Before you read any further, stand up, hold this book at about waist height, and drop it. Just do it. (Well, if you’re reading this on an electronic device, maybe you should reach for the nearest unbreakable object and drop it instead.)
Now that you’ve retrieved your book and found your place in it once more, your first assignment is to explain why it fell down when you dropped it. Sure, sure, it’s gravity—Isaac Newton and falling apples, etc.
Your next assignment is to answer this question: “How do you know it’s gravity that makes things fall down?” What’s the evidence that makes you confident that gravity is better than other possible explanations—for example, you might think of the Earth as a kind of magnet that attracts objects of a wide range of materials. Chances are you find it much easier to produce the right answer than to explain why it’s the right answer. It’s possible, too, that throughout your science education you were more often evaluated on your ability to remember the right answer than on being able to recreate the scientific process that led people there. And I have to admit there’s a certain efficiency to this approach: there’s a wheel, learn what it is, use it, don’t reinvent it.
The trouble with the “learn it, use it” approach is that science hardly ever has “the” right answers. Science is full of ideas, some of which stand an extremely good chance of being right, and some of which are long shots but the best we’ve got at the moment. The status of these ideas shifts around a fair bit (which partly explains why textbooks have to be revised every couple of years). If you have a good sense of the body of evidence that backs up an idea (or can identify the gaps in the evidence), it becomes much easier to tell where a certain idea falls on the spectrum of likelihood that it’s right.
This was a point made by scientist and author Isaac Asimov in his well-known essay “The Relativity of Wrong” (see Box 1.1). In this 1988 essay, Asimov challenged an English student who wrote to accuse him of scientific arrogance. The letter-writer pointed out that, throughout history, scientists have believed that they understood the universe, only to be proven wrong later. Hence, concluded Asimov’s correspondent, the only reliable thing one could say about scientific knowledge is that it’s bound to be wrong.
To this, Asimov countered that what matters isn’t knowing whether an idea is right or wrong, but having a sense of which ideas might be more wrong than others. He used the flat-Earth theory as an example of how scientific theories develop. In ancient times, the notion that the Earth was flat wasn’t a stupid or illogical one—it was the idea that happened to be most consistent with the available body of knowledge. Eventually, people like Aristotle and others observed things that didn’t quite mesh with the flat-Earth theory. They noticed that certain stars disappear from view when you travel north, and certain others disappear if you travel south. They saw that Earth’s shadow during a lunar eclipse is always round and that the sun casts shadows of different lengths at different latitudes. In short, the available body of evidence had expanded. The flat-Earth theory was no longer the best fit to the observations, causing it to be abandoned in favor of the notion that the Earth is a sphere. As it turned out, when even more evidence was considered, this theory too had to be abandoned: the Earth is not exactly a sphere, but an oblate spheroid, a sphere that’s been squished toward the center at the North and South Poles.
As Asimov put it, “when people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking that the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.” Without the distinction that one is more wrong than the other, for example, you could be left with the belief that, for all we know, in 50 years, scientists will “discover” that the oblate spheroid theory was wrong after all, and the Earth is cubical, or in the shape of a doughnut. (In actual fact, the oblate spheroid theory is wrong. The Earth is very, very slightly pear-shaped, with the South Pole being squished toward the center just a bit more than the North Pole. Still, not a cube.)
Asimov’s point about scientific progression and the graded “rightness” of ideas seems fairly obvious in the context of a well-known example like the flat-Earth theory. But unfortunately, the way in which people often talk about science can blot out the subtleties inherent in the scientific process. In many important discussions, people do behave as if they think of scientific ideas as being right or wrong in an absolute sense. For example, you’ve probably heard people express frustration upon reading a study that contradicts earlier health tips they’ve heard; a common reaction to this frustration is to vow to ignore any advice based on scientific studies, on the grounds that scientists are constantly “changing their minds.” And when people talk about evolution as “just a theory” (and hence not something we need to “believe”) or object that the science of climate change “isn’t settled,” they’re failing to think about the degree to which these scientific ideas approach “rightness.” Naturally, being able to identify whether an idea is very likely to be wrong or very likely to be right calls for a much more sophisticated body of scientific knowledge than simply having memorized what the supposedly right answer is. But ultimately, the ability to evaluate the rightness of an idea leaves you with a great deal more power than does merely accepting an idea’s rightness.
I have a niece who, at the age of three, was definitely on to something. Like many preschoolers, her usual response to being exposed to new information was to ask a question. But in her case, the question was almost always the same. Whether you told her that eating her carrots would make her healthy or that the sun is many, many miles away, she would demand, “How do you know?” She made a great scientific companion—in her presence, you couldn’t help but realize where your understanding of the world was at its shallowest. (Conversations with her still have a way of sending me off on an extended Google search.) One can only hope that by the time she hits college or university, she hasn’t abandoned that question in favor of another one, commonly heard from students: Which theory is the right one?
1.1 What Do Scientists Know about Language?
In studying the language sciences, it’s especially useful to approach the field with the “how do you know?” mindset rather than one that asks which theory is right. The field is an exceptionally young one, and the truth is that its collection of facts and conclusions that can be taken to be nearly unshakable is really very small. (The same is true of most of the sciences of the mind and brain in general.) In fact, scientific disagreements can run so deep that language researchers are often at odds about fundamentals—not only might they disagree on which theory best fits the evidence, they may argue about what kind of cloth a theory should be cut from. Or on very basic aspects of how evidence should be gathered in the first place. Or even the range of evidence that a particular theory should be responsible for covering. It’s a little bit as if we were still in an age when no one really knew what made books or rocks fall to the ground—when gravity was a new and exciting idea, but was only one among many. It needed to be tested against other theories, and we were still trying to figure out what the best techniques might be to gather data that would decide among the competing explanations. New experimental methods and new theoretical approaches crop up every year.
All this means that language science is at a fairly unstable point in its brief history, and that seismic shifts in ideas regularly reshape its intellectual landscape. But this is what makes the field so alluring to many of the researchers in it—the potential to play a key role in reshaping how people think scientifically about language is very, very real (see Box 1.2). A sizable amount of what we “know” about language stands a good chance of being wrong. Many of the findings and conclusions in this book may well be overturned within a few years. Don’t be surprised if at some point your instructor bursts out in vehement disagreement with some of the material presented here, or with the way in which I’ve framed an idea. In an intellectual climate like this, it becomes all the more important to take a “how do you know?” stance. Getting in the habit of asking this question will give you a much better sense of which ideas are likely to endure, as well as how to think about new ideas that pop up in the landscape.
The question also brings you into the heart of some of the most fascinating aspects of the scientific process. Scientific truths don’t lie around in the open, waiting for researchers to stub their toes on them. Often the path from evidence to explanation is excruciatingly indirect, requiring an intricate circuitous chain of assumptions. Sometimes it calls for precise and technologically sophisticated methods of measurement. This is why wrong ideas often persist for long periods of time, and it’s also why scientists can expend endless amounts of energy in arguing about whether a certain method is valid or appropriate, or what exactly can and can’t be concluded from that method.
In language research, many of the Eureka! moments represent not discoveries, but useful insights into how to begin answering a certain question. Language is a peculiar subject matter. The study of chemistry or physics, for example, is about phenomena that have an independent existence outside of ourselves. But language is an object that springs from our very own minds. We can have conscious thoughts about how we use or learn language, and this can give us the illusion that the best way to understand language is through these deliberate observations. But how do you intuit your way to answering questions like these:
■ When we understand language, are we using the same kind of thinking as we do when we listen to music or solve mathematical equations?
■ Is your understanding of the word blue exactly the same as my understanding of it?
■ What does a baby know about language before he or she can speak?
■ Why is it that sometimes, in the process of retrieving a word from memory, you can draw a complete blank, only to have the word pop into your mind half an hour later?
■ What does it mean if you accidentally call your current partner by the name of your former one? (You and your partner might disagree on what this means.)
■ What exactly makes some sentences in this book confusing, while others are easy to understand?
To get at the answers to any of these questions, you have to be able to probe beneath conscious intuition. This requires acrobatic feats of imagination—not only in imagining possible alternative explanations, but also in devising ways to go about testing them. In this book, I’ve tried to put the spotlight not just on the conclusions that language researches have drawn, but also on the methods they’ve used to get there. As in all sciences, methods range from crude to clever to stunningly elegant, and to pass by them with just a cursory glance would be to miss some of the greatest challenges and pleasures of the study of language.
1.2 Why Bother?
At this point, you might be thinking, “Fine, if so little is truly known about how language works in the mind, sign me up for some other course, and I’ll check back when language researchers have worked things out.” But before you go, let me suggest a couple of reasons why it might be worth your while to study psycholinguistics.
Here’s one reason: Despite the fact that much of the current scientific knowledge of language is riddled with degrees of uncertainty and could well turn out to be wrong, it’s not nearly as likely to be wrong as the many pronouncements that people often make about language without really knowing much, if anything, about it (see Table 1.1). The very fact that we can have intuitions about language—never mind that many of these are easily contradicted by closer, more systematic observation—appears to mislead people into believing that these intuitions are scientific truths. Aside from those who have formally studied the language sciences or have spent a great deal of time thinking analytically about language, almost no one knows the basics of how language works or has the slightest idea what might be involved in learning and using it. It’s simply not something that is part of our collective common knowledge at this point in time.
Try this: Ask your mother, or your brother, or your boyfriend, or your girlfriend, “How can you understand what I’m saying right now?” Many people happily go through their entire lives without ever asking or answering a question like this, but if pressed, they might answer something like, “I recognize the words you’re using.” Fine, but how do they even know which bunches of the sounds you’re emitting go together to form words, since there are no silences between individual words? And, once they’ve figured that out, how do they recognize the words? What do “word memories” look like, and is there a certain order in which people sort through their mental dictionaries to find a match to the sounds you’re emitting? Moreover, understanding language involves more than just recognizing the words, or people would have no trouble with the phrase “words I you’re the using recognize.” Obviously, they’re responding to the order of words as well. So, what is the right order of words in a sentence—not just for this one, but more generally? How do people know what the right order is, and how did they learn to tell whether a sentence they’ve never heard before in their lives has its words strung together in the “proper” order?
Most people have a decent sense of how they digest their food, but the common knowledge of many educated people today does not contain the right equipment to begin answering a question as basic as “How can you understand what I’m saying?” Imagine how it must have been, before awareness of gravity became common knowledge, for people to be asked, “Why does a rock fall to the ground?” A typical answer might have been, “It just does”; most people probably never thought to ask themselves why. Many might have stared and stammered, much as they do now when asked about how language works. By studying the psychology of language, you’re entering a world of new questions and new ways of thinking—a world that isn’t visible to most people. You’ll be privy to discussions of ideas before they’ve become the officially received “right” answers that “everyone” knows. You might find this all so stimulating that you wind up being a language researcher yourself—but the vast majority of readers of this textbook won’t. Which brings me to the second reason to study psycholinguistics.
There are few subjects you can study that will have such a broad and deep impact on your daily life as the study of language. Even if you’re unlikely to become a professional language researcher, you’re extremely likely to use language in your daily life. Inevitably, you’ll find yourself asking questions like these:
■ How can I write this report so that it’s easier to understand?
■ What kind of language should I use in order to be persuasive?
■ If I sit my kid in front of the TV for an hour a day, will this help her to learn language?
■ Why do my students seem incapable of using apostrophes correctly?
■ How can I make my poem more interesting?
■ Should I bother trying to learn a second language in my 30s?
■ Why is this automated voice system so infuriating?
Even a basic understanding of how language works in the mind will provide you with the tools to approach these and many, many other questions in an intelligent way.
Unfortunately, those of us who are deeply immersed in studying language don’t always take the time to talk about how our accumulated body of knowledge might provide a payoff for daily users of language. This would be a poor textbook indeed if it didn’t help you answer the questions about language that will crop up throughout your life. Ultimately, whether or not you become a professional psycholinguist, you should feel well equipped to be an amateur language scientist. And to do that, you need much more than “answers” to questions that researchers have thought to ask. One of the goals of this book is to give you the conceptual framework to address the questions that you will think to ask.
Throughout this book, you’ll find activities and exercises that are designed to immerse you in the scientific process of understanding language. The more deeply you engage in these, the more you’ll internalize a way of thinking about language that will be very useful to you when faced with new questions and evidence. And throughout the book, you’ll find discussions that link what can sometimes be very abstract ideas about language to real linguistic phenomena out in the world. Many more such connections can be made, and the more you learn about how language works, the more you’ll be able to generate new insights and questions about the language you see and hear all around you.
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