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Language and Memory
Abstract
Linguistic and psychological concerns are seen to converge in the area of semantics in such a way as to suggest the value, for both disciplines, of 'psychosemantic' studies. This paper illustrates some of the possibilities by providing linguistic evidence for three kinds of memory, called surface, shallow, and deep. The evidence deals with the occurrence of temporal adverbs in English and with their intonation and order, as well as with the non-generic perfective. A classification of memory by psychologists into sensory, primary (short-term), and secondary (long-term) is discussed, and is seen to coincide only in part with-though not to conflict with-the linguistically motivated classification. The relevance of memory to the use of tenses is briefly explored, and it is observed that the tripartite classification of memory is mirrored in our concept of the future.
... The notion that working memory contributes to language originally proposed in Chafe (1973) finds a recent parallel in the working memory-model of sentence processing (Lewis & Vasishth, 2005;Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006). Lewis and Vasishth propose a set of heuristics that together are supposed to explain the impact of working memory on sentence processing. ...
... The influence of memory on activation in language has been suggested as early as Chafe (1973), who cited it as the root of the given-new distinction. More recently, computational models of working memory activation have surfaced (Lewis et al., 2006;Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). ...
... As an initial step we explain some recent work on givenness and accenting that is used in centering OT. Schwarzschild's (1999) explanation of accent marking shares some similarities with the section above, in that he includes a long discussion of accent-his explanation is in large part a formalization of Chafe's (1973) notion that accent is closely tied to givenness. Additional differences between Schwarzschild's account and Chafe's are that Schwarzschild uses entailment as a motivating factor in accent and semantic OT. ...
Probably best to look at my thesis if you are interested in these topics. This was a report I submitted in the first year of my Ph.D., describing what I had done to that point and what I was planning on doing.
... In a fourth phase, that information carried by the message is stored in long term memory by processes that involve the hyppocampal system (Chafe 1973;Cardo 1976). ...
... Yet, the acquisition of information transmitted verbally is not the same as the memorization of words, poems or prayers, where both form and content must be stored. As Chafe (1973) points out, remembering that Steve fell in the swimming pool is not the same sort of thing as remembering the sequence XJWlQH. The activities involved in most psychological experiments on bilingual memory are akin to the acquisition of skills in that performance improves with repetition (Cardo 1976). ...
While the study of bilingualism has been steadily gaining important ground for quite some time, in sociolinguistics and most certainly developmental psycholinguistics, the relevance of bilingualism to the neurology of language in particular and to neuroscience in general has only recently been paid much attention to. The reason is because cases of aphasia in bilinguals and polyglots are numerous but the number seen by any individual researcher remains small. For a comprehensive anthology of such cases, see Paradis (1983).
... A partir dessa perspectiva, recorremos a Chafe (1973), quando define a memória como superficial, rasa e profunda, conforme o fez Fleischman (1990), para distinguir os discursos da memória, já que definimos a narrativa como uma recapitulação de eventos passados. Utilizando uma categorização de tempo medida em anos, constituímos três variáveis para esse grupo de fatores: a) narrativas atuais (que relatam o que ocorreu durante o ano da entrevista); b) narrativas menos atuais (que relatam o que ocorreu entre um e três anos antes da entrevista) e c) narrativas distantes (que ocorreram há mais de três anos da entrevista). ...
... A number of recent studies have supported Chafe's (1973) proposal that different types of intonational features are used to distinguish various degrees of referent accessibility, rather than a binary relation. Some accounts have shown that different accent types might be used for marking different accessibility states (Pierrehumbert & Hirschberg 1990, Kohler 1991, Baumann 2005. ...
In a detailed comparison of the intonational systems of two unrelated languages, Israeli Sign Language and American Sign Language, we show certain similarities as well as differences in the distribution of several articulations of different parts of the face and motions of the head. Differences between the two languages are explained on the basis of pragmatic notions related to information structure, such as accessibility and contingency, providing novel evidence that the system is inherently intonational, and only indirectly related to syntax. The study also identifies specific ways in which the physical modality in which language is expressed influences intonational structure.
... The basic distinction of what may propositionally be formulated as opposed to what may only prototypically be realized in some system structure of stored experiences, is reflected in the great variety of notional pairings which different disciplines have produced facing a similar, if not identical research problem. Thus, their notions of formal vs. experiental knowledge [2], semantic vs. episodic memory [21], frame vs. scene [3], description vs. schema [1], etc. show a striking resemblance: although their approaches differ in what they consider natural language meaning to be, they nonetheless converge on the central notion of it, being a relation between a representation (i.e. the body of discourse) and that which it represents (i.e. a referentially and/or prototypically defined system structure). ...
this paper discusses some of the empirical problems connected with natural languages' varying and vague meanings, how these can be analysed statistically from discourse data, and represented formally as fuzzy system of vocabulary mappings. Some examples computed from East- and West-German newspaper texts will be given at the end to illustrate the approaches feasibility
The article examines the role of metaphor in many scientific disciplines. Despite all the differences in the processes of metaphorization in individual languages, metaphor is not only a sphere of manifestation of the idioethnic, but also universal
Autobiographical memories have been investigated, experimentally rather than in real interactional settings. This study explores the role of language in mental processes through the linguistic explication of memories in discursive practices in early ontogenesis. It considers the ways and means of early oral memories evolvement in the interdisciplinary paradigm. The goal is to identify the mechanism of early discourse formation in recalls. The data were collected from the multimedia corpus CHILDES Transcript Browser with speech transcripts of German-speaking children from three to seven years old and were subjected to communicative, pragmatic, cognitive and discursive analyses. Adults’ verbal discursive strategies and tactics were examined to explicate the mnemonic content of children’s narratives. We identified the pragmatic orientation of stimulating statements of adults and described the linguistic features of a child’s mnemonic utterances. It has been found that the main discursive strategies of adults prompting children are: the strategy of discursive socialization, the strategy of dialogic narrative with its further transformation into a mnemonic narrative and information extraction from memory. As a result, the psycholinguistic (verbal) model of the ontogenetic generalization of childhood memories typical for German-speaking communication partners was developed. The model includes six stages according to the age of a preschooler. It displays the evolution of the surface structure of mnemonic utterances-recollections, which make up the framework of primary autobiographical narrations. This research fills in the niches in discourse studies, in ontogenesis and in the primary and secondary text models. The findings may have practical application in corpus and empirical studies.
Crises of reputation are rarely studied from the linguistic point of view, which results in several research gaps. Therefore, in this study three selected crisis cases have been analyzed as asynchronous online polylogues —Internet debates performed by stakeholders in different sources from the moment of publication. In this approach corpus analysis has been combined with the theory of computer-mediated communication, speech acts and a semantic study of emotions. One of the findings was that certain common patterns of subtopics, emotion expressions and communicative actions are noticeable in the user-generated content across different crisis cases. Contrary to some NLP studies, emotions expressed by stakeholders in a crisis situation refer not to the major topic, but to its subtopics, which impacts the construction of text-mining models. Unlike in pre-social media studies, sarcasm and not anger is the major emotion expressed textually in reaction to a crisis of reputation.
This paper presents a study of the system of lexical devices used by English speakers to verbalize their personal memory experiences. The approach presented in the paper presupposes inclusion of non-narrative structures into the spectrum of language forms conveying mnemonic meanings and extends the latter so as to encompass the meanings of encoding, storage, retrieval and loss. The research is based on the hypothesis that lexical units expressing memory-related meanings in English constitute a specifically organized system. A variety of communicative contexts representing mnemonic situations are analyzed as to develop a typology of memory verbalizers in English, estimate their functional potential and role in objectifying personal memory experiences on the lexical level. The results confirm the original hypothesis and suggest that mnemonic lexicon as a linguistic reflection of the mnemonic faculty is an important and largely understudied element of the language – memory system.
Accepting W. Chafe's ideas regarding memory's representability via language categories expressed in grammatical forms, the author aims at analyzing temporal adverbials as grammatical markers of mnemonic processes, establishing their status in this quality and assessing their potential. To provide a thorough and accurate description of temporal adverbials consistent with the goal of the present study, two relevant parameters are set: direct involvement in marking of specific mnemonic processes at the grammatical level and the type of temporal reference assigned to the mnemonic event. In accordance with the temporal characteristic of the mnemonic event, two subclasses of temporal adverbials are differentiated: localizers specifying the position of the mnemonic event on the time axis in relation to the fixed or conditional reference point and correlators indicating the position of the mnemonic event in relation to other events. An analysis of communicative contexts representing interaction between the subject of a mnemonic situation with other participants yielded results indicating absence of correlation between subclasses of temporal adverbials and specific mnemonic processes as well as functional inequality as representation of mnemonic function at the grammatical level. The findings suggest involvement of temporal adverbials in setting the timeline framework of a mnemonic utterance regardless of their discretionary status and validity as grammatical markers of mnemonic function in general as opposed to specific memory types and procedures.
Remembering (including forgetting) is both an important cognitive process and a pervasive linguistic phenomenon. This paper focuses on a less researched phenomenon in remembrance, namely, how remembrance can be disputed by interlocutors in conversation. I show, with data from audio/video-recorded Mandarin conversations, that disputed remembering in the form of debating, augmentation, emendation, and alternation, etc. is often displayed in the service of social interaction. The types of disputed memory analyzed include (1) disputes between interlocutors with regard to a past experience; (2) selective (or contradictory) remembering by the same speaker; (3) adults disputing and elaborating on memory on behalf of children; and (4) mother–children memory disputes regarding children's past behaviors. The Mandarin data involving remembering add to the linguistically and socio-culturally diverse range of forms and functions of negative epistemic expressions.
Paul Butler applauds the emerging interest in the study of style among scholars of rhetoric and composition, arguing that the loss of stylistics from composition in recent decades left it alive only in the popular imagination as a set of grammar conventions. Butler's goal in Out of Style is to articulate style as a vital and productive source of invention, and to redefine its importance for current research, theory, and pedagogy. Scholars in composition know that the ideas about writing most common in the discourse of public intellectuals are egregiously backward. Without a vital approach to stylistics, Butler argues, writing studies will never dislodge the controlling fantasies of self-authorized pundits in the nation's intellectual press. Rhetoric and composition must answer with a public discourse that is responsive to readers' ongoing interest in style but is also grounded in composition theory.
Linguistics, neurocognition, and phenomenological psychology are fundamentally different fields of research. Helmut Schnelle provides an interdisciplinary understanding of a new integrated field in which linguists can be competent in neurocognition and neuroscientists in structure linguistics. Consequently the first part of the book is a systematic introduction to the function of the form and meaning-organising brain component - with the essential core elements being perceptions, actions, attention, emotion and feeling. Their descriptions provide foundations for experiences based on semantics and pragmatics. The second part is addressed to non-linguists and presents the structural foundations of currently established linguistic frameworks. This book should be serious reading for anyone interested in a comprehensive understanding of language, in which evolution, functional organisation and hierarchies are explained by reference to brain architecture and dynamics.
This book explores the nature of sentential stress, how it is assigned, and its interaction with information structure. The central thesis is that the position of sentential or nuclear stress - the element with the highest prominence in the sentence - is determined syntactically and that cross-linguistic differences in this respect follow from syntactic variations. In particular, it is proposed that the Sentential Stress Rule applies in a phase-based manner (Chomsky 2000, 2001, and subsequent work) and assigns stress to the highest element in the spelled out constituent. An additional rule, namely the Focus Stress Rule, which also applies in a phase-based manner, is proposed to handle the interaction between sentential structure and information structure. Sentential stress is thus determined in an interplay between two components, the default Sentential Stress Rule and the Focus Stress Rule. The book provides several arguments in favor of this two-component system.
This chapter describes a series of studies concerned with the role of memory mechanisms. The restrictions considered in the chapter are (1) focus on the ongoing process of comprehension, (2) use of normal text, (3) focus on normal reading, (4) maintenance of relation to simple memory tasks and the theories that go with them, and (5) postulation of entities. There are several advantages in starting with the restrictions. The most significant advantage is that it leads, more easily, to the prediction of new results or incorporation of known results and to the development of application of both sets of results. The restrictions also lead to predictions concerning cases that are less obvious. They also lead to the incorporation of cases that are considered different from ordinary reading, such as the paradigm for abstraction of complex ideas.
How linguistics turned cognitive (again)
This paper describes the birth of the conglomerate of interconnected views that is known as cognitive linguistics. In today’s parlance, “cognitive linguistics” refers to a movement that was born in the United Sates in the 1970s and progressively took shape in the work of linguists who wished to break away from generative grammar.
Although generative grammar was initially perceived by some linguists as a liberating new framework, which made it possible again to explore semantic matters and the mapping of meaning to forms, it soon became clear to the same linguists that the Chomskyan school was not taking generative grammar in that direction. The dissident approach which resulted from their alternative point of view, generative semantics, anticipated and, to a certain extent, prepared the split between cognitive linguistics and the Chomskyan paradigm. Both steps, — the generative semantics period and the ensuing move to cognitive linguistics — are retraced here. In the second part of the paper, the move to cognitive linguistics (or various brands of it) is examined in some detail for four linguists who had all at one point views sympathetic to generative semantics and played a major role in the constitution of cognitive linguistics (Chafe, Talmy, Lakoff and Langacker). The last part describes how the reawakening of semantics and of an empiricist view of cognition favored the adoption of prototype theory and promoted metaphor as an important field of inquiry. Since prototype theory and metaphor have been linked to psychology and general views on cognition, it is appropriate at that point to discuss the interactions between linguistics and cognitive science.
This paper describes the birth of this theoretical conglomerate known as cognitive linguistics. In today’s parlance, “ cognitive linguistics” refers to a movement that was born in the United Sates in the 1970s and progressively took shape in the work of linguists who wished to break away from syntaxcentered tranformational grammar. This split was to a large extent prepared by the movement of generative semantics, which had steered a number of linguists in a more semantically oriented direction. Generative semantics is given its due in the first part of the paper, in which I analyze the motivations of this movement, and the ways in which it may have prepared the ground for cognitive linguistics. The second part recounts how topics and positions characteristic of cognitive linguistics have emerged and gained momentum. Four central themes are given special emphasis : the notion of conceptual metaphor, the revival of localist ideas, questions related to prototype theory and categorization, and, finally, the concept of frame. In conclusion, it is pointed out that cognitive linguistics gained its unity by weaving together themes and theoretical views of various origins around an empiricist core.
My aim in this paper is to demonstrate the relationship between prosody and information status in spontaneous conversation in two languages, Spanish and English. My data come from several audio tapes of conversations recorded by the speakers themselves—in each case a pair of native speakers of the same language. My conclusions regarding both languages are very similar. The prosodic traits, which I call rhythmic elements, play an important role with respect to the management of new and known information. However, this applies not only to one speaker's point of view, but to both viewpoints involved in the turn-taking exchange. The coordination between the two speakers also implies a common perception about the status of the information delivered.
A great deal of current research in language acquisition and in ESL classroom practice is coalescing into a method for second language instruction called Communicative Language Teaching (CLT). Although there is agreement about some of its characteristics, other aspects of this method lack consensus or even clear definition. One reason for this may be because CLT has moved away from the metaphors commonly used to describe language teaching but has not as yet fastened onto one of its own. This article discusses some characteristics of what such a new metaphor might be and reviews a few of the ways in which CLT guides classroom practice, aligns ESL teaching with current theory in other fields, and offers directions for future research.
Ellipsis is a common occurrence in Japanese conversation despite the fact that there are no overt clues to the identity of ellipted elements. Both the ellipsis of noun phrases and main verbals is examined. It is shown that an analysis which utilizes a version of frame theory can account for when ellipsis has occurred; recognition of paragraph structures defines the identity of ellipted elements. All sentences require a main verbal; if one is not present, an appropriate verbal is selected from those available in immediate consciousness. All verbals have specific noun phrases which must be identified; if any of these are not present they are also selected from available candidates in immediate consciousness. In addition to structural information about paragraphs, the accretion of information throughout a conversation and the notion of scripts is necessary to identify the referents of ellipted noun phrases.
Given these three independently motivated functional principles, it is argued that the relative frequency of basic constituent order types is due to the tendency for the three principles to be maximally realized in the world’s languages. SOV and SVO languages are typologically most frequent because such basic orders reflect all three principles. The remaining orders occur less frequently because they reflect fewer of the principles.
The study of repeated tellings of the same experience by the same speaker has been a neglected source of insights into the human mind. The content of the mind (here termed underlying experience) cannot be equated with any particular verbalization of it. Language, mental imagery, and emotions provide different windows on it, but the very fact that repeated tellings differ shows that language is not in any one-to-one relation with it. The comparison of such tellings can, however, allow us to zero in on the nature of underlying experience by showing what is constant and what variable. Such comparisons suggest that experience is stored in terms of relatively large topics and relatively small foci that are activated, one at a time, as a topic is scanned. They suggest, too, that decisions regarding sentence boundaries are made as one is talking, so that sentences appear not to reflect units of memory. Whereas ideas of events and their participants show stability, the orientations to such ideas that are expressed by the inflectional elements of language are free to vary. The relative importance of ideas may be inferred from their constancy across repetitions. Chronology appears to be important when it is a relevant relation between ideas, but when it is not relevant there is room for random ordering. These points will be illustrated with a comparison of two tellings that were produced fifteen months apart. (Narrative Structure, Memory)
This study examines variation in the narrative structure of recounted sad memories from defensive (sometimes called avoidant or repressive) and nondefensive participants. Defensiveness was operationally defined by high scores on the Marlowe- Crowne (MC) Social Desirability Scale (Crowne & Marlowe, 1960). In a laboratory interview, participants were asked to discuss past depressive episodes. Transcribed interviews were analyzed for narrative structure, using a method adopted from Labov and Waletzky (1967). Most nondefensive (low MC) participants responded with a narration, defined as at least 3 propositions uttered in the same order as the past events they represent. In contrast, most defensive (high MC) participants described a sad memory without narrating. Overall, the nonnarrative responses were briefer than the narrations and were rated as less vivid, even after controlling for length. Avoiding narration is hypothesized as an automatic self-protective cognitive maneuver by which individuals can comply with a task demand to "tell about" an unpleasant memory without "reliving" it.
Assessing the readability of texts is an important task for many administrative and educational programs. However, current readability measures have serious empirical and theoretical flaws that make their use questionable. In this paper we propose two methods of assessing readability that involve analyzing the referential and cohesive structures of a text. We suggest that such measures are theoretically better motivated and, through reconsideration of some anomalous performance results from Duffy & Kabance (1982), that they promise to be more adequate in predicting actual reading performance.
Three experiments tested whether Clark and Haviland's given-new strategy operates in the processing and retention of natural expository paragraphs read as wholes. The first indicated that a paragraph that facilitates the given-new strategy is easier to process than a paragraph that has the same truth value but that frustrates the given-new strategy. The second indicated that a facilitating paragraph has advantages in memory over its variant. And the third both largely confirmed the findings of the second test and suggested that subjects add new information to the memory node holding the given information. Therefore, these experiments extend the tested applicability of the given-new strategy to the readability and retention of some natural expository paragraphs.
The long-range goal of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) should be to construct computer programs that interact with a student
as a human tutor does. In order to make computers act as intelligent tutors, we must consider three aspects of teaching; (1)
A tutor makes use of many different knowledge sources. (2) A tutorial session is a kind of problem-solving situation in which
the tutor is trying to solve the problem of imparting understanding to the student. (3) There is an analogy between the process
of communication and those of teaching in that both require the participants to make a number of inferences about each other’s
states and responses. A tutor designs an “instructional act,” anticipating how the student will interpret and learn from it,
and the student interprets and learns from the instruction in a manner that depends on his hypotheses about the intent of
the tutor. The paper reviews the relevant literature and discusses how we will incorporate such ideas into CAI systems.
Five experiments are presented which illustrate microprocesses of discourse comprehension related to foregrounding. It is argued that when a sentence of a discourse is comprehended, its given portion must be matched to prior text memories by one of three processes. If the antecedent memory structure is in a short-term memory, matching is rapid; if no direct antecedent is found, bridging inferences, which take time to make, are performed. The present studies explore in detail an intermediate case in which prior memories exist but must be reinstated to active memory.
The question of learning from materials presented during sleep has been answered positively by Soviet studies and negatively by Western studies. However, procedural differences among studies have been confounded with the absence of an established criterion for sleep. The present paper reviews 11 studies in sleep learning for the potential practical value of sleep-assisted instruction (SAI). A strategy of optimizing compatibility between learning and sleep variables to support SAI is proposed within the context of both wake and sleep research on attention, perception, and memory. Age, sex, health, wake learning capacity, and suggestibility are important moderating variables in SAI. The individual's motivation and set, meaningful-relevant learning material, activation of low-voltage EEG sleep patterns and coordinated wake learning with extended training are tentatively deduced as necessary conditions in applied SAI. (111/2 p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The present paper reports on an experiment which was set up to examine whether we can make a speaker either accent or de-accent particular words by systematically varying the objective probability that a particular referent will be mentioned (and therewith the referent's predictability for speaker and listener). In the experiment each of 24 speakers was asked to watch a visual display, showing a very simple configuration of letter symbols, and to describe orally each change in the current configuration to a listener. By manipulating the letter configurations shown on the display, the objective probability that the speaker would mention a particular letter could be controlled. Letters could either move around on the screen (moving letters) or remain fixed and serve as spatial reference points (fixed letters). Objective probabilities were 0.5 and 1 for both moving letters and fixed letters. The main findings were the following: (1) When a referent is fully predictable to speaker and listener there is a high proportion of ellipsis, particularly for the moving letter, which was always referred to from subject position. (2) The probability that a word referring to a letter will be accented appears not to be immediately controlled by the predictability of the referent. The controlling factor is rather the preceding linguistic context. More specifically, the probability of accenting, being close to 1 the first time a specific referent is mentioned, sharply decreases when the same referent is mentioned for the second time in a row, and decreases again when this same referent is mentioned three or more times in a row. However, as soon as the competing referent is mentioned once, in the same role (moving or fixed letter), the probability of accenting jumps up again. (3) The probability of accenting is systematically lower for the moving letters in subject position (average 0.32) than for the fixed letters in predicate position (average 0.52). In view of these findings, de-accenting, defined as conspicuously omitting an accent on a word that, for grammatical reasons, otherwise would have been accented, is interpreted as a device which can be used by a cooperative speaker for helping the listener to find the intended referent as easily and quickly as possible. It is supposed that speakers not using this device systematically give their listeners a harder time.
The purpose of the study was to assess contextual effects upon text memory for young, aged-normal, and aged memory-impaired individuals. Subjects read short passages which differed in their contextual relatedness to target sentences, and then recalled those target sentences. It was found that large differences distinguished the performance of the young from the elderly on the free recall task; that cueing aided the performance of the young and the elderly-normal more than the aged-impaired; and lastly, that no differences were found in recognition performance between young and aged normals whereas the performance of the aged-impaireds was significantly poorer than either the young or the aged-normal group. The results were interpreted in light of two hypothetical mechanisms; the first is labeled "normal" aging and the second, "pathological" aging.
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