia. In Geschwind, 1974a. Geschwind, N. (1974~) Problems in the anatomical understanding of the aphasias. In Geschwind, 1974a. Geschwind, N. (1974d) A review: Traumatic Aphasia by A. R. Luria. In Geschwind, 1974a. Geschwind, N., Quadfasel, F. A. and Segarra, J. (1968) Isolation of the speecharea,NeuropsychoZ., 6. Gleason,
J. B., Goodglass, H., Green, I.:., Ackerman, N. and Hyde, M. (1975) The retrieval of syntax in Broca’s aphasia. Brain Lang., 2. Goldstein, K. (1917) Die transkortikalen Aphasien, Gustav Fischer, Jena. Goldstein, K. (1948) Language and Language Disturbances, Grune and Stratton, New York. Goodenough, C. Zurif, E. B., Weintraub, E. J. and von Stockert, T. (forthcoming) The comprehension of definite and indefinite reference. Lang. Sp. Goodglass, H. (1973) Studies on the grammar of aphasics. In Goodglass and Blumstein. Goodglass, H. and Mayer, J. (1958) Agrammatism in aphasia. J. Sp. Hear. Dis., 23. Goodglass, H. and Hunt, J. (1958) Grammatical complexity and aphasic speech, Word, 14. Goodglass, H. and Berko, J. (1960) Aphasia and inflectional morphology in English. J. Sp. Hear. Res., 3. Goodglass, H., Quadfasel, C. and Timberlake, W. H. (1964) Phrase length and the type and severity of aphasic disturbances. Cortex, 3. Goodglass, H., Fodor, 1. G., and Schulhoff, C. (1967) Prosodic features in grammar-evidence from aphasia. J. Speech and Hear. Res., 10. Goodglass, H. and Hunter, M. (1970) A linguistic comparison of speech and writing in two types of aphasia. J. Comm. Dis., 3. Goodglass, H., Gleason, J. B., Bernholz, N. A. and Hyde, M. R. (1972) Some linguistic structures in the speech of a Broca’s aphasic. Cortex, 8. Goodglass, H. and Kaplan, E. (1972) The Assessment of Aphasia and Related Disorders, Lea and Febiger, Philadelphia. Goodglass, H. and Blumstein, S. (Eds.) (1973) Psycholinguistics and Aphasia, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore. Green, E. (1969) Psycholinguistic approaches to aphasia Ling.. 53. Green, E. (1970) On the contribution of studies of aphasia to psycholinguistics. Cortex, 6. Green, J. B. and Hamilton, W. J. (1975) Is anosognosia for hemiplegia a disconnectionsyndrome? Paper presented at the 27th annual meeting of the American Academy of Neurology. Gribble, C. (Ed.) (1968) Studies presented to Professor R. Jakobson by his Students, Slavica, Cambridge, Mass. Gutman, E. (1942) Aphasia in children. Brain, 65. Hankamer, J. and Aissen, J. (1974) The sonority hierarchy. CLS, 10. Head, H. (1963) Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech, Vols. I and II, Hafner, New York.
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H. and Angelergues, R. (1965) Pathologic du Langage, Laroussc, Paris. H. and Consoli, S. (1973) Analyse des troubles du langage au tours des lesions de l’airc de Broca, Neuropsychol. 11, 377 - 388. Howes, D. (1964) Applications of the word frequency concept to aphasia. In de Reuck and O’Connor. Howes, D. and Geschwind, N. (1964) Quantitative studies of aphasic language. In Rioch and Weinstein. Jakobson, R. (1964) Towards a linguistic typology of aphasic impairments. In de Reuck and O’Connor. Jakobson, R. (1966) Linguistic types of aphasia. In Carterettc. Jakobson, R. (1968) Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals, A. R. Keiler, trans., Mouton: The Hague. Jakobson, R. (1973) Towards a linguistic classification of aphasic impairments. In Goodglass and Blumstein. Jakobson, R. and Halle, M. (1956) P’undumentuZs of Language, Mouton: The Hague. Jackson, J. H. (1958) Selected Writings, Vol. II., 1. Taylor (Ed.), Basic Books, New York. Jcffress, L. A. (Ed.) (195 1) Cerebral Mechanisms in Behovior, Wiley, New York. Joynt, R. (1964) Paul Picrrc Broca: his contribution to the knowledge of aphasia. Cortex, 1. Kean, M-L (1977) The Linguistic Interpretation of Aphasic Syndromes. In Explorations in the Biology of Language, Report of the MIT Work Group on the Biology of Language. Kean, M.-L. and Garrett, M. (forthcoming) Levels of Representation and the Analysis of Speech Errors. Kehoe, W. J. and Whitaker, H. A. (1973) Lexical Structure Disruption in Aphaisa. In Goodglass and Blumstein. Kerschentcincr, M., Poeck, K. and Brunncr, E. (1972) The fluency- non fluency dimension in aphasia. Cortex, 8. Lashley, K. S. (1951) The problem of serial order in behavior. In L. A. Jeffress (cd.) Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior. The Hixon Symposium, New York, Wiley. Lecours, A. R. and Lhermitte, F. (1969) Phonemic paraphasias: linguistic structures and tentative hypotheses. Cortex, 5. Reprinted in Goodglass and Blumstein. Lecours, A. R. and Rouillon 1:. (1976) Nemolinguistic Analysis of Jargonaphasia and Jargonagraphia. In Whitaker and Whitaker (1976b). Lenneberg, I<. (1967) Biological I’oundutions of Language, John Wiley and Sons, New York. Lesser, R. (1974) Verbal comprehension in aphasia: an English version of three Italian tests. Cortex, 10. Locke, S., Caplan, D. and Kellar, M. (1973) A Study in Neurolinguistics, Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Ill. Luria, A. R. (1958) Brain disorders and language analysis. Lang. Sp., 1. Luria, A. R. (1966) Ncuropsychology in the local diagnosis of brain damage. Cortex, 1. Luria, A. R. (1966) Higher Cortical Functions in Man, Basic Books, New York. Luria, A. R. (1966) Human Brain and Psychological Processes, Harper and Row, New York. Luria, A. R. (1970) Traumatic Aphastiz, Mouton: The Hague. Marie, P. (1906) La troisiime circonvolution frontale gauche nc jouc aucun role special dans la fonction du language, Sem. Med. Par., 26. Meyer, A. (1974) 1;rontal lobe syndromes, the aphasias and related conditions. Brain, 97. Mcycrson, R. and Goodglass, H. (1972) Transformational grammar of three agrammatic patients. Lang. Sp., 15. Millikan, C. II. and Darlcy, 1:. L. (Lds.) (1967) Bruin Mechanisms Underlying Speech and Language, Grunt and Stratton, New York. Mohr, J. P. (1975) Broca’s Area and Broca’s Aphasia. In Whitaker and Whitaker (1976a). Nielson, J. M. (1936) Agnosiu, Apraxia and Aphasia Hoeber, New York. Nell, J. D. and Berry, W. (1969) Some thoughts on the Token Test, J. Indiana Sp. Hear. Assoc., 27. Orgass, B. and Pocck, K. (1966) Clinical evaluation of a new test for aphasia: an experimental study on the Token Test. Cortex, 2. Hccaen, llecacn,
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Osgood, C. E. and Muon, M. S. (Eds.) (1963) Approaches to the Study of Aphasia. Urbana. Parisi, D. and Pizzamiglio, L. (1970) Syntactic comprehension in aphasia. Cortex, 6. Penfield, W. and Roberts, L. (1959) Speech and Brain Mechanisms, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Pick, A. (1913) Die agrammatischen Sprachstorungen, Springer, Berlin. Pizzamiglio, L. and Parisi, D. (1970) Studies on verbal comprehension in aphasia. In C. B. Ilores d’Arcais and W. J. M. Levelt. Pizzamiglio, L. and Appicciafuoco, A. (1967) Test a scelta multipla per la valutazione dei disturbi di comprehensione negli afasici. Arch. Psicol. Neurol. Psichiat., 6. Poeck, J., Kerochenstuner, M. and Hargje,W. (1972) A quantitative study on language understanding in fluent and nonfluent aphasia. Cortex, 8. Ramsey, P. P. (1965) The Foundations ofMathematics, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. de Reuck, A. V. S. and O’Connor, M. (1964) Disorders of Language, Churchill, London. Rioch, D. McK., and Weinstein, E. A. (Eds.) (1964) Disorders of Communication, Williams and Wilkins: Baltimore. Roberts, L. (1966) Central brain mechanisms in speech. In Carterette. Russell, W. R. and Espir, M. L. E. (1961) Traumatic Aphasia, Oxford University Press, London. Sasanuma S. and P’ujimura, 0. (1971) Selective impairment of processing phonetic and non-phonetic transcriptions of words in aphasic patients: kana and kanji in visual recognition and writing. Cortex, 7, 196 - 218. Sasanuma S. and l’ujimura, 0. (1972) An analysis of writing errors in Japanese aphasic patients: kanji versus kana words. Cortex, 8, 265 - 282. de Saussure, F. (1966) Course in General Linguistics, McGraw Hill, New York. Schnitzer, M. (1972) Generative Phonology--Evidence from Aphasia, Pennsylvania State University, State College. for five linguistic hypotheses, Lang., 50. Schnitzcr, M. (1974) Aphasiological evidence Schuell, H., Jenkins, J. J., and Jimcncz-Panbon, E. (1964) Aphasia in Adults, Harper and Row, New York. Selkirk, E. 0. (1972) The Phrase Phonology of Enghsh and French, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, MIT. Shankweiler, D. and Harris, K. S. (1973) An experimental approach to the problem of articulation in aphasia. In Goodglass and Blumstein. Shewan, C.-M. and Canter, G. J. (1971) Effects of vocabulary, syntax, and sentence length on auditory comprehension in aphasic patients. Cortex, 7. Swisher, L. P. and Sarno, M. T. (1969) Token Test scores of three matched patient groups: left braindamaged with aphasia, right brain-damaged without aphasia, non-brain-damaged. Cortex, 5. Vignolo, L. (1964) livolution of aphasia and language rehabilitation: a retrospective exploratory study. Cortex, 1. von Stockert, T. R. (1972) Recognition of syntactic structure in aphasic patients. Cortex, 8. de Villiers, J. (1974) Quantitative aspects of agrammatism in aphasia. Cortex, 10. Wagenaar, E., Snow, C. and Prins, R. (1975) Spontaneous speech of aphasic patients: a psycholinguistic analysis. Brain Lang., 2. Weigl, E. and Bierwisch, M. (1970) Neuropsychology and linguistics: topics of common research. Found. Lang., 6. Wepman, J. M. and Jones, L. V. (1964) Five aphasiacs: a commentary on aphasia as a regressive linguistic phenomenon. In Rioch and Weinstein. Wernicke, C. (1874) Dcr aphasische Synftomencomplex: Eine psychologische Studie auf anatomischer Basis, Cohn and Weigert, Breslau. Wernicke, C. (1881) Lehrburch der Gehirnkrankheiten, Fischer, Berlin. Weiscnberg, T. S. and McBride, K. L. (1964) Aphasia, Hafner, New York.
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Whitaker, H. A. (1970) Linguistic competence: evidence from aphasia. Glossa, 4. Whitaker, H. A. (1971) On the Representation of Imguage in the Human Mind, Linguistic Research, Edmonton. Whitaker, H. A. (1971) Neurolinguistics. In Dingwall. Whitakcr, H. A. and Nell, J. D. (1972) Some linguistic parameters of the token test. Neuropsychol., 10. Whitaker, H. and Whitakcr, H. (I-ds.) (1976a) Studies in Neurolinguistics, I, Academic Press, New York. Whitaker, H. and Whitaker, H. (Eds.) (1976b) Studies in Neurolinguisfics, II, Academic Press: New York. Zurif, 1;. and Blumstein, S. (1976) Language and the brain: evidence from aphasia. Paper presented at the Convocation on Communication in celebration of the Centennial of the Telephone, MIT. Zurif, E., Caramazza, A. and Meyerson, R. (1972) Grammatical judgments of agrammatic aphasics, Neuropsychologkz, 10. Zurif, 1% and Caramazza, A. (1976) Psycholinguistic Structures in Aphaisa: Studies in syntax and semantics. In Whitaker and Whitaker (1976a).
Unc des plus frappantes caractt%istiques typique du langage des aphasiques de Broca est I’agrammatismc caract6risd par l’omission des mots “fonctionnels” et desmorph&mesindiquant des inflexions. L’agrammatisme est le plus souvent consid& commc symptomatique d’un deficit syntaxique. Nous pensons quc cette optique manque de rigueur grammaticale et que seule une interprktation de cc dbfitit en termes de structure phonologique peut dtre cohkrentc et systdmatique. Une classe naturelle composdc de mots de fonction et de certains morphemes lids, peut gtre ddfinie par rLf&ence aux propriktks de fronti&rcs des phrases lcsquellcs dkfinissent les mots phonologiques. C’est cette classe d’&ments qui tend g disparaitrc dans le discours agrammatical. Le but de cet article n’est pas seulement de fournir unc hypothese pcrmettant d’interprtter un syndrome aphasique, mais aussi de tester et d’illustrer l’id6e qu’il est efficace de considerer attentivement lcs universaux substantifs de la structure grammaticale lorsqu’il s’agit de rendre compte dcs deficits linguistiques.
Cognition, @Elsevier
5 (1977) 57 - 71 Sequoia S.A., Lausanne
3 - Printed
in the Netherlands
Performance
of expert abacus operators*
GIYOO HATANO Dokk yo University,
Japan
YOSHIO MIYAKE National
Institute
for Educational
Research,
Japan
and MARTIN The University
G. BINKS of Liverpool,
England
Abstract Ten expert abacus operators were given various restrictions and distractions during addition of ten numbers of 3-5 figures. All subjects except one could calculate very rapidly without an abacus, probably relying upon its mental representation. Some of those at an intermediate level of mastery moved their fingers as if they had been manipulating a real abacus, and prohibition of this movement or interfering finger-tapping reduced their performance. All the subjects could answer simple non-mathematical questions during abacus calculation without increasing time or errors, but answering extraneous mathematical questions was very hard. We sought in this study to investigate, by distracting expert abacus operators in various ways, the cognitive and psycho-motor mechanisms involved in working with the modern Japanese version of this venerable instrument of calculation. Abacus operation is psychologically interesting as a typical overlearned cognitive skill or habit. Almost all Japanese children learn how to use the abacus in the third grade in school and have some practice until the 6th grade. In addition, there are many private training schools for children and adolescents. According to the Yomiuri Shimbun (May 13, 1971) one of the
*We are grateful to the operators for their cooperation, and to Mr. I. Ozawa, head of Murata Commercial High School for Girls for making the subjects available to us. We also would like to thank Prof. D. Norman (University of California, San Diego) for his valuable suggestions. Requests for reprints should be sent to G. Hatano, Dokkyo University, Soka-shi, Saitama, Japan 340.
48
Giyoo Hatano, Yoshio Miyake and Martin G, Binks
best-known newspapers in Japan, more than two million take some qualifying examination for one of the grades (10th class to 1st class; then level 1 master to level 10 master grade) every year. In some junior high schools and high schools, there is an abacus club, members of which compete in matches and tournaments. Usually these players practice at least a few hours every day for several years. This undoubtedly produces an overlearned skill. Since overlearning is characteristic of the routine use of an established skill, and since the nature of this final stage may be different from earlier stages of acquisition, the presence of overlearning increases the validity of generalizations from experimental studies of a skill to its daily use. In daily observation, two things about abacus calculation as an overlearned skill are especially intriguing. First, abacus operation tends to be gradually interiorized to such a degree that many abacus masters can calculate even faster and more accurately without an abacus than with the instrument itself. They move their fingers during mental calculation as if they were actually fingering an abacus, though grand masters manage not to do so. Their finger movements are analogous to mouthing the words while reading. Secondly, while expert practitioners are using an abacus they can carry on a conversation. Like the subjects who did a pair of high ideomotor compatibility tasks in Greenwald’s experiment (1972), they can do two things at one time - calculating and asking and/or answering questions. This suggests, hypothetically, that after their overlearning, abacus operators need only a limited amount of attention for calculation, and little linguistic processing is involved therein. Since there have been almost no systematic, scientific studies on abacus operation, the experiment reported here was aimed at examining mental calculation and the effects of answering questions during operation under controlled experimental conditions relying mainly upon the dual task technique. Specifically, it concerned 1) whether or not most expert operators could calculate mentally, 2) how their performance would change if their finger movement was prohibited or interfered with, 3) whether or not they could answer a question asked during abacus operation and/or 4) during mental operation, and 5) how the answers to l)-4) would depend upon their level of mastery. Method Procedure
The experiment digit recitation
was individually administered. Prior to the main part, the sub-test from Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) was
Perfomance of expert abacus operators
49
given, first as prescribed in the manual (Ml), and the second time by reading each series as if it had been a large number (e.g., 628 was read as six hundred twenty-eight, M2). Better performance was expected under the latter condition, because abacus operators surely have much experience of representing and processing orally given large numbers. Seven series of 10 addition problems were given in turn. Each problem consisted of 10 three-to-five digit numbers, 40 digits in all. All digits were randomly chosen, with the restriction that the most significant digit should not be zero. The problems were printed out from the computer, ten numbers from top to bottom, with the corresponding figures in the same column and presented to the subjects visually. After two or three practice items of the same sort, a subject was required to give oral answers for each of the problems as quickly and as accurately as possible. Time was measured from the ‘begin’ signal to where she started her answer, The following experimental conditions were set in order to examine effects of three independent variables on computation time and accuracy: availability of abacus (El, E2; E3, E5); finger movement (E2, E6, E7) subsidiary questions (E 1, E3, E4; E2, E5). (El)
use of abacus as usual
No distractions (E2)
nor restrictions
were given.
mental calculation
No abacus but no distractions nor restrictions. A subject was permitted to write down partial answers during the calculation, but required to give the final answer aloud. (E3)
use of abacus
interposed
with a simple, non-mathematical
question
A factual or preference question, such as “What is your name?“, “What is the highest mountain in Japan?“, “What is the capital of England?“, “What is your favorite food?“, was orally presented 5 seconds after the signal to begin calculation. (E4)
use of abacus interposed
with a simple mathematical
question
Five seconds after the ‘begin’ signal, a subject was given a simple mathematical question orally, e.g., “What is 3 plus 8?“, “What is 16 minus 9?“, “What is 72 divided by 6?” (Es)
mental
calculation
interposed
with
a non-mathematical
question
A subject, denied the use of the abacus as in E2, was asked a non-mathematical question as in E3.
50
Giyoo Hatano, Yoshio Miyake and Martin G. Binks
036)
mental calculation
without
A subject was prohibited operation, but no distraction (E7)
mental calculation
moving fingers
from moving was presented.
with compulsory
her fingers
to simulate
abacus
tapping
A subject was requested to tap on the table with the left hand (problems l-5), then the right hand (6-10) at her own preferred speed. She was permitted to move the fingers of the other hand, but no one was observed doing so. Since those conditions under which subjects were distracted had been preceded by ‘baseline’ tasks (El and E2), there may have been contamination through warm-up effects, or, on the other hand, fatigue. However, daily observation suggests that performance of skilled operators is so stable over a period of a few hours, that in this test session of 30 to 35 minutes, we can ignore these factors with little risk. Speed of calculation was compared between conditions and between subjects by 2 factorial ANOVA, treating each subject’s solution times on 10 problems as ‘independent’ behavior samples from universe, because little inter-problem carry-over effect was expected to exist for speed. Accuracy was compared only between two conditions by the Wilcoxon matched pair signed rank test, using the number of correct responses of each subject. Thus, the number of pairs was reduced when some subjects made the same number of correct responses under the two conditions. Two-tailed test was used throughout for both speed and accuracy. Subjects
Ten skilled female abacus users, 16- 18 years of age, served as subjects. They were the ablest operators of the ‘abacus club’ of a senior high school and qualified as ikkyu (first class) or better. Six of them had acquired shodan (level 1 master) or an even higher grade. In order to be qualified as ikkyu, one has to be able to perform 2.4 single operations of addition or subtraction per second when a problem is presented visually, but is not required to calculate mentally. Qualifications above this, i.e., for master levels, require greater speed and some skills of mental operation.
Results 1. Most subjects said in a post-experiment informal interview imagined arranged beads of an abacus when they heard a number.
that they However,
Performance
of expert abacus operators
51
the digit memory span of abacus masters did not greatly exceed the national median. Range for Ml was 5 to 9 with a median of 6.5 and that for M2 5 to 8 with a median of 7. There was no marked correspondence between memory span and skill of abacus operation. 2. Means and standard deviations of response (calculation) time and the number of correct responses for each condition over individual subjects are shown in Table 1. Most subjects, working with the abacus at an average rate of two to four digits per second, made few, if any, errors, in El. Stability within subjects was high, i.e., mean within-subject standard deviation over 10 problems was 1.68 sec.
Table 1.
Means and standard deviations (SD) of reaction correct responses (CR) over subjects RT
El, E2, E3, E4, ES, E6, E7,
abacus mental abacus-nonmathematical abacus-mathematical mental-nonmathematicdl mental-fixing hand mental-tapping
time (RT)
and number of
CR
mean
SD
mean
range
15.1 13.9 14.9 15.8 14.2 13.3 14.3
3.14 4.38 3.24 2.70 3.75 4.15 5.10
8.5 5.8 8.3 7.1 3.0 3.5 3.8
6-10 2-9 5-10 4-9 l-5 o-9 O-7
Note: Data for one subject unable to calculate paper are omitted in E2, E5, E6 and E7.
mentally
without
pencil and
3. There appeared very clear individual differences in mental calculation, E2, again with high stability within subjects (mean standard deviation was 1.38 set). If we rank the subjects according to their speed on E2, half of them, all of intermediate capacity, moved their fingers as if to simulate abacus operation. Sl, S2, S3 and S5 did not move their fingers. The weakest (SIO) resorted to pencil and paper and her data for mental calculation are excluded. Mental calculation took significantly less time than actual operation for the best five. For the remaining four (excluding SlO) the reverse was true. When 2 (El, E2) X 9 (subjects l-9) factorial ANOVA with 10 repetitions in each cell was conducted, the interaction effect was highly significant, F(8, 262) = 12.8, p < 0.01. 4. Though prohibition of hand movements did not produce any consistent change in the rate of calculation, performance deteriorated (between E2 and
52
Giyoo Hatano, Yoshio Miyake and Martin G. Binks
E6, by the Wilcoxon matched pair signed rank test, T = 4, n = 9, p < 0.025). This means moving fingers helped at least some subjects. However, this, and even finger tapping, did not prevent the best two (Sl and S2) from scoring nearly 100% (90% each). 5. The negative effect of finger tapping was similar to that of mere immobilization of subjects’ hands. It significantly reduced the number of correct responses (between E2 and E7, T = 1,n = 9, p < O.Ol), but its overall effect on speed was not clear (F (1, 162) = 2.3 1, p > 0.1). Right hand tapping was not significantly more disturbing than left hand tapping (average calculation time among Sl-S9 was 15.4 set for right with 28 errors while 13.4 for left, with 29 errors). 6. With an abacus, being asked non-mathematical questions affected neither accuracy nor speed (between El and E3, for speed F (1, 180) = 0.457; for the number of correct responses, T = 11, n = 7). On the contrary, questions involving calculation had a clear inhibitory effect: they often completely blocked performance of the main task. This was the only condition under which our best two subjects needed significantly longer time. It seemed to be impossible for the subjects to calculate two sets of numbers at the same time. (Between El and E4, for speed F (1, 180) = 7.978, p < O.Ol;foraccuracy T=5,n= lO,p< 0.025). 7. Without an abacus, asking non-mathematical questions had a negative effect on accuracy generally, and on speed only for the upper five subjects (between E2 and E5, for speed, F (1, 162) = 1.95, p > 0.1; for accuracy T = 0,n= 9,p < 0.01; forspeed of Sl-S5,F(l, 90) = 7.80,~ < 0.01). 8. Though our subjects tried hard to answer all interfering questions, they answered several incorrectly and sometimes failed to respond at all. Excluding SlO, who failed to reply on 18 items of the 30, their average number of no-response-plus-error was 4.9 (16.3%). Incidentally, they could not answer some questions even after the experiment was over.
Discussion
First, the problem of ‘interiorization’ will be discussed. All subjects but SlO showed extraordinary speed in mental calculation, and four of them (Sl, S2, S4 and S5) performed with considerable accuracy (80% correct or better on E2). Although the fact that SlO relied solely upon the pencil-and-paper technique means that mastery of manual abacus operation does not necessarily guarantee drastic improvement in mental calculation, the other nine subjects seemed to have ‘interiorized’ their skill in abacus operation to a varied extent.
Perfomance of expert abacus operators
53
That their mental calculation derived from abacus operation was suggested by the imitative finger movements of the subjects of intermediate capacity (the very skilled subjects reported they had been moving fingers sometime before), and also by the detrimental effects of manual restriction and extraneous movement (E6 and E7). If their mental operations were purely cognitive, keeping their hands still would not have been inhibitory. Even finger tapping should produce no difficulty, since it is only an ‘emission’ task, according to Peterson’s classification (1969), requiring neither discrimination nor transformation. In fact, Jastrow (1891-2) found no mutual interference between a cognitive task and rhythmic finger tapping when the latter was self-paced. However, E6 and E7 significantly reduced the accuracy of mental calculation, except for the best two subjects. In other words, abacus operation tends to interiorize into mental operation through a transition stage wherein the mental operation is not completely independent from the motor system and abacus-simulating finger movement gives important support. It is not clear why finger movements are essential for the transition to mental abacus operation, but they might provide feedback about the progress of the calculation, or serve as a representation of the digits and the calculation. This kind of dactylic coding has been observed in memory experiments with deaf children (Locke and Locke, 197 1). As they progress, the mental operation comes to involve only visual representation without relying upon the motor elements. In this ‘mature’ stage, neither the prohibition of finger movement nor tapping causes any disturbance. In addition, their mental calculation is much faster than their actual abacus operation, because it is no longer limited by their fingering speed. This exclusion of peripheral activity has also been reported in a study of exceptional skill in solving arithmetic problems by mental calculation using Western methods (Hunter, 1966). Longitudinal studies are necessary to establish that individuals must make these qualitative changes in the underlying processes if their performance is to improve and extend to mental abacus calculation. This would exclude the interpretation that each of these different processes is a stable characteristic of a subgroup of subjects and does not change as a necessary condition of improved performance. Factors inhibiting the interiorization for SlO were not analysed here, but certainly deserve close examination. Secondly, from E3 and E4, the compatibility of additional conversational tasks with abacus operation and its limitation will be discussed. Answering a verbal query during calculations did not disturb manual operation (E3). This confirmed daily observation and strongly suggests that 1) their operations are now quasi-automatic and need only a limited amount of attention, and that 2) while conversation is carried out in the auditory-linguistic
54
Giyoo Hatano, Yoshio Miyake and Martin G. Binks
system, abacus operation is conducted mainly in the visual-motor system. These suggestions were also supported by an additional experiment showing that immediate repetition of a word or a series of 3 digits did not have any detrimental effect on computation time or accuracy. Moreover, magnitude of this compatibility is rather constant among the skilled practitioners, irrespective of their relative level of mastery. Unlike abacus masters, people who have little or no experience in abacus operation seem to use the auditory-linguistic system in calculation (paperand-pencil or mental) to a considerable extent. Therefore, even simple repetition of an extraneous word is expected to be incompatible with calculation. This was confirmed in another auxiliary experiment with three university students with minimal experience of abacus operation. Their calculation was significantly slowed down even by immediate repetition, which proved to have no effect on the expert abacus practitioners’ calculation. Matching the subjects and experts for arithmetic ability, or the use of the same experts for both methods of calculation would strengthen these results. However, the same combination as E3 was extremely difficult in E4. Even the expert abacus users, for whom abacus operation seems nearly automatic, could not calculate another set of numbers promptly while working on the abacus. This clearly established a limit to the generality of the daily observation. Two interpretations can be raised: first, calculation requires a considerable amount of attention or informationprocessing while answering factual or preference questions involves only little. A second possible interpretation takes the similarity or overlap of the two operations as critical. The expert abacus users may have relied upon a mental abacus even for the simple mathematical questions asked in E4. This point will be examined more systematically in varieties of dual-task experiments including those with more demanding non-mathematical questions. No marked differential effects were observed in either condition between the best and poorest 5 subjects. This may be due to the fact that less advanced practitioners tend to waste a certain amount of motion or attention during calculation, while those who are more advanced work more efficiently so that little or no such ‘empty time’ is expended. E5, concerned with the compatibility of conversation with mental operation, cast some light on the differences between abacus and mental operation. Considering that performance was disturbed in E5 while nonmathematical questions did not deteriorate abacus operation (E3), mental calculation seems less stable than abacus operation. Mental calculation may be so demanding that it is disrupted by the modest additional processing posed by non-mathematical questions.
Performance of expert abacus operators
55
References Greenwald, A. G. (1972) On doing two things at once: time sharing as a function of ideomotor compatibility. J. exp. Psychol., 94, 52-57. Hunter, 1. M. L. (1968) Mental calculation. In P. C. Wason and P. N. Johnson-Laird (Ids.), Thinking und reasoning. Harmondsworth, England, Penguin Books. Jastrow, J. (1891-2) The interference of mental processes. Amer. J. PsychoL. 4, 219-223. Locke, J. L. and Locke, V. L. (1971) Deaf children’s phonetic, visual and dactylic coding in a grapheme recall task. J. exp. PsychoL, 89, 142-146. Peterson, L. R. (1969) Concurrent verbal activity. Psychol. Rev., 76, 376-386.
A dix opcrateurs experts d’abaque sont don&s de diverses restrictions et des distractions pendant l’addition de dix nombres de 3-5 chiffres visuellement present&. Sauf un sujet, tous peuvent calculer tres rapidement sans abaque, probablement en comptant sur la representation “interiorisee”. Quelques-uns d’entre eux qui se trouvent au niveau intermediaire de la maitrise, remuent leurs doigts commc s’ils etaient en train de manipuler un abaque reel et la prohibition de ce mouvement ou l’interference du frappement des doigts reduisent leur performance. Les deux meilleurs opkrateurs ont marquc presque 100% sans augmentation de temps sous ces conditions. Cc fait suggere que leurs operations mentales ne comportent en effet que la representation visuelle sans compter sur les elements moteurs. Tous les sujets peuvent repondre aux questions simples sur des verites ou des preferences pendant le calcul par abaque sans augmentation de temps ou d’erreurs. C’est peutdtre parce que, apres leur apprentissage excessif, les operateurs n’ont besoin que d’attention limit&e pour le calcul et le traitement linguistique entre peu dedans. Cependant, la rdponse aux questions differentes sur les mathematiques est t&s difficile. L’etude supplkmentaire sera nccessaire pour determiner lequel entre deux facteurs, c’est-i-dire, la nature plus exigeante de la question mathematique ou sa similarite dans le traitement, rend les deux operations incompatibles.
Cognition, 5 (1977) @Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne
Word associations
- Printed
in the Netherlands
and the development
of lexical memory
SANDY PETREY State University
of New York at Stony Brook
Abstract Endel Tulving’s distinction between “episodic” and “semantic” memory defines changes with age in word association norms in a more informative and more comprehensive manner than the syntactic classifications normally used. The principal development as subjects mature is an episodic-semantic shift. Young children associate primarily to the stimulus’s perceived contexts, older subjects to its abstract semantic content. Endel Tulving’s binary opposition between “episodic” and “semantic” memory has proven its utility by precisely defining methodological and theoretical distinctions in several areas of cognitive psychology. This paper will test the value of that opposition in considering a restricted set of linguistic data to which it has not yet been applied, the well-documented differences between children’s and adults’ word-association norms. Usually described by different syntactic characteristics, changes with age in responses to verbal stimuli are in fact more comprehensively defined by the distinctions between the episodic and semantic storage-retrieval systems. Although the paper entitled “Episodic and Semantic Memory” is Tulving’s (1972) most thorough discussion of the subject, his subsequent work includes more succinct and accessible summaries: . ..episodic memory is concerned with storage and retrieval of temporally dated, specially located, and personally experienced events or episodes, and temporal-spatial relationships among such events... Semantic memory is the system concerned with storage and utilization of knowledge about words and concepts, their properties, and interrelations. Thus, episodic information about a word refers to information about the event of which the word is the focal element, or one of the focal elements, while semantic information about a word is entirely independent of the word’s occurrence in a particular situation or its temporal co-occurrence with some other words. (Tulving and Thomson, 1973: 354)
58
Sandy Petrey
Two points in that passage will be crucial to this paper. (1) Despite the normal use of “semantic”, Tulving’s semantic memory is not synonymous with “information about lexical items”. As the last sentence specifies, we store and retrieve both semantic and episodic information about words. (2) The two kinds of contexts, linguistic and non-linguistic, correspond to two sorts of episodic information about words. Episodic knowledge includes both memory of a word’s co-occurrence with other words (its verbal context) and of the event of which it is a focal element (its situational context). Both contexts are “personally experienced” or, using a term Tulving takes from Reiff and Scheerer (1959), “autobiographical”. Semantic memory has no autobiographical component. Tulving himself considers word associations a pure example of inquiry into semantic memory (Tulving, 1972: 402). It is true that word-association norms reveal far more about semantic memory than the results of experiments on verbal learning which, because they involve cued storage and retrieval, depend on episodic memory. Nevertheless, the presumption that free association activates exclusively semantic memory cannot account for a basic opposition in recent theories of word associations, that between “syntagmatic” and “paradigmatic” responses. Paradigmatic associations are those in which stimulus and response belong to the same form class: noun-noun, verb-verb, adjective-adjective and so on. Syntagmatic responses fail to preserve the stimulus’s form class and produce associations like noun-verb or adjective-noun. The primary and secondary responses to high in the Kent-Rosanoff (1910), Russell-Jenkins (1954) and Entwisle (1966) norms for adults exemplify the critical characteristics of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses in general. In all three, the paradigmatic adjective low was the primary response, emitted by as many as 65% of the subjects. This is consistent with adults’ paradigmatic tendency, their marked preference for responses from the same form class as the stimulus. Moreover, the crossexperimental consistency of low illustrates the commonality often correlated with paradigmatic associations. The contrasts are striking when we look at secondary responses to high in the three sets of norms, mount&, school and FZOO~Z. All are nouns and consequently form syntagmatic responses to the adjective high. None is emitted by more than 16% of the subjects. Each survey elicited a different secondary response, yet all three complete a leftright sequence from normal speech: high-mountain, high-school, and high-noon. This last characteristic of syntagmatic responses originally suggested the possible value of applying the episodic-semantic distinction to word associations. “Semantic memory does not register perceptible properties of
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
59
inputs, but rather cognitive referents of input signals.” (Tulving, 1972: 386) Applied to words, this means that semantic memory registers the signified rather than the signifier, to use Saussure’s (1916) classic division of the linguistic sign into its perceptual form and the mental concept it conveys. When Tulving defined as episodic that memory of words which depends on “temporal co-occurrence with other words”, he was referring to artificial laboratory situations which lead subjects to associate lexical items presented together, regardless of their pre-experimental connections. But natural utterances also create a temporal co-occurrence of signifiers. Associations like high-mountain or high-school could be the effect of subjects reacting to various representations of high as a signified, “physically elevated” or “intellectually advanced”, and providing another word from the same semantic complex, mountain or school. But they could also be purely echoic repetitions of two words often perceived together. High-noon is certainly the effect of the perceived co-occurrence which is among the defining traits of episodic memory. High signifies “exactly” only when it is linked with noon. We cannot say “high 12 o’clock”. The semantic content of the stimulus thus exists only after subjects have combined it with the response in the syntagm high-noon. This kind of idiomatic association argues that other syntagmatic responses may also be the result of episodic memory. Early explanations of word associations stressed the importance of contiguity in utterances, of perceived co-occurrences, in creating the bond between stimulus and response. As many recent authors have argued, however, subjects’ general paradigmatic tendency constitutes an insuperable objection to this model. English grammar is such that words of the same form class are contiguous far less often than words of different form classes. The classic theory of word associations thus cogently explains only syntagmatic associations, yet adult word-association norms consistently display paradigmatic dominance. McNeil1 (1966) and H. Clark (1970) are representative of the recent commentators who emphasize the objection to an association-by-contiguity model posed by paradigmatic associations. They explain the link between stimulus and response by deep-structure connections independent of perceptible phenomena: “...‘association theory’ cannot account for language comprehension and production; language, the critics say, should not be thought of as a consequence of built-up associations; rather, word associations should be thought of as a consequence of linguistic competence.” (H. Clark, 1970: 272) The paper containing that quotation is further typical of linguistically based theories of word associations in that it relies heavily on the concept of a mental dictionary structured by minimal units of significance below the level of the word, the semantic features hypothesis. This hypothesis econo
60
Sandy Petrey
mically and persuasively explains paradigmatic responses to verbal stimuli, which generally obey what Clark calls a simplicity-of-production rule: “Perform the least change on the lowest feature, with the restriction that the result must correspond to an English word” (H. Clark, 1970: 284). What Carrol, Kjeldergaard and Carton ( 1962) designated as opposite-evoking stimuli exemplify how this rule operates. Man-womun, for instance, is a highly frequent association because the response changes the last feature of the stimulus [+male] , while preserving all others, such as [+humanl and [ +adult] . Non-antonymous associations derive from more complex operations like addition or deletion of features, necessary when the least change on the lowest feature does not have a lexical realization. The more featural changes required, the more diverse response patterns become. Featural theories readily account for mature subjects’ paradigmatic tendency. In the lexical hierarchy, form-class markers are very high. Since the rule is to change the lowest feature, responses will naturally preserve the stimulus’s form class. Then why do syntagmatic responses occur at all? While Clark is aware of the importance of that question, his discussion of syntagmatics is a major flaw in an elegant paper. He explains them by a complete-the-idiom rule which involves an extremely loose definition of “idiom”. If white-housr and ncetlle urzd thread, two of Clark’s examples, are idiomatic, so are most common sequences in normal speech. Moreover, even if we grant Clark’s use of “idiom”, the theoretical dilemma remains. The idiom-completion rule, which depends on contiguity in surface structure, is not assimilable under the simplicity-of-production rule, which depends on congruence in deep structure. To put it another way, the simplicity-of-production rule depends on the immediate cognitive reference characteristic of semantic memory; the idiom-completion rule relies on the autobiographically experienced cooccurrence which identifies episodic memory. The need to confront syntagmatic responses appears more imperious when we recall that the paradigmatic tendency is developmentally a late acquisition. Young children display a marked syntagmatic tendency. (Brown and Berko, 1960; Ervin, 1961) Given the importance contemporary linguistics attaches to children’s early linguistic ability, this distinction between children and adult norms is of great interest. Tulving identified semantic memory as that “necessary for the use of language”. (1972: 386) The generally valid assertion that abstract featural relationships determine adult associations confirms that statement. But children, who also use lankwage, respond to verbal stimuli in a different way. And their syntagmatic associations are fully as suggestive of episodic memory as adults’ paradigmatic associations are of semantic memory.
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
61
Although the increase with maturity of paradigmatic responses - the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift (S-P shift) - has long been recognized (Woodrow and Lowell, 1916), the most complete study of age-related changes is Entwisle’s comparatively recent Word Associations in Young Children (1966). After administering 96 stimuli to 1,240 subjects in kindergarten, grades one, three and five, and college, Entwisle presented her massive data in both analyzed and raw form. Her analysis concentrates on the thorough description of the S-P shift provided by her survey, a description she justifiably designated as her “primary finding”. (Entwisle, 1966: 120). By showing that the S-P shift was correlated with I.Q. as well as with age, Entwisle’s study gave further reason for assuming that the paradigmatic tendency reveals something significant about language ability in general. But what? Since syntagmatic responses fail to preserve form class categories, it would seem that the S-P shift reflects increasing sensitivity to syntactic properties. Yet McNeil1 (1966) was correct to protest that this explanation makes no sense in light of what we know about children’s ability to generate grammatical utterances. Whereas normal children are speaking correctly, and thus displaying great sensitivity to form-class distinction, by the age of four, the S-P shift is most dramatic between the ages of six and eight. Variations in syntactic capacities are therefore inherently unable to explain the differences between children and adult norms, and the paradigmatic-syntagmatic opposition can by definition describe nothing except syntactic variations. That argues for another taxonomy, such as that provided by the episodic-semantic distinction. The place to test the adequacy of Tulving’s categories is readily available in Entwisle’s raw data, 409 pages of computer printouts containing every response emitted by 1,040 children to 96 stimuli. Because of the mass of these data, the following discussion will of necessity depend on representative examples. Before choosing them, however, the first group in Entwisle’s appendices, kindergarten associations to add, can serve as a random illustration of why the syntagmatic-paradigmatic distinction is inadequate to deal with what is exciting about children’s norms. The most striking fact about the words add elicits from five-year-olds is that they include only one (0.5%) instances of subtract; 185 (66.1%) of Entwisle’s third-grade subjects, only three years older, responded to add with subtract. For kindergarteners, subtract is statistically no more firmly associated with add than any of 115 other idiosyncratic responses of extraordinary diversity. Add-subtract is of course paradigmatic, and its huge increase is certainly related to older subjects’ greater mastery of the stimulus. But the correlation between paradigmatics and control is not valid for younger subjects. Kinder-
garten syntagmatics to add include numbers, two plus two and fifty; their paradigmatics include sing, guess and walk. Since the first group incontestably indicates more meaningful storage of the stimulus, it is difficult to discern what the S-P distinction is supposed to reveal when applied to immature responses. In Entwisle’s alphabetical listing, the first kindergarten response to add is a cup of water, which completes a common cooking instruction plausibly heard by a young child helping mother in the kitchen. Elicited from only one subject, that response can nevertheless be combined with the associations formed by nineteen other subjects which evoke an identical cooking context: j7our, milk, water, cook, dinner, cake, cookies, someone is cooking. The clustering principle is apparent, but it cannot be described in terms of syntagmatics and paradigmatics. In response to add, the syntagmatic flour and the paradigmatic cook belong together in a way that the two nouns flour and numbers or the two verbs cook and sing do not. If we ccntinue down Entwisle’s alphabetical listing, after add-a cup of water comes add-a horse. Although without theoretical importance, that association deserves comment because it exemplifies the risks of a tendency apparent in many commentators, that of classifying as starkly meaningless children’s responses which are in fact perfectly logical. In isolation, adda horse is nonsense, a pair formed by a child who was not listening to the interviewer. But it becomes quite reasonable when related to the other responses from the same age group. Five other kindergarteners respond to add with Mister Ed, Ed the horse or horse without the article. “Mister Ed” was the name of a talking horse in a television program popular at the time of Entwisle’s survey. The confusion between add and Ed is clear. This identifiable breakdown illustrates how easily systematic associations can appear incoherent. The principal contention of this paper is that, despite their diversity, the 30,000 different responses to 96 stimuli in Entwisle’s appendices are a highly structured demonstration of the principles ordering immature lexical memory. In order to apprehend those principles, we must avoid what Nelson (1973) calls the “adult-dimension fallacy”, make allowances for tangential groups created by confusions like add-Ed, and assess the central groupings which remain on their own terms rather than by concepts developed from adult norms. For the most important point is that young children’s responses display the kinds of clusters just discussed not in addition to but instead of those structuring adult associations. A crucial thesis in current theories of word associations is that the stimulus effects immediate cognitive input into semantic memory, whose systemic organization leads to a semantically related respo.nse. While adult norms strongly support that thesis, immature
Word associations and the deveIopment
of lexical memory
63
norms do not. Quite the contrary; the cooking cluster in response to add is typical in that the stimulus seems to have been stored as a predicate of the sort of situation from which Tulving took the term episodic memory, an autobiographical episode during which it appeared as a focal element. Entwisle’s appendices display consistent grouping around such episodes, a system of contextual bonds far more pervasive than that attributable to semantic similarity or contrast. Recalling external situation of utterance appears to precede the most elementary assignment of internal content. Restricting episodic clusters to those formed in kindergarten norms, happen elicits 24 responses beginning with what and a long list of situationally associated suggestions of the catastrophes which would make children hear accident, and we all fall down, bruise, cry, the question “What happened?“: cut, cut yourself, damn, fall, fell down, fell off her bike, get mud throwned in my face, hurt, hurt knee, something bad, something terrible, we get hurt. Once elicits upon (a time), the sources of that phrase - story, book - and extensive fragments of the language the phrase introduces: three bears, he was a tailor, there was a bunny rabbit, run out into the forest, there was a birdie up high. Cold evokes not only related meteorological terms but also utterances heard when the weather is appropriately described by them, bundle up, don’t go outside, and then you get your coat on. Although representative, these sets obviously exhaust neither Entwisle’s stimuli nor the episodic clusters formed in association to the stimuli mentioned. In order to illustrate fully the grouping principles of kindergarten associations, we must look at one set of responses in detail. Examine, a stimulus which Entwisle was the first to use in a word-association survey, manageably demonstrates the importance of episodic memory, and the corresponding nullity of semantic memory, in young subjects’ reactions to certain words. “Manageably” is a key word in the previous sentence. While responses to all Entwisle’s stimuli form clear episodic groupings, high-frequency words elicit many different clusters. Given the diversity of human experience, this is of course to be expected; children could originally store a common word as the focal element of any number of autobiographical experiences. On the other hand, low-frequency stimuli, which by definition appear in relatively fewer situations, should also elicit a smaller number of clusters. Responses to the low-frequency stimulus examine confirm that this is the case. Despite its relative rarity, exumirze elicits associations which exemplify the global distinctions between mature and immature norms. The 200 kindergarten subjects gave 159 different responses to this single word; their primary and secondary responses, both syntagmatic, together account for only 11.5% of the total. The primary and secondary adult responses, both
64
Sandy Petrey
Table
I.
Stimulus
Episodic and semantic responses to different Appendices C and D) Response
eyes (combined)
stimuli (From
1
1966:
S
K NC%)
NC%)
23(11 S)
46(16.4)
49(17.S)
27C9.7)
7C2.S)
Sl(18.2)
120(42.9)
3(1.1)
examine
doctor,
examine
look (at), check (up), test (combined)
l(0.S)
dark
moon, star(s), (go to) bed,
23(11 .S)
25C8.9)
(go to)sleep
Entwisle,
3 NC%)
NC%)
3(1.1)
(combined)
dark
night
27(13.S)
25C8.9)
31(11.1)
dark
light
25(12.S)
85(30.4)
185(66.0)
9C3.2)
O(G)
OC -)
7(2.5)
S(1.8)
28ClO.O) 180(64.3)
long
lawn/mower)
lO(S.S)
long
grass
16(8.0)
long
short
9C4.S)
S6(20.0)
177C63.2)
164C58.S)
wild
all names of individual animals: bear, lion etc. combined
82(41.0)
88(31.4)
45C16.1)
29ClO.4)
wild
animal(s)
47C23.5)
48C17.2)
48Cl7.2)
40(14.3)
l(0.S)
8C2.9)
44Cl5.7)
81(28.9)
wild
tame
clean
house
clean
dirty
give
(a) present(s)
give
take
listcrz listen
to (...) hear
sometimes
I (...)
sometimes
always
1 l(3.9)
X1.7)
29ClO.4)
15(5.4)
7C3.5)
29ClO.4)
134C47.9)
24Cl2.0)
18C6.4)
4(1.4)
S(l.7)
2(1 .O)
6C2.1)
S6t20.0)
99C35.4)
44C22.0) 12C6.0)
39(13.9) 33C11.8)
8C2.9) 84(33.0)
33(16.5)
22(7.9)
lB(9.0)
O( )
6C2.1)
122(43.6)
4(1.4) 123(43.9)
3Cl.l)
l(O.3)
64(22.9)
S5Cl9.7)
paradigmatic, constitute 41% of their total. The semantic explanation is perfectly adequate to the two most common adult responses, test and look. It is inapplicable to kindergarten responses, which include not a single instance of test or look. If young subjects react to the stimulus’s cognitive content, it is curious that common words with featural connections to examine - look at, check or check up in addition to test and look ~ appear only in isolated cases until third grade. Younger children’s associations to examine do not support the assumption that they have stored it as the vehicle of precise signification. Yet their associations manifest a distinct autobiographical memory of the stimulus. The primary kindergarten response is doctor, given as a single word
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
by 18 subjects. Ifwe accept the connective principle implicit in that perception of the stimulus in a medical environment, the 159 responses lose their diversity. Four subjects mention doctor in word response. An additional 24 emit terms from an extensive lexicon: x-rays, stethoscope, abrasion, pill, blood pressure, sick, hospital, hurt, something’s the matter, needle, 14 mention portions of children’s anatomy
shot, nurse,
dentist,
65
response, different a multimedical checkup, operate:
likely to be examined by a doctor, while 18 give noun and pronoun designations of candidates for medical examination. This grouping accounts for over a third of kindergarten responses. If probable cases like glasses, bed or the medicinal brand name Vicks are included, the percentage increases to around half. In no sense is this set fortuitous. Many of the medical responses are elicited only by examine. None of the 95 other stimuli produces a comparable medical cluster. The connective bonds are obvious, and they are obviously episodic. Associations like examine-doctor uses when you ‘re sick demonstrate that subjects with neither syntactic nor semantic control of the stimulus recalled the circumstances where they had perceived it. Kindergarten responses include sophisticated words - stethoscope, abrasion, blood pressure - implausibly part of a five-year-old’s active vocabulary. Their link to the stimulus is almost certainly analogous to that artificially created between nonsense words presented in the same situations during experiments on episodic memory. Early associations to examine thus depend not on semantic content but on episodic experience, either shared situational environments (examineneedle) or syntactic juxtaposition (examine-blood pressure). The strongest associations are consequently formed between words combined in both situational and linguistic memories, as is exemplified by the primary ‘and secondary kindergarten responses to examine.. doctor and eyes. Sentences such as “We’d better have the doctor examine your eyes” are far more readily imaginable than utterances combining examine with comparably focal words from children’s experience of a medical environment. As Table I shows, doctor and eyes accordingly dominate kindergarten responses and furthermore increase in frequency until third grade, when semantic associations definitively replace episodic responses. Responses to dark illustrate more clearly the refining out of purely situational associations. Pairs likedark-moon ordark-star, inexplicable by the connective structure of semantic memory, are situationally formed. In the same circumstances where they perceive dark, subjects also perceive moon, stars, go to bed, go to sleep. However, none of these responses is likely to be in linguistic contiguity with dark, whereas dark-night is quite common. Associations depending on physical context alone decline drastically by third grade.
66
Sandy Petrey
Responses to long show an analogous shift within the episodic period as well as the much more dramatic shift from episodic to semantic. Grass is the primary kindergarten response to long. Luwn and lawn mower are also perceived in the situation which combines long and grass, but only grass is often syntagmatically contiguous as well. Lawn and Zawn mower, along with other intriguing situational responses like what you cut down and Mr. Smith’s lawn, disappear entirely by third grade. All stimulus-response pairs in Table I display the same chronological development. Remembering perceived contiguities appears to precede mature storage by featural congruence and contrast. Responding by feature change (wild-tame, clean-dirty, give-take), feature deletion (listen-hear) or feature intensification (sometimes-always) predominates only after contextual associations which suggest episodic retrieval. Although perfectly suited to describe the structures of word associations emitted by subjects at both ends of the developmental scale, the episodicsemantic distinction is less helpful in conceptualizing the intermediate period. If we restrict the definition of syntagmatic associations to those responses which form an acceptable English syntagm with the simulus, the developmental sequence can be considered as having three stages: episodicsyntagmatic-semantic. As discussed earlier, syntagmatic responses properly secalled are highly problematic because either semantic or episodic storage could produce them. Uncritical memory of a word’s co-occurrence with other words can lead to meaningful sequences even if the subject does not control the meaning created. For example, any English speaker who has heard the word “hermetically” is likely to associate it with “sealed” irrespective of the degree to which he or she controls “hermetically” as a signified. Dark-night could result from either the associative mechanisms which produce durk-moon or those producing dark-light. While it is self-evident that semantic memory can produce grammatical sequences, it is sometimes not recognized that well-formed utterances can emerge from episodic memory as well. Yet many syntagmata in Entwisle’s appendices are like the kindergarten pair exambze-blood pressure in that it seems legitimate to conclude that subjects are echoing rather than generating their response. For example, the first six stimuli elicit from kindergarteners associations like these: add-some bricks to a house; ulwuj!s-obey the law; u/low-me to introduce myself; because-J’ou ‘re not supposed to; bee-rnJ> Valentine; begin-to work the tractor. It is likely that such associations depend on reaction to the stimulus as a verbal unit which co-occurs with other units, not on reaction to a lexical vehicle for abstract cognitive content. The recognition that episodic memory can produce associations identical to those caused by semantic responding has the advantage of explaining
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
67
patterns which appear not to follow the general development of lexical memory. Young subjects’ responses display in general such low commonality that primary responses can have less than a 5% frequency. Only three of Entwisle’s 96 stimuli - gallop, salt and table - elicited their respective primaries from more than 30% of kindergarten subjects. Associations to salt and table are: K salt-pepper 74(37%) :24(44.3%) T59(56.8%) L5(44.5%) A&l~*.o%) table-chair 65(32.5%) 101(36%) 145(51.9%) 141(50.4%) 131(65.5%) If we avoid the adult-dimension fallacy and think of salt-pepper and tablechair not as we apprehend them but as deriving from episodic memories, the early development of adult patterns is fully comprehensible. They are unusually frequent because linguistic and situational contiguity establish the same link. In the physical world, salt is usually perceived with pepper, tables with chairs. In speech, “salt and pepper” and “table and chairs” are set sequences in a frozen order. It is of course less than desirable to assume that identical associations have different causes in children and adults. But the alternative is to suppose that precocious mature storage of salt and table is what leads children to associate to them in an adult manner. Since no inherent characteristics such as frequency, syntactic properties or semantic content, distinguish these words from many of Entwisle’s other stimuli, it becomes reasonable to assume that the unusual commonality in children’s associations to them is the effect of their plausibly unusual co-occurrence. Gallop elicits associations wholly inexplicable by standard categories. gallop-horse
;2(46%)
f24(44.5%)
:9(28.2%)
5 76(27.1%)
Adult 100(50%)
A word’s frequency of occurrence is broadly correlated with children’s control of it, and it consequently seems logical to expect that immature norms would display the commonality characteristic of adult associations in response to a high-frequency stimulus. But more kindergarteners gave the primary response to the low-frequency gallop than the combined total of all those who gave the primary kindergarten response to the seven highfrequency verbs add, begin, carry, give, move, run, tell. If we join with horse variants like horsey and multi-word responses like oy1 a horse, then the primary five-year-old association to gallop attains a frequency of 70% and bears comparison with those adult associations which have the highest commonality ratings. Such unique consistency demands explanation. The episodic-semantic hypothesis can furnish it. “Gallop” is subject to a peculiarly rigid selection restriction. Although it technically takes any
68
Sandy Petrey
quadruped as agent of the action it designates, for most English speakers including professional linguists: cf., Leech (1974: 1455 146) - galloping is performed only by horses. The preponderance of memories of verbal cooccurrence would consequently link gallop and horse. Situational memories are analogous. “Gallop” is perceived apart from “horse” almost exclusively in circumstances including a horse or some representation of it, in a picture, or, as the kindergarten pair gaZZop-stick horse suggests, in imagination. The unique frequency of the primary kindergarten response does not exhaust the unusual quality of associations to gallop. As is evident in the figures above, changes with age in response to that stimulus indicate an aborted S-P shift. The normal decline in syntagmatic associations occurs between first and third grade, when gallop-horse goes from 44% to 28%. But between fifth grade and college, the frequency ofgallup-horse nearly doubles. Adult subjects respond in a way more similar to five than to ten-year-olds. Although Entwisle’s survey revealed a decline in paradigmatics to several stimuli between fifth grade and college, gallop is unique in displaying a regression to kindergarten norms, an S-P-S shift. The typical paradigmatic pairs gallop-trot and gallop-run, attributable to semantic memory, increase dramatically over the developmental period when gallop-horse declines. No kindergarten subjects gave gallop-trot, 46%1 responded with lmw; 2 1.4% of fifth-grade subjects gave gallop-trot, only 27.1% gallop-horse. Mature responses reverse that trend. Gallop-horse increases to 50% and gallop-trot dwindles to 12%. Gallop has been discussed at length because the patterns it elicits show subjects in the middle range of development emitting purely semantic responses even though adult associations indicate that memory of permissible co-occurrences provides efficient storage. This striking exception to the standard pattern of progressive developmental increases in adult primaries suggests that the episodic-semantic shift is a global phenomenon which affects all words in the mental lexicon. Furthermore, the near identity of the figures for gallop-horse in kindergarten and adult subjects is a further reason why it is plausible to postulate different associative mechanisms to explain superficially identical responses. Judging from the figures for subjects in intermediate stages, developmental changes in the storage of gallop appear as important as those in the storage of stimuli whose response patterns conform more straightforwardly to the general shift. We can at least speculate that gallop elicits horse from young children because of episodically remembered co-occurrences and from adults because of semantic assignment of selection restriction. The special interest of the syntagmatic pair gallop-horse illustrates the major shortcoming to the syntagmatic-paradigmatic distinction in describing
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
69
changes with age in word associations: because the terms of classification can designate nothing but syntactic properties, they are inherently unable to represent much that is of interest about immature norms. To divide children’s responses according to whether they preserve the stimulus’s form class can be as tedious and uninformative as dividing them by the number of letters they contain. Young children’s first significant reactions to a verbal stimulus suggest either an autobiographical episode during which the word was perceived as a focal element (the cooking cluster elicited by add, the medical cluster by examine, the catastrophe cluster by happen) or perceived syntactic juxtaposition whose sense may not be fully grasped. This clearly episodic stage rapidly declines, to be followed by syntagmatic responses in the strict sense (dark-night, wild-animals, clean-house), which are in turn normally supplanted by the featurally, instead of situationally or syntactically, linked associations characteristic of mature norms. The few patterns which diverge from this development, like responses to salt, table and gallop, are comprehensible as the effect of episodic memory. They are inexplicable within the parameters imposed by S-P terminology.
Conclusion The primary conceptual gain when we consider children’s word associations in light of Tulving’s category of episodic memory is the discovery of order where there appeared to be none. The number of irrelevant or playful responses given by young subjects is far smaller than commonly believed. The crucial opposition between mature and immature norms is not that between structure and chaos but that between different sorts of structure. Whereas adult’s responses are grouped primarily by semantic memory of words’ internal content, children’s responses display mainly episodic memories of external context. Both Chomsky (1965) and Saussure (1916) distinguish between abstract linguistic structure (“langue” for Saussure, “competence” for Chomsky) and concrete linguisticutterances (“parole” and “performance” respectively). Lungue is homogeneous, parole heterogeneous; competence is context-free, performance context-sensitive, “the actual use of language in concrete situa1965: 4) It is remarkable how aptly the traits which tions”. (Chomsky, distinguish kzngue (competence) from parole (performance) also define the differences between mature and immature word-association norms. Children’s heterogeneous responses are acutely context-sensitive; adults’ homogeneous patterns are semantic and hence context-free. While autobiographically experienced performances link stimulus and response in
70
Sandy Petrey
young subjects’ norms, older subjects associate so as to suggest the systematic relationships which define competence. The affinities among the episodic-semantic, competence-performance and Zangue-parole distinctions point out the major theoretical implication of developmental changes in word associations. If it is valid to assume that free responses to verbal stimuli manifest subjects’ systems of lexical storage, then the episodic-semantic shift leads to the hypothesis that linguistic maturation involves a major reorganization of the mental lexicon during which memories of paroZe decline in importance and sensitivity to langue develops. This hypothesis of course directly contradicts the assumption that children have an innate predisposition to organize knowledge according to the categories which inform adult linguistic competence, an assumption apparent in McNeil1 (1970), E. Clark (1973), and others. On the other hand, it is quite compatible with other recent work, such as that of Nelson (1974) and Bloom (1973), who insist on the function of a child’s dynamic interaction with a particular environment in early formation of word meaning. Young subjects’ associations strongly suggest the kind of contextual apprehension of words and concepts which Bloom and Nelson emphasize. This compatibility between the episodic structure of immature word associations and cognitive-development models of language acquisition leaves a crucial question unanswered, however: by what process can episodic memories of words in context lead to the abstract semantic organization of mature lexical storage? Transformational grammarians have persuasively argued that no amount of exposure to linguistic performance can explain language’s “creative” component, humans’ ability to produce and understand sentences never uttered before. The classic example is Chomsky’s (1959) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, a sentence immediately recognizable as grammatical even though it obviously expresses no independently formed concept nor evokes any conceivable context. The argument that autobiographical experience of performance cannot account for creative competence also challenges the hypothesis that children’s episodic storage somehow reorganizes itself into the semantic structure of adult lexical memory. The dilemma is pointedly clear. If the structure of language is always present, then the theoretical problem of where it comes from is solved ~~ more accurately, no such problem can arise. But if subjects of all ages control language in the samic way, why do mature and immature free word associations consistently organize themselves in difyerent ways? Tulving’s categories do not resolve this dilemma, but they do contribute significantly to posing it with clarity. As Tulving (1972) insisted, the episodic-semantic
Word associations and the development
of lexical memory
71
distinction is pretheoretical rather than theoretical, taxonomic rather than explanatory. As a taxonomy, the episodic and semantic systems comprehensively define the differences between mature and immature responses in word association surveys. The explanation of why those differences exist and of how one system becomes another are topics for future inquiry. References L. (1973) One Word af a Time, The Hague, Mouton. R. and Berko, J. (1960) “Word associations and the acquisition of grammar”, child Dev., 31, l-14. Carroll, J., Kjeldergaard, I’. and Carton, A. (1962) “Number of opposites vs. number of primaries as a response measure in free association tests”, J. verb. Learn. verb. Beh., 1, l-13. Chomsky, N. (1959) “Review” of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, Lang., 35, 26-58. Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects ofthe Theory ofSyntax. Cambridge, MIT Press. Clark, E. (1973) “What’s in a word?” m . Moore, T. (ed.) Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Lnnguage. New York, Academic Press. Clark, H. (1970) ‘Word Associations and linguistic theory”, in Lyons, J. (ed.) New Horizons in Linguistics. London, Penguin. Entwisle, D. (1966) Word Associations in Young Children. Baltimore, Hopkins Press. Ervin, S. (1961) “Changes with age in the verbal determinants of word association”, Amer. J. Psych., 74, 361-372. Kent, G. and Rosanoff, A. (1910) “A Study of association in insanity”. Amer. J. Insanity. 67. Leech, G. (1974) Semantics. London, Penguin. McNeill, D. (1966) “A Study of word associations”, J. verb. Learn. verb. Beh., 5, 548-557. McNeill, D. (1970) The Acquisition of Language. New York, Harper and Row. Nelson, K. (1973) Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk. Mono. Sot. Res. Child Dev., 38 (l-2). Nelson, K. (1974) “Concept, Word and Sentence” Psych. Rev., 81, 267-285. Reiff, R. and Scheerer, M. (1959) Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression. New York, International Universities Press. Russell, W. and Jenkins, J. (1954) The Complete Minnesota Norms. ONR Technical Report No. 11, August, 1954. de Saussure, 1:. (1916) Cours de Linguistique GPn&rale. Lausanne, Payot. Tulving, E. (1972) “Episodic and Semantic Memory”, in Tulving and Donaldson (eds.) The Orgunization ofMemory. New York, Academic Press, pp. 381404. Tulving, E. and Thomson, D. (1973) “Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory”, Psych. Rev., 80 (S), 359-380. Woodrow, H. and Lowell, I:. (1916) “Children’s association frequency tests”, Psych. Mono., 22, l-l 10. Bloom, Brown,
RPsumP La distinction faite par Endel Tulving entrc la m&moire “6pisodique” ct la mkmoirc “stmantique” permet d’interprkter le changement a,ux r6ponses d’associations verbales en fonction de l’ige de faGon plus comprkhensible et plus rentable que ne le font les clarifications syntaxiques utilisees habituellement. Le d&eloppement se traduit essentiellement par un passage de I’Cpisodiquc au sdmantique. Les jeuncs enfants associent d’abord avec les contextes perGus du stimulus, les sujets plus ages associent au contenu semantique abstrait de ce stimulus.
Cognifion, @Elsevier
5 (1977) 73-99 Sequoia %A., Lausanne
5 - Printed
in the Netherlands
Flashbulb
memories*
ROGER.BROWN JAMES KULIK Harvard
University
Abstract Flashbulb Memories are memories for the circumstances in which one first learned of a very surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) event. Hearing the news that President John Kennedy had been shot is the prototype case. Almost everyone can remember, with an almost perceptual clarity, where he was when he heard, what he was doing at the time, who told him, what was the immediate aftermath, how he felt about it, and also one or more totally idiosyncratic and often trivial concomitants. The present paper reports a questionnaire inquiry into the determinants of such memories by asking about other assassinations, highly newsworthy events, and personally significant events. It is shown that while the Kennedy assasstnation created an extraordinarily powerful and widely shared flashbulb memory, it is not the only event that has created such memories. The principal two determinants appear to be a high level of surprise, a high level of consequentiality, or perhaps emotional arousal (assessed by both rating scales and ethnic group membership). If these two variables do not attain sufficiently high levels, no flashbulb memory occurs. If they do attain high levels, they seem, most directly, to affect the frequency of rehearsal, covert and overt, which, in turn, affects the degree of elaboration in the narrative of the memory that can be elicited experimentally. Parallels are made explicit between the behavioral theory and a less elaborated, speculative neuro-physiological theory of which R. B. Livingston (1967) is the proponent. Finally, an argument is made that a permanent memory for incidental concomitants of a surprising and consequential (in the sense of biologically significant) event would have high selection value and so could account for the evolution of an innate base,for such a memory mechanism. *This study was supported and Social Relations, Harvard
by a small grant University.
to the authors
made by the Department
of Psychology
74
Rcjgcr Browtl arzdJames Kulik
“Hardly a man is now alive” who cannot recall the circumstances in which he first heard that John Kennedy had been shot in Dallas. Not just thefact that John Kennedy was shot and died; we remember that too, of course, but we really do not need to since it is recorded in countless places and in many forms. It is not the memory of the tragic news that invites inquiry, but the memory of one’s own circumstances on first hearing the news. There is no obvious utility in such memories. The second author recalls: “I was seated in a sixth-grade music class, and over the intercom I was told that the president had been shot. At first, everyone just looked at each other. Then the class started yelling, and the music teacher tried to calm everyone down. About ten minutes later 1 heard over the intercom that Kennedy had died and that everyone should return to their homeroom. I remember that when I got to my homeroom my teacher was crying and everyone was standing in a state of shock. They told us to go home.” The first author recalls: “I was on the telephone with Miss Johnson, the Dean’s secretary, about some departmental business. Suddenly, she broke in with: ‘Excuse me a moment; everyone is excited about something. What? Mr. Kennedy has been shot!’ We hung up, I opened my door to hear further news as it came in, and then resumed my work on some forgotten business that ‘had to be finished’ that day.” Ten years after the assassination, the always-enterprising Esquire magazine (1973) asked a number of famous people a question similar to ours: “Where were you?” Julia Child was in the kitchen eating soupc dcj poisson. Billy of tragedy. Graham was on the golf course, but he felt a presentiment Philip Berrigan was driving to a rally; Julian Bond was in a restaurant; Tony Randall was in the bathtub. The subtitle of the 1973 Esqztirc article could, we are sure, be used again today: “Nobody forgets”. Probably everyone who has read until this point is primed with an account of his own, which he would rather like to tell, perhaps because there is something strange about this recall. John Kennedy was shot thirteen years ago. What else can one remember from 1963? Almost everyone testifies that his recall of his circumstances is not an inference from a regular routine. It has a primary, ‘live’ quality that is almost perceptual. Indeed, it is very like a photograph that indiscriminately preserves the scene in which each of us found himself when the flashbulb was fired. But why should the human species have such a flashbulb potentiality? Where is the use in carrying certain scenes in permanent store? “Flashbulb memory” (FB) is a good name for the phenomenon inasmuch as it suggests surprise, an indiscriminate illumination, and brevity. But the name is inai;propriate in one respect that had better be brought forward at
Flashbulb memories
75
once. An actual photograph, taken by flashbulb, preserves everything within its scope; it is altogether indiscriminate. Our flashbulb memories are not. The second author’s crying teacher had a hairdo and a dress that are missing from his memory. The first author faced a desk with many objects on it, and some kind of weather was visible through the window, but none of this is in his memory picture. In short, a flashbulb memory is only somewhat indiscriminate and is very far from complete. In these respects, it is unlike a photograph. Is it only the news of John Kennedy’s assassination that has ever set off the flashbulb registration of each person’s circumstances on first hearing the news? Anticipating our data, it seems to have precipitated the effect in greater strength, and for a larger number of persons, than any other event of recent history. However, it is not the only event that has fired flashbulbs. There are, in the first place, other events in our recent national history that have had this effect for some: the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King and the attempted assassinations of George Wallace and Gerald Ford, as well as the startling Chappaquiddick episode involving Ted Kennedy. But unexpected events that involve nationally prominent persons simply constitute a class of events for which one may reasonably hope to uncover a good number of flashbulb memories. There are also the sundry private shocks in each person’s life. Some of our older informants had, prior to 1963, been jolted by midnight phone calls bringing the sad news of the unexpected death of a parent. And slightly younger subjects heard, out of the blue, that a friend had been killed in an accident or by an overdose of heroin. Such personal jolts also cause flashbulb memories; that is, memories not just of the crucial event, but of the circumstances in which one first learned of them. What chiefly differentiates them from presidential assassinations and the like is the absence of a very large population of like-minded people. Only a few feel the shock of a family death or are interested in how you felt when you heard. There is, therefore, no named central event that one can use to retrieve possible flashbulb memories. The best one can do is to ask each informant to search his memory for events of this order. We began with a familiar phenomenon which, however, does not follow from such well-established determinants of memory as primacy or recency or repetition, even though the data one can collect are a variety of verbal free recall. We had definite intuitions about the variables that might be important and also a large quantity of general curiosity which guided us in the construction of a very long and difficult questionnaire. When about half the data had been collected, we came upon a neuro-physiological theory that paralleled our intuitions in its own terms and we decided to bring out the
76
Roger Brown and James Kulik
parallels in our exposition. The theory is Robert B. Livingston’s (1967a, b), and it is called by the evocative name: “Now Print!“* “The steps are postulated to occur as follows: 1) Reticular recognition of novelty; 2) Limbic discrimination of biological meaning for that individual at that moment; 3) Limbic discharge into the reticular formation; 4) A diffusely projecting reticular formation discharge distributed throughout both hemispheres, a discharge conceived to be a ‘Now print!’ order for memory, and finally; 5) All recent brain events, all recent conduction activities will be ‘printed’...” (1967b, p. 576). Without the neurology one may say: First comes the recognition of high novelty or unexpectedness; then comes a test for biological meaning for the individual; if this second test is met, there follows the permanent registration not only of the significant novelty, but of all recent brain events. What confirmed our interest in this theory was Livingston’s first application of it: “I suggest that almost all of you will remember exactly where you were on November 22, 1963, when you heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. You can probably tell us where you were, with whom, and very likely whether you were sitting, standing, or walking ~ almost which foot was forward when your awareness became manifest” (1967b, p. 576).
Method We had two major intuitions about the determinant of FBs when we designed our study and before we knew of their neurological parallels in Livingston’s theory. Perhaps the most obvious property of President Kennedy’s assassination was its extreme unexpectedness; in most of our lives no other major political figure had been assassinated. And, in selecting events to use in prospecting for FBs, we generalized this property and so chose 10 very unexpected or novel events, among which assassinations *Some friends, among physiological psychologists, have advised us that the ‘Now Print!’ theory is, as WC had guessed, entirely speculative. Furthermom, and this we did not know, it has inspired little or no direct psycho-physiological research. There is apparently no clear reason why the theory could not be correct, but it has not had heuristic value in psycho-physiology and so there is really nothing clearly pro or con. We were sorry to learn that the ‘Now Print!’ theory has been of such slight consequence in physiological psychology and, of course, we could not very well provide any direct evidence as to its truth value with a paper-and-pencil study. In actual fact, as you will see, all of our own measures and concepts are behavioral, and our theory is completely independent of Livingston’s, Nevertheless, at the considerable risk of seeming naive or willful. we have elected to build Livingston’s theory into our exposition because his speculations did interest us and we see no harm in stretching an arm (or is it a neck?) in the direction of ultimate synthesis.
Flashbulb memories
77
loom large. As a consequence, one can reasonably say that for all the events we chose, the first operation in Livingston’s theory was satisfied: the registration of novelty. However, we know that the level of novelty varied a good deal, and there is some reason to suppose that the only full-fledged FB effects we obtained were for John Kennedy and for the personal shock described by each person. The second intuition we luckily had was that among national events like assassinations, there might well be a difference between white Americans and black Americans, in the public figures who set off FBs*. How many white Americans, for instance, could say just where they were and what they were doing when they first heard that Martin Luther King had been shot? Not many, we suspected, but probably quite a few black Americans would be able to do so. What should account for a difference of this kind if it were, indeed, attained? We guessed that what would matter would be the comparative consequentiality for the black and white individual of each national event. And so we composed a five-point scale for the rating of consequentiality which, as we shall see, we defined in a way that makes it a plausible parallel to Livingston’s “biological significance”. Our behavioral data were more fine-grained than the parallel concepts in Livingston’s theory. By eliciting spontaneous accounts of whatever length and by conceiving of consequentiality as a five-point scale, we obtained data clearly important to the further development of a behavioral theory. Livingston does not attempt to account for the length or elaborateness of the memory, but our data presented us with wide variation in this respect, and we thought it possible that the rated degree of consequentiality (interpreted as biological significance) would be one of the determinants.
*Nowadays, it is perhaps the case that any study comparing black Americans and white Americans on any sort of cognitive task risks suspicion of seeking tendentious or even downright invidious comparisons. Nothing of the sort is true in the present study. We worked with black Americans and white Americans, only because there have been a number of assassinations in America in recent years which might reasonably be expected to differ in importance or emotional significance for these two demographic populations. We would expect the same kinds of differences for any two groups, such as two ethnic minorities, two professions, the two sexes or, for that matter, two individuals, providing there were highly publicized and surprising events known to both, but differing in significance. In fact, however, only recent assassinations in America and their effects on Blacks and Whites meet the requisite criteria and exist in some substantial number of instances for large populations. As we shall see, when the data are reported, our black subjects and our white subjects followed the same principles of human memory, and there is nothing at all suggestive of, or relevant to, differences in any intellectual capacity.
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Roger Brown and James Kulik
Subjects Forty white Americans and forty black Americans filled out our questionnaire. The age range was 20 to 54 for Whites with a median age of 27; for Blacks the range was 20 to 60 with a median of 25. We had to tolerate these small differences of age distribution because the length of the questionnaire made it somewhat difficult to recruit enough informants. We used several means to attract informants, including newspaper advertisements and posters in Harvard University buildings*. Our collection of informants cannot be considered a random sample of any definable population. We, ourselves, think that the population for which the major results, in abstract form, hold true, may be the human species. The Questionnaire The heart of the questionnaire is the set of persons set down in Table 1. We used a little over two pages to describe the exact nature of the flashbulb effect - a vivid recall of the circumstances in which one first learned of some important event. Since almost everyone had such recall in connection with the assassination of John Kennedy, it was possible to illustrate the mental state we hoped to evoke with the two examples provided by the memories of the authors. All informants but two (whom we have excluded from the analysis) correctly understood what we meant. The two who misunderstood reported various facts about the events as they have been described in the press, rather than their personal circumstances on hearing the news. Essentially, the questionnaire was composed by using each of the person-event pairs of Table 1 to form the nucleus of a set of similar inquiries. We will describe here only those that are directly relevant to the argument we want to make. Irlitial Free Accounts In the case of each person-event listed in Table 1, informants were first asked : “Do you recall the circumstances in which you first heard that...?” In the event that he did not, the informant checked “no” and was directed to turn four-pages-or-so to the next person-event. Whenever he checked “yes” he was asked to write a free recall of the circumstances in any form or order and at any length he liked.
*Mr. Michael Forte, a friend and graduate student ficient number of black informants, and we are happy
in social psychology, helped US to interest to acknowledge his assistance.
a suf-
Flashbulb memories
Table 1.
Chronological order of events used to search for jlashbulb memories
N%lX 1. Medgar
Evers
2. John F. Kennedy 3. Malcolm
79
“X”
4. Martin
Luther
King
5. Robert
F. Kennedy
Race
Event
Date
Place
Black
Shot to death
June 12, 1963
Mississippi
White
Shot to death
Nov. 22, 1963
Dallas
Black
Shot to death
Feb. 21, 1965
Harlem
Black
Shot to death
April 1, 1968
Memphis
White
Shot to death
June 6,1968
Los Angeles
6. Ted Kennedy
White
Drowning
July 19, 1969
Chappaquiddick
7. George
Wallace
White
Shot, but not killed
May 15, 1972
Laurel,
8. Gerald
Ford
White
Failed attempt
at assassination
Sept. 5,1975
San Francisco
Died of natural
causes
Nov. 20, 1975
Madrid
9. Gen. Francisco 10. A personal, of a deadly
Franc0
unexpected shock, disease, etc.
such as death
involvement
of a friend or relative,
serious accident,
Md.
diagnosis
The first set of inquiries offered three possible criteria of a flashbulb effect: (a) the subject’s simple response “yes” or “no”; (b) some number of words that we might arbitrarily require for an account to be considered a genuine flashbulb; (c) a content coding of the circumstances reported in terms of such prevalent categories as “Place”, “Ongoing Event”, “Informant”, and so on. Of course, these potential criteria were all closely intercorrelated. However, in spite of that fact, there were reasons to prefer one possible criterion over another. Simple reliance on the informant’s “yes” and “no” would only dichotomize responses into those that are flashbulbs and those that are not, whereas many things indicated that the division was not so absolute and, more importantly, that within the accounts themselves there was much to interest us. Adding up the number of words (or any other objective index of length of account) would enable us to represent the fact that flashbulbs varied in degree, but did not represent variations as well as constancies evident to us in the content of the reports. It is possible reliably to report our conclusions about content, using content analysis, but these conclusions cannot be proved to be necessary emanations of the data. Still, they are too suggestive and, in our eyes, obyious to go unreported. The first author read 20 FB accounts of the assassination of President John Kennedy, and to him it seemed that there were only six classes of information reported in 50 per cent or more of the accounts. An informant
80
Roger Brown and Jarms Kulik
was most likely to report the “Place” in which he learned of the assassination, the “Ongoing Event” that was interrupted by the news, the “Informan t” who brought him the news, “Affect in Others” upon hearing the news, as well as “Own Affect” and finally some immediate “Aftermath”, for himself on hearing the news. Sampling the flashbulb accounts for all nine historical events, it appeared that the six categories listed were a kind of “canonical” form for the historical FB memory in the sense that they were more likely to be recalled than any other content though, of course, no informant always used all six. It is important to bear in mind that the canonical categories listed are abstractions. Each informant’s “Place” of hearing the news and “Ongoing Activity” and so on, was, of course, unique. The variation is dramatic: “ with a classmate at Shaw University in North Carolina”; . . . conversation “...engaging in a game of softball”; “... talking to a woman friend on the “... I was telephone”; “... working for a market research organization”; having dim;?r in a French restaurant”; etc. For an instant, the entire nation and perhaps much of the world stopped still to have its picture taken. In addition to the variation within each canonical category, there was, in many records, a sentence or so that fit none of the abstract categories, but was as idiosyncratic on the abstract level as on the concrete: “The weather was cloudy and gray”; “She said, ‘Oh, God! I knew they would kill him’ “; “... We all had on our little blue uniforms”; “... I was carrying a carton of Viceroy cigarettes which I dropped...“. Responses like these fell outside the canonical categories and also were so unlike one another as to resist grouping in some new category. Is it possible that so endlessly diverse a collage satisfies one law? Both facts about the content are important: the existence of six abstract canonical categories into which most of the, always unique, content could be easily and naturally placed; the existence in some accounts, but not all, of completely idiosyncratic content that the first author could not subsume under any recurrent categories. The personal unexpected shock question which appears as No. 10 in Table 1, as it did in the questionnaire, is unlike the other questions in that it does not name a historical person and event, known to all, but asks the informant if he has had experience of a personal event that caused a flashbulb recall. Consequently, the personal event, as well as the circumstances upon hearing of it, must be unique. The question was different enough from the others to suggest that there might be some differences in content categories. and there were. The first author once again read 20 accounts, this time of personal shocks, and formed an inductive impression, whose general inevitability cannot be proved. Two categories were, however, necessitated by the form of the
Flashbulb memories
81
question: the nature of the event and the person involved, and these were always reported. The unexpected death of a parent was much the most common severe shock experienced by these, for the most part young, people. One set of categories duplicated categories in the canonical form for the historical events: “Place”, “Ongoing Event”, “Informant”, “Own Affect”, and “Aftermath”. These five most common response categories omit only “Other Affect” from the pattern for historical incidents and it is, perhaps, seldom mentioned because of the stress on “personal” in the question lead. Two additional categories (“Event” and “Person”) were invariably found here, though not in the historical cases. They may both be explained by differences in what the informant might reasonably expect the E to need to know: “Event”, “Person”, “Cause”, and “Time” would all be unknown to E. Their addition to “Place”, “Ongoing Event”, “Aftermath”, “Informant”, and “Own Affect” seems simply to represent intelligent adaptation to a different sort of question. Having defined the two sets of canonical categories as precisely as he could, the first author wrote a set of coding rules for the second author to apply to the 20 accounts of circumstances attending John Kennedy’s assassination and also another set to be used to score the 20 personal accounts. Even on their initial check on interscorer reliability, the scorings of the two authors were not far apart, presumably because the categories are familiar ones, fuzzy only at their edges. Inevitably, however, there were small differences of definition and presupposition to be resolved, and this was done, not once but several times. It proved impossible to attain perfect agreement on the individual categories, at least in a tolerable period of time. Three formal studies of inter-scorer reliability were made, using different sets of protocols, with the results being 88% agreement, 89% agreement, and 94% agreement, or an average of 90% agreement. This seemed satisfactory to us because the residual differences were really peculiar to individual accounts and hardly solvable by rule. Scorings of informants’ accounts in terms of total number of scored content categories invariably yielded high reliability coefficients. We judged it necessary not to be satisfied with these results, but to develop inter-scorer reliability also with respect to individual content entries since we would want to theorize about results on this level. The data were coded throughout by the first author and also in large samples by the second author. Differences were resolved in discussion. A “yes” answer to our initial question and a canonical content score of 1 or more defined the flashbulb (FB) effect in this study. Of course, the higher the content score, the more elaborated the account. However, since the
82
Roger Brown arzdJames Kulik
coding is ultimately not an “objective” feature of the data, we shall also sometimes cite number of words, an objective index of the degree of elaboration.
For each of the ten persons referred to in Table 1, there was a 5point Consequentiality Scale, labeled “Little or no consequentiality for me” at “1” and “Very high consequentiality for me” at “5”. The scale came at the end of the questionnaire to minimize the likelihood of disclosing the point of the inquiry. We spilled a lot of ink in our questionnaire trying precisely to define consequentiality and beseeching our informants to keep the exact sense always in mind, answering as painstakingly as possible. To quote our own efforts at defining the concept: “In order to rate the consequentiality in your life of the death of someone, let us say President John F. Kennedy, you must try to imagine the things that might have gone differently had President Kennedy lived”. We pointed out that not only world figures had consequentiality for oneself, but also, obviously, relatives, friends, admired persons and others could be very consequential. To quote again: “Probably the best single question to ask yourself in rating consequentiality is, ‘What consequences for my life, both direct and indirect, has this event had?’ ” While no one could possibly tote up all the consequences for himself of any particular event, the judgment proved to be one informants could make and, in the data, there are several indications that they followed our directions. It is certain that they did not simply report attitudes or historical prominence. Rehearsal For the purposes of this paper it remains only to describe several items included in the set of questions asked concerning each figure in Table 1. To investigate the role of rehearsal as a determinant of flashbulb memories, we asked each informant to indicate, if he gave a flashbulb account at all, how often he had related that account: “ . . . never told anyone.” “... gave the same account roughly l-5 times.” “... gave the same account roughly 6- 10 times.” “... gave the same account more than 10 times.” Advance
Overview
The data are, of course, all correlational, but the cause-and-effect construction we shall put on them is as foilows. The written account of a memory satisfying our definition of a FB accourzt is to be thought of as the depen-
Flashbulb memories
1
J
I
83
84
Roger Brown and James Kulik
dent variable. A FB account defined by a “yes” answer to the opening question and the use of at least one canonical category. The FB account is conceived not as an absolute, but as an effect varying in elaboration both across informants and events and within informants with the event fixed and the retrieval cues changed. Elaboration is indexed either by number of canonical categories or by number of words. Our preliminary model of the process represents a behavioral flow chart paralleling the major features of Livingston’s “Now Print!” theory. We agree with Livingston that the registration of surprise and unexpectedness in the central nervous system is the first step and the sim yuu rzmz of all else (see Figure 1). Thus, some, as yet undetermined, level of novelty may be viewed as the first hurdle that a stimulus event must overcome before the central nervous system will “take a picture”. Determination of the requisite degree of surprise necessary for FBs is made difficult by at least two problems. First, there is the obvious problem of accuracy associated with retrospective accounts of surprise. Second, the relationship between degree of surprise and FBs may not be linear. The phenomenon called “retrograde amnesia” suggests that there may be a level of surprise or shock that is too great for a FB memory, and the general dependence, from childhood on, of mild arousal and attention on small departures from expectation suggests that there may be a level that is insufficient for a FB memory. It will, therefore, be our assumption, in the present analysis, that the 10 events we selected for study were all potentially within the critical region of surprise necessary for a FB memory although the degree of surprise, of course, varied somewhat from one event to another, both between and within subjects. Livingston does not suggest that variation within the postulated critical zone of surprise influences degree of FB elaboration and we will, for the present, assume the same. A second determinant of a FB memory in Livingston’s theory is the biological significance of the event to the organism, which Livingston treats simply as present or absent. We have collected data on two measures of consequentiality, one direct measure and one relatively indirect. The direct measure simply asked the subject to rate the degree of consequentiality that the particular event had had for his or her life. Although such a mcasure has obvious face validity, it is less than ideal in testing the model in that it is largely retrospective and, therefore, does not really tell us exactly how the subject viewed the consequentiality ut the time of the event. Our second measure of consequentiality concerned the race of the subject (black or white) in relation to the historical event. We believed that events which involved leaders who were prominent in American race relations (whether pro- or anti-civil rights and whether black or white) would have
Flashbulb memories
85
greater consequentiality for Blacks as a group than for Whites. Leaders who are involved with race relations are particularly salient and potentially important to a minority group which is still struggling for full equality. Although this measure of consequentiality is thus largely intuitive, it has the advantage of assessing more accurately the likely degree of consequentiality at the time of the event. One of our hypotheses is that the degree of elaboration in FB accounts (canonical content scores) of a group will be positively associated with the mean consequentiality scores given by the group. We thus go beyond Livingston in proposing that neither biological significance (consequentiality) nor FB accounts is an either-or matter, but that both vary in degree and that they vary together (see Figure 1). As can be seen in Figure 1, we have made an essential distinction between Livingston’s theory and our model based on the data we were able to collect. His theory concerns a certain kind of memory, described in hypothetical neurological terms. We had no means of access to the FB memory and neither, of course, did he. What we do have is a collection of FB verbal accounts which were elicited by a particular means of retrieval. The retrieval cue was: “Do you recall the circumstances in which you first heard that...“, with the question completed in 9 cases by a generally familiar person-andevent and in one case by a request for some personal surprising event. We call these verbal accounts “FB accounts” when the informant said “yes” to the question and included at least one canonical content category in what he wrote. What relation shall we suppose to exist between our FB accounts and Livingston’s FB memories? We think the accounts are ultimately derived from the memories but that the two cannot be identical. We postulate, with Livingston, a FB memory fixed for a very long time, and conceivably permanently, varying in complexity with consequentiality but, once created, always there, and in need of no further strengthening. However, our guess is that the memory is not a narrative and not even in verbal form, but represented in other, perhaps imaginal, ways. How is a particular FB account derived from the one FB memory? Our suggestion is that the important mediating process is rehearsal, both covert and overt. We propose that higher consequentiality of an event for an individual works both to make more elaborate flashbulb memories and also to compel more frequent rehearsal of that which is all or part of the FB memory. An event which has great consequentiality for an individual is more likely both to be “on the mind” of the pe’rson (covert rehearsal) and to be worked into conversation (overt rehearsal). However, we doubt that this rehearsal of the memory is a simple reproduction of the brain events constituting the
86
Roger Brown and James Kulik
memory, but think it must also be a constructive process, especially when it is an overt account. Probably, the rehearsal process, set off by high consequentiality, draws its content from the unchanging FB memory, but, in rehearsal, a verbal narrative is likely to be created. We propose that rehearsals build up associative strength between the verbal narrative created and the (retrieval) cues used in the various settings. It seems likely that the sort of cue that elicited overt rehearsals in our subjects in the past would have been similar to our cue in the present study. A typical cue in our experience has not been, “Do you remember the facts of John Kennedy’s assassination?“, but rather one more along the lines of “Do you remember what you were doing when you heard that John Kennedy had been assassinated?” If such is the case for our informants, we might expect informants who report more frequent rehearsals to have easier access to their verbal accounts by virtue of having relatively greater associations between cue and verbal narrative. In addition, the fact that qualitatively different cues are also likely to have been used would build additional associations between those cases and different aspects of the FB memory. Subjects who have rehearsed their accounts should thus be more likely to give more extensive verbal accounts in the present scheme. It is our assumption then that the FB memory is always there, unchanging as the slumbering Rhinegold, and serving by means of rehearsal to generate some variety of accounts. Of course, rehearsal need not be either overt or verbal (see Figure 1). Bellugi, Klima and Siple (1975) have given evidence that, in the deaf, rehearsal is manual, at least as reflected on the periphery. But that is still a semantic sort of rehearsal. We believe, with Norman, that: “When the items to be rehearsed are not words but are actions, sounds, visual scenes, tastes, or smells, then the rehearsal tends to mimic the properties of these sensory modalities. Almost nothing is known about rehearsal for nonverbal items, but almost everyone has experienced it” (1976, p. 101). Certainly we have, since we started to attend to the process. Following a sudden consequential automobile accident, one of us finds his covert rehearsal of the circumstances as uncontrollable as the tongue that seeks an aching tooth. Of course, one of the principal things we should like to know about nonverbal rehearsal is whether it tends to build into narrative accounts. Our introspection suggests that it somehow operates on the materials from the FB memory so that a narrative is promptly produced when an audience exists that cares about the story. Our abstract speculation may be made clearer with an example. The shooting of President Kennedy was, we know, much the most surprising of all our historical events. It “bowled over” just about everybody. The rated .
Flashbulb memories
87
consequentiality of the event was, for Whites, also highest in the historical list and only slightly edged out by the category of Personal Shocks (see Table 4). For Blacks, Kennedy was also rated very high on consequentiality (see Table 5). On the evidence, John Kennedy rated as a member of almost everyone’s immediate family. In these circ&tances, we expect Livingston’s “Now Print!” mechanism to operate and to record permanently all immediately previous and contemporaneous brain events above some level of organization. We further believe that this inaccessible memory will be more elaborated (in canonical content forms or words) than any other historical memory in spite of the fact that it occurred thirteen years ago before all assassinations but that of Medgar Evers. It was so, for Blacks as well as Whites (Tables 4 and 5). Of course, the memory is not directly accessible and what we have, in fact, is 79 FB accounts, similar in their references to Place, Ongoing Event, and the other canonical categories but, in some irrelevant detail, always unique. These accounts are by far the most elaborated in content or in words of any historical event; in content they are slightly less so than the Personal Shocks. How should it happen that the accounts reflect the high degree of elaboration we attribute to the memories? We have data on overt rehearsals though not on covert. Overt rehearsal would be expected to be especially frequent relative to covert in just this case because there existed a national, indeed an international, highly interested audience. The overt rehearsals reported were far higher than those for any other event; 73% of Whites and 90% of Blacks reported telling their personal tales more than once and generally between l-5 or 5-10 times. Those who did not report overt rehearsals, but nevertheless gave FB accounts, must either be assumed to have forgotten past rehearsals and/or to have rehearsed covertly. It is of some importance that no one reported an overt rehearsal within the past year. In short, we propose that frequent rehearsals, covert and overt, made accessible elaborate FB accounts because of the high consequentiality posited to produce both an elaborate memory and many rehearsals. If all these factors work as we have hypothesized (see Figure l), the predictions are quite simple. With an adequate level of surprise taken as given, there should be positive correlations among all of our variables: degree of consequentiality; frequency of overt rehearsals; and degree of elaboration in FB accounts. The FB memory itself is a hypothetical construct not directly measurable. Covert rehearsals also could not be measured, and this is particularly unfortunate sin& that leaves one free to imagine frequencies that could make up any deficiencies in the anticipated positive correlations between overt rehearsals and elaboration of accounts.
88
Roger Brown and James Kulik
Results In the conception pictured in Figure 1, the creation of a FB memory begins with the registration of surprise falling within a critical region. We are assuming that all 10 of our events generated surprise at a level within this region and so that the first condition for creating a FB memory was, in all cases, satisfied. The second condition is, in Livingston’s version, biological significance at some level, which in our version is operationalized in two ways: a dichotomy of racial group membership and a continuous variable of consequentiality. In presenting the results, we will begin with just these factors: frequency of FB memories; group membership; and consequentiality. Of course, we are not, properly speaking, able to count FB memories, but only FB accounts. However, an account presupposes a memory (though the reverse is not the case) and so we may fairly tally accounts as memories. Results involving the entire conception pictured in Figure 1 will be considered last. Race Membership
ard Frequetlcy
of' FB Memories
Our advance prediction was that the 40 black informants would be most likely to register biological significance in the case of those national leaders who were most involved with American civil rights, whether the leader bc black or white, a friend or an enemy of the black minority. Our intuitive guess was that three such leaders in our set were black and were clear champions of the civil rights of black Americans: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X. and Martin Luther King. These men could truly be said to have attempted to advance the position of American Blacks in a way that was ultimately biological since their immediate concerns with education, employment opportunities, and income must ultimately translate into improved opportunities for Blacks to survive and contribute to the American gene pool. The fourth leader closely identified with civil rights is former Governor George Wallace, a white man. Whatever George Wallace may have intended his rhetoric to suggest, it was clear to our black informants that he was an enemy (they rated their attitude to him as “extremely unfavorable”). Wallace seemed interested in preserving the disadvantage of the black minority. The other national leaders - France, Ford, and the Kennedys seemed to LIS not so strongly concerned with civil rights. In Table 2 we have the absolute frequencies of FB memories (really, of course, FB accounts) for each racial group and the 9 political leaders. It is possible to use frequencies rather than percentages because Ns were the same for both groups. Perhaps the easiest way to absorb the information in this
Flashbulb memories
Table 2
Numbers of white and black subjects reporting flashbulb memories for various events FB Whites (N = 40)
Event * 1. Medgar Evers 2. John F. Kennedy ***3.
Malcolm
***4.
Martin
5. Robert
X Luther
King
F. Kennedy
6. Ted Kennedy **7. George 8. Gerald
89
Wallace Ford
9. Gen. Francisco 10. A personal,
Franc0
unexpected
shock
FB Blacks (N = 40)
0
5
39
40
1
14
13
30
25
20
13
10
11
20
23
16
17
13
37
32 (36Ja
By chi square analysis: ***p < 0.001 **p between 0.05 and 0.02 *p with Yates’s correction between 0.10 and 0.05 al:our informants said they had a FB memory for a personal shock but that it was too personal to relate, and so these 4 did not fully satisfy the definition for a FB account which includes at least 1 canonical content category.
table is to look first at the 4 leaders we have identified as strongly concerned with civil rights and so most likely to elicit FB memories from Blacks. For Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, the difference in frequency of FBs is in the predicted direction (Blacks greater than Whites) and is very highly significant. For Wallace, the difference is again as predicted (nearly twice as many FBs for Blacks as for Whites), but the significance level is lower. For Medgar Evers, only 5 informants of all 80 had a FB memory, but all 5 were Blacks, and so the difference approaches significance. After the fact, it is clear why the Evers’ FBs were so few. Medgar Evers was assassinated in June of 1963; 24 of our informants were, in 1976, between 20 and 24 years of age and so, in 1963, would have been between 7 and 11 years old. John Kennedy was also assassinated in 1963, and yet all but one of the full 80 informants, including the youngest, had FB memories of that event. Reading the accounts of their circumstances when they heard the news, it is clear that some, especially the youngest, knew nothing, or next to nothing, of President Kennedy. Had the news (inconceivably) been reported as no more than a routine newspaper headline, the early school-
age informants would not have registered surprise, nor probably would they have experienced the event as a consequential one. In fact, however, they did, most of them, experience surprise and consequentiality. But they experienced them in the microcosms of their own lives, usually in school, where the regularities of life were disturbed by reflection from the events in Dallas. Principals made unscheduled announcements over public address systems, teachers or parents burst into tears, and school was dismissed for the day. Events unthinkably surprising and consequential when you are 7 years old. But for Medgar Evers, not a very famous figure. no scl~ools were closed, no announcements were made by principals, some tears were shed but not so many, with Blacks still predominantly resigned to injustice. Looking next, in Table 2, at the leaders thought not to be deeply involved in civil rights ~ John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Ted Kennedy, Gerald Ford and General Franc0 we find, as predicted, no significant differences shock, was, of between thz groups. The 10th event, a personal unexpected course. entirely different for each informant. The very high levels of personal FBs, almost identical for Blacks and Whites, simply means that almost everyOIIC could find in his memory an event answering to our abstract description.
._~.._~
1.
Whites (N = 40)
Black< (N = 40)
Significance level of difference by student’s t ,I < 0.001
2.
Medgar Evcrs John I:. Kennedy
1.39” 3.39
3.00b 3.81
3.
Malcolm
1.49’
3.40
p < 0.001
4.
Martin Luther King Kobcrt I;. Kennedy Ted Kennedy Gcorgc Wallace (haId I:ord Gen. I:rancisco I~ranco
2.88 3.08 2.07 1.75 1.88 1.55
4.34 3.56 2.16 2.23 1.63 1.29
p < 0.001 p < 0.10
3.68’
4.22d
5.
6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
X
A personal.
unexpected
shock
p < 0.10
p < 0.10
~l~our informants failed to complctc this item. t’Onc informant failed to complete this item. phrcc informants failed to complete this item. Seven informants failed to complete this item
In Table 3 we have arrayed the mean consequentiality scores assigned each event by the total groups of Blacks and Whites. Let us look first at what
Flashbulb memories
91
does not take us by surprise. The mean consequentiality scores for the civil rights leaders, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, are all very significant and, as anticipated, their consequentiality is greater for Blacks. George Wallace’s consequentiality is also greater for Blacks, but at a borderline level of significance. The simplest way, then, to read Table 3 is to say that it provides independent validation of our obvious-enough notion that just these men had greater biological significance or consequentiality for Blacks than for Whites. Since the notions are obvious, one may also say that the results provide a degree of validation for the consequentiality scale. There is firmer validation in the fact that Whites gave a higher consequentiality score to their personal shocks than to any events on the national level, and Blacks rated only the consequentiality of the death of Martin Luther King above their personal shocks. If we are going to take seriously the difference in consequentiality, for Blacks and Whites, of George Wallace, then we must do the same for the differences with regard to John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy because the significance values are approximately the same. We failed to predict that Blacks would find the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy more consequential than Whites did only because we did not go beyond the level of those intuitions that are most obvious. We ought to have anticipated differences of about the order we see in Table 3. Robert Kennedy was, perhaps, more outspokenly concerned, in both words and actions, about the civil rights of Blacks than was his elder brother, and we still remember how numerous were the Blacks in the crowds that lined the tracks of his funeral route. But we suspect that Blacks felt the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy to be more consequential than Whites did, not just because of explicit policy statements and actions of the Attorney General’s office. Both men, one as a president and the other as a likely president, succeeded in engendering in the nation as a whole a hope that its ideals would be realized. One of those ideals has always been equality. Whites were accustomed to be counted in. But this time many Blacks felt that the Kennedys meant them too. Evidence forthe Full Conceptiorl In the results reported above we were able to include all informants, but not all variables. In the data now to be reported we can include all of the variables that play a role, in our opinion, in the creation of FB accounts. We cannot, however, include all informants. There can be no rehearsals where there are no FB accounts and, likewise, no elaboration to count in canonical content units and no length to count in words. In short, we are limited to just those informants who wrote FB accounts for each of the 10 events. And
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the range across events in number of FBs we already know to be great. In fact, it is from 39 Whites and 40 Blacks for John Kennedy to no Whites at all for Medgar Evers. The full data for Whites appear in Table 4 and for Blacks in Table 5. Table 4.
Mean consequentiality, percentage of overt rehearsals greater than zero, and mean lengths of accounts for Whites with FBs*
Event
Consequentiality
3.68
Rehearsals
> 0
a
Account length in content units
Length in words
5.57
16.54
3.37
73%
4.44
95.33
3. Robert F. Kennedy (N = 25)
3.04
52%
2.96
54.00
4. Martin Luther (N = 13)
3.00
54%
2.85
56.69
1.90
31%
2.23
35.15
1.83
35%
2.6 1
31.56
1. Personal
shock
(N = 3 7)
2. John 1:. Kennedy
5. Ted Kennedy 6. Gerald
King (N = 13)
Ford (N = 23)
7. Gcn. Francisco (N = 17) 8. George
(N = 39)
Franc0
Wallace (N = 11)
9. Malcolm X (N = 1) 10. Medgar Evers (N = 0) *Events are not ordered aBy mistake, informants
a
2.65
28.76
1.36
9%
2.64
37.58
1.00
O%,
2.00
34.00
1.53
chronologically, but by consequentiality were not asked about overt rehearsals.
scores,
from high to low
Setting aside the critical level of surprise, which we are assuming to be satisfied by all events, the flow chart of Figure 1 that eventuates in a FB account begins as a consequentiality score. To preserve the left-to-right sequence of Figure 1, the events in Tables 4 and 5 are ordered by mean consequentiality score from high to low whereas they have heretofore been ordered chronologically. Tables 4 and 5 are included, essentially, because we think the best thing to do in the case of incomplete data is to report the data in full. In addition, however, we think the most nearly appropriate statistic should be used, and for these data that statistic is Spearman’s rank order correlation coefficient (rho). All of the rhos relevant to the conception of Figure 1 appear as Table 6. The discussion of the results reported in full in Tables 4 and 5 is much more easily coordinated with Table 6. It is necessary to remember that the number of informants on which the values constituting the rank orders vary, and that is not ideal. However, we have done what we could to minimize the un-
Flashbulb memories
Table
Mean consequentiality, percentage of overt rehearsals greater than zero, and mean lengths of accounts for Blacks with FBs*
5.
Event
1. Martin Luther (N = 30)
> 0
Account length in content units
Length in words
Consequentiality
Rehearsals
4.43
60% a
3.21
52.93
5.16
64.81
King
2. Personal
shock (N = 32)
4.19b
3. Malcolm
X (N = 14)
3.86
29%
2.36
31.29
3.81
90%
3.83
78.47
5. Robert 1:. Kennedy (N = 20)
3.16
50%
3.00
47.55
6. Medgar Evers (N = 5)
3.60
20%
1.60
17.40
7. George
2.55
30%
2.45
25.95
2.20
40%
2.20
27.10
1.91
19%
1.88
16.31
2.08
22.23
4. John F. Kennedy
(N = 40)
Wallace (N = 20)
8. Ted Kennedy 9. Gerald
(N = 10)
Ford (N = 16)
10. Gen. Francisco (N = 13)
Franc0
a
1.15
*Events are not ordered chronologically, but by consequentiality py mistake, informants were not asked about overt rehearsals. One informant failed to complete this item.
Table
6.
scores, from high to low.
Spearman rank correlation coefficients for certain pairs of 7 variables Whites
Consequentiality;
Overt rehearsals
Consequentiality;
Content
Consequentiality; Overt rehearsals
> 0
categories
Length in words > 0; Content
categories Overt rehearsals Content
93
> 0; Length
categories;
Length
in words in words -___
Exact
p
Blacks
Exact
p
0.118
0.886
(N = 6)
0.01 I
0.536
(N = 7)
0.786
(N = 8)
0.014
0.883
(N = 9)
0.0015
0.810
(N = 8)
0.011
0.883
(N = 9)
0.0015
0.771 0.771
(N = 6) (N = 6)
0.051
0.893 0.893
(N = 7) (N = 7)
0.0062
0.05 1
0.786
(N = 8)
0.014
0.933
(N = 9)
0.00037
0.0062
reliability resultant from a small number of informants without eliminating so many values as to make computation of rhos meaningless. The rule we have followed is simple: for any pair of columns in Tables 4 and 5, use all available values providing the value is based on at least 10 informants. We will take up the conception pictured in Figure 1 at the second level, the consequentiality rating, which is our translation into a continuous
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Roger Brown and James Kulik
variable of Livingston’s biological significance. We have proposed that higher consequentiality values make for more elaborate FB memories, but the memory itself, of course, is inaccessible, and so we cannot directly check that prediction. We also predicted, however, that high levels of consequentiality would compel high frequencies of rehearsal, both covert and overt. We have no data on covert rehearsals, but we do have data on overt rehearsals. As can be seen in Table 6, the rho between consequentiality and overt rehearsals for Whites is so high (0.886) that even with an N of only 6 it is significant. The value for Blacks is positive and moderately high, but with an N of 7 not significant. If a post hoc suggestion is not out of order, we have a notion why the value was as low as this. Blacks may have felt a kind of racial obligation to rank Martin Luther King and Malcolm X above any white man; the word coruequerztidity has, after all, some semantic overlap with importunce. But with respect to rehearsals, Blacks give their highest value to John Kennedy (90% > 0 rehearsals) even as did Whites. It is difficult to imagine any participant in the American culture at that time doing otherwise. We have suggested that the kind of cue most frequently eliciting overt rehearsals in the past would probably be similar to the cues by which we attempted to retrieve FB memories. We have also suggested that consequentiality should vary directly with the elaboration of a neurological memory and that rehearsals, while drawing on the materials of the memory, would also have a constructive role in building up verbal narratives from the memories. It follows that the consequentiality value of an event ought to be positively related to the degree of elaboration and length in words of a retrieved account by virtue of the mediating rehearsal process. We have then a whole set of predictions. Consequentiality should be positively correlated with the elaboration of an account in canonical categories. It is (rhos are 0.786 and 0.883). Consequentiality should be positively correlated with account length in words. It is (rhos are 0.810 and 0.883). Rehearsals, as the mediating variable between FB memories and FB accounts, should be related to both the content elaboration and word length values of accounts; rhos are, respectively, 0.77 1 and 0.77 1 for Whites and 0.893 and 0.893 for Blacks. Finally, of course, some positive correlation between content measures of elaboration and word counts of length is to be expected. but obtained values as high as 0.786 and 0.933 is hardly an u priori necessity. The content coding into 6 categories for historical events and 9 for personal shocks is to be compared with a range in word counts from 6 to 343. If the so-called canonical categories were not close to the csqence of the degree of elaboration in the neurological memories, we might find that long accourlts did not necessarily
Flashbulb memories
95
include most or all of the canon but were often exhausted on irrelevant matters such as the weather, one’s clothing, one’s most recent meal, one’s favorite novel, or what have you, with the canon omitted. At the same time, the canon is so small that, in principle, very few words could cover the lot. The suggestion is that Place, Ongoing Activity, Informant and so on are, in fact, the uniform terms in which the event was experienced, that they well represent the regnant brain processes at the time of the event. Discussion You have now seen all the quantitative data we have that are relevant to our behavioral version of Livingston’s “Now print!” theory. We should like now to remind you of a qualitative aspect of our data that makes a “Now print!” theory especially appealing to us. Livingston states that the “Now Print!” order, activated by some surprising and biologically significant event, affects all immediately preceding as well as contemporaneous brain patterns. This proposition is exactly what is required to explain two aspects of the accounts written by our informants: (1) certain content categories were so frequently present in the accounts that we have called them canonical; (2) many accounts included utterly idiosyncratic and, in a sense, accidental content. The canonical categories that appeared most often were: Place, Ongoing Activity, Informant, Own Affect, Other Affect, and Aftermath. If one thinks of the situation of the individual person when someone breaks in upon him with the startling news of an assassination or the like, it is evident that the brain activity roughly contemporaneous must usually be just the sort of nervous activity required to satisfy the canonical categories. Remember that it is not memory for the central newsworthy event that constitutes a FB memory, but rather memory for the circumstances in which one first heard the news. And Livingston’s proposal that contemporaneous brain activity will result in permanent neurological change is precisely what is needed to explain this curious phenomenon. Each individual, when he is broken in upon with startling news, may not only be attending to usual matters like Place and Ongoing Activities, but to quite irrelevant, accidental matters. Attention is not always fully task governed, so one person remembers the color of a dress, another something of the character of the informant, another the name of a companion. One psychologist and former Harvard colleague (not an informant in the study) included, in his account of his memory for the news of the shooting of President Kennedy, that he was walking up the steps of Emerson Hall and could still feel the special rubber tread on those steps at that time. Com-
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Roger Brown and James Kulik
parable idiosyncrasies appear in many of our accounts, and they are just what should appear if all ongoing brain patterns are subject to the order “Now print!” To some readers it must seem that our conceptualizing as “biological significance” the variable that, with surprise and rehearsals, is conceived to be most important in the creation of FB memories is distinctly undermotivated and possibly no more than conformity to a current fad for biological explanations in psychological science. Clearly, there is, in this case, no direct way to measure biological significance. We have had to resort to common-sense reasoning about racial groups and to a scale of conscquentiality. We cannot, certainly, prove that biological significance is the best conceptualization. Perhaps it should be prominence or emotional cathexis or extremity of attitude or degree of arousal or some other concept, overlapping in sense with consequentiality, but partially independent. Perhaps whenever attention is sustained at some high level, beyond some critical time, a FB memory is created. Concepts such as we have described, as well as any serious neurological proposals that may develop, are not really in competition with biological significance. They operate on several different levels of explanation. With the neurological process constituting a test for biological significance unknown, the problem is to find a question, a scale, an evoked potential, a peripheral indicant of attention, or something else that will closely reflect the unknown brain event. If the brain event were known and could be measured, it would be possible to predict and create FB memories with a high level of precision. The question would then be whether the identified brain event were such as to have biological significance in Livingston’s sense. What that reduces to is the question whether the mechanism has a significant innate component which the species might reasonably be supposed to have evolved in accordance with the Doctrine of Natural Selection. An innate component, of course, does not mean a mechanism that can develop without specific experiential inputs. In the end, our liking for biological significance is based on a belief that the relevant mechanism does have an important innate base and that a plausible, even interesting, case can be developed for its evolution in accordance with natural selection. There is, in the name Livingston has given to his theory, a wonderful and revealing paradox which he, himself, does not seem to have noticed. The theory is named “Now print!” and it is the nervous system that is supposed, metaphorically, to print. Bilt in fact, of course, printing is done by presses and for newspapers and books. What they print is the central newsworthy event, the assassination or its like. There is no actual need for the human nervous system today to print, or remember, on the basis of one trial, major
Flashbulb memories
97
political assassinations. They are all in the printed record; they are a part of history. One can look them up if there is ever any doubt, but there never is, because one reads references to them many times. No special nervous mechanism is today required for events like this. What is not anywhere printed is the individual circumstances in which each person first receives the news. Each is, in the concrete, unique and not newsworthy. They cannot be looked up in any book or paper. If they are not remembered, they are lost. But, then, what of that? What need is there today to remember them? The “Now print!” neurobiological mechanism surely did not evolve in the human species in historical time, that is, in the few thousand years since writing was invented or the few hundred since printing was invented. The mechanism surely evolved much earlier in the (roughly) one million years since our species appeared. At the time when the mechanism evolved, there was no actual printing; there was only the human memory. What surely had to be printed neurologically and put in permanent store was not the circumstances of an unexpected and biologically significant event, but the event itself. To survive and leave progeny, the individual human had to keep his expectations of significant events up to date and close to reality. A marked departure from the ordinary in a consequential domain would leave him unprepared to respond adequately and endanger his survival. The “Now print!” mechanism must have evolved because of the selection value of permanently retaining biologically crucial, but unexpected events. It seems to be an irony of evolution that it is just the central newsworthy events that no longer need to be retained because cultural devices have taken over the job. And today the automatic recording of the circumstances, concomitant to the main event, is what captures our interest and calls for explanation. But the explanation has not been given. Certainly the surprising and consequential had to be permanently remembered, but why should man ever have developed a mechanism for storing his concomitant circumstances? When - ever - would such memories have had survival value? Suppose we imagine a state of life for primitive man, We are not now at a time when presidential assassinations are the critical events to evoke. They would be something more like the appearance in one’s territory of a new dangerous carnivore or the sight of a serious injury to a dominant male of the same species or the moving on, of a troop of baboons, to a new and remote range. These things have to be stored in memory promptly and enduringly and are most closely similar to the Person and Event categories which in our Personal Shock cases were never, literally never, omitted from the account. What might the concomitant circumstances have been like, and would there have been any reason to remember them?
98
Roger Brown and James Kulik
Place, after all, is important almost always. Where was the primitive man when he saw the new carnivore or the baboon troop on the march? The significance of the main event is, in great degree, defined by its locus. Nothing is always to be feared or always to be welcomed. It depends. In part on place. What about ongoing activity? Well, perhaps it is the nature of that activity that has attracted an animal or enraged him or allowed him to draw near without being noticed. Affect in others may well be a clue from more experienced conspecifics of the character of an intruder or the quality of some prey or some sheltering space. So, it is not really difficult to conceive of reasons for permanently remembering the circumstances in which something novel and consequential occurred. But we have not yet quite unraveled the mystery of these memories. The canonical category called “Informant” was the category most often specified in FB accounts and, in that fact, we find the reason why these enduring memories for personal circumstances struck us as mysterious in the first place. All of the 10 events we used to search for FB memories were events like John Kennedy’s assassination in which there was a sharp separation between the time and place of the significant event and the circumstances in which each of many millions first heard of that event. An informant was essential for all who were not on the scene, and that informant was usually radio or television. Primitive man, lacking such instruments of telecommunication, would not so regularly register an informant. Sometimes, of course, he would, at least for separations of moderate length since spoken and gestural language may be as old as the species. But what if there were no informant, then or now, no separation between the event and the circumstances in which one learned of it? You are in a startling and serious automobile accident, or you narrowly miss being struck by lightning. There is novelty and biological significance, and also a FB memory. But what now are the preceding and concomitant circumstances? Still, perhaps, Place and maybe Time and Ongoin g Activity and Affect with only Informant missing. But what a difference it makes! The place of an automobile accident, the ongoing activity, the affect are no longer circumstances attendant upon hearing the news. In a way, they ore the news, at least parts of it or dimensions of it. The precise intersection, the make of the car, the signal unobserved all together define the event. And so it makes sense that all of these brain patterns should have to be permanently stored and that a “Now print!” mechanism for doing it would have evolved. What is relatively new is telecommunication which makes an informant a necessity and creates the sharp separation between news and circumstances of hearing the news, and that is what first made us think we were on the trail of a mystery. Probably the same “Now print!” mechanism accounts both for
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99
the enduring significant memories in which one has played the role of protagonist and those in which one has only been a member of an interested audience of millions.
References I. C. (1950) Remembering; a Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press. Bellugi, U., Klima, E. S., and Siple, P. (1974-1975) Remembering in signs. Cog., 3, 2, 93--125. Berendt, J. (1973) Where were you? Esquire, November. Livingston, R. B. (1967a) Brain circuitry relating to complex behavior. In G. C. Quarton, T. Melnechuck, and F. 0. Schmitt (Eds.), The Neurosciences: A Study Program. New York, Rockefeller University Press, 49995 14. Livingston, R. B. (1967b) Reinforcement. In G.C. Quarton, T. Melnechuck, and I’. 0. Schmitt (Eds.), The Neurosciences: A Study Program. New York, Rockefeller University Press, 568576. Norman, D. A. (1976)Memory and Attention, second edition. New York, Wiley. Posner, M. 1. (1973) Cognition: An Introduction. Glenview, Ill., Scott, Foresman and Company. Tulving, E. (1968) Theoretical issues in free recall. In T. R. Dixon and D. L. Horton (Eds.), Verbal Behavior and General Behavior Theory. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 2-36. Bartlett,
Lc souvenir “eclair” (Flashbulb Memory) cst le souvenir dcs circonstanccs dam lesquclles on a appris, pour la premikrc fois, un Cvenement t&s surprenant aux consequences importantes (ou Bveillant une grande emotion). Le cas prototype est la nouvellc de l’assassinat du President John Kennedy. Presque tout le monde se souvient, avec une grandc acuite perceptive, ou il se trouvait au moment oti il a appris la nouvclle, cc qu’il faisait, qui la lui a apprise, ce qu’il a ressenti a son propos et les suites immediates de l’cvencment. De m&me, on SC souvient d’un ou parfois de plusicurs faits concomitants, totalement idiosyncratiques et parfois triviaux. L’article presentc un questionnaire portant sur lcs determinants de ce type de souvenir, i propos d’autres assassinats, Cvenemcnts d’importancc mondialc et significatifs du point de vuc personnel. Si l’assassinat de John Kennedy a cred un souvenir “eclair” extraordinaircment puissant, ce n’est pas le seul Cvdnement a avoir tree cc type de souvenir. Les dcux principaux determinants semblcnt Ctre le niveau de surprise eleve et le niveau des cons& quences impliquces ou peut etre l’cveil emotionnel (&al&s par dchelles de cotations et appartenancc a un groupc ethniquc). Si les deux variables n’attcigncnt pas un nivcau suffisant, il n’y a pas souvenir “eclair”. Si le nivcau est suffisant, ces dcux variables affcctent directemcnt la frdquencc du rappel (implicitc ou explicitc) qui affecte, i son tour, lc dcgrc d’claboration du r&it, expcrimentalemcnt obtenu. On propose de mettre en parallele, de manicrc explicite, la theorie du comportement et la thkoric neuro-physiologique, moms dlaborec ct spticulative de R. B. Livingston (1967). Enfin, la discussion Porte sur unc m&moire permanente des faits incidentcls concomitants, i un evenement surprenant (au sens de biologiquement significatif) qui aurait une grande valcur selective et pourrait expliquer l’dvolution dune base inn& pour un tcl mecanisme de mdmoirc.
