Articles on Psycholinguistics

Author(s): Susan Ervin

Reviewed work(s):
Source: International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Jul., 1962), pp. 205-209
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1263874 .
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NO. 3

ABSTRACTS AND TRANSLATIONS

by Philological Notes and a Vocabulary.")

By Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg.
Edited by Jorge Luis Arriola. Guatemala:
Editorial del Ministerio de Educaci6n
Publica "Jos6 de Pineda Ibarra", 1961.
This is a new edition of a work first
published in Paris in 1862, with the title:
Grammaire de la Langue Quich6e, Espagnole-Frangaise, Mise en Parallele avec ses
Deux Dialectes, Cakchiquel et Tzutuhil
... Portions originally in French have been
translated into Spanish. The work comprises a Quiche grammar; notes on the
differences between Quich6, Cakchiquel, and
Tzutuhil; and a Quiche-Spanish root list.
The text of the dance-drama Rabinal-Achi,
included in the 1862 edition, is omitted
from the present one.
2. Articles on psycholinguistics reported
by Susan Ervin: [The accounts are ordered
alphabetically by author. As a partial index,
a list of topics is given first, keyed to the
articles by authors' names. Some crosslisting occurs.]

205

success. The relationship between attitude

and success varied in different communities,
suggesting that the socio-psychological characteristics of Jews in the various districts
vary, and the significance of learning Hebrew
is not the same for all types of communities.

Address in American English. By Roger

Brown and Marguerite Ford. Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 62
(1961), pp. 375-385.
Three sources were used for analysis of
modes of direct address: plays, observations
in a Boston business firm, questionnaires of
executives, and notations of address during
the complete day of a midwestern child.
Mutual first names were the most common
pattern, and mutual formal address the
least common. Many speakers differing in
age, occupation, or subordination used nonreciprocal address forms involving a first
name by only one of the dyad. The use of
multiple or variable names was related to
degree of intimacy, a point related to the
tendency of lexical differentiation to inAttitudes towards language: Anisfeld and crease with the importance of the semantic
Lambert; Lambert et al.; Steward. Bilingual- domain. The passage from mutual formal
ism: Anisfeld and Lambert; Ervin; Lambert terms to intimate terms of address, is an
et al. Children's speech: Harwood; Steward. important social rite, and ordinarily it is
Language learning: Anisfeld and Lambert; initiated by the superior party, with a nonGoodglass and Berko; Harwood; Liberman reciprocal response as the bridging pattern.
et al. Patterns of speaking: Brown; Goldman- The authors discuss the relation of address
Eisler. Perception of speech: Liberman et al.; terms to greetings, to degrees of intimacy in
Lotz et al. Phonetic symbolism: Markel and behavior, and to the pronoun differentiation
Hamp; Miron. Semantic habits: Ervin; in other languages, all of which seem to
Fishman; Maclay and Ware. Speech defects: follow similar patterns and are related to
Goodglass and Berko (aphasia); Steward the dimensions of power and of intimacy.
The generalizations reported all derive from
(stuttering). Whorf: Fishman.
appropriate empirical measures.
Social and Psychological Variables in
Semantic shift in Bilingualism. By Susan
Learning Hebrew. By Moshe Anisfeld anb
W. E. Lambert. Journal of Abnormal and M. Ervin. American Journal of Psychology,
Social Psychology, vol. 63, (1961), pp. vol. 74, (1961), pp. 233-241.
Standardized color chips varying in hue
524-529.
The Carroll-Sapon language aptitude test were presented to monolingual speakers of
was the best predictor of achievement in Navaho and English, in this study for the
Hebrew classes, but the attitudes of students Southwest Project in Comparative Psychoproved also to be important in predicting linguistics. On the basis of the relative

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS

terminological agreement in naming each

hue, predictions were made as to preferred
color terms by English-dominant or Navaho-dominant bilinguals, for each hue. The
results are presented for various types of
discrepancy in categories between the two
languages, and support the theory that
bilinguals' overt naming is mediated (or
influenced) by the category appropriate to
the other language, under two conditions:
dominance of the other language in the skill
of the speaker, or less ambiguity in category
assignment in the other language.

VOL. XXVIII

there were more hesitation pauses during

interpretation than during description, and
that hesitation pauses occurred at points of
maximum uncertainty in the information
theory sense-points where alternative possibilities were greatest. For each informant
there was a relatively consistent individual
variable in the relation between the frequency of filled pauses and the duration of
unfilled pauses. Individuals who gave the
most concise, least predictable summaries,
had more hesitation pauses during the summaries, and a lower ratio of filled to unfilled
pauses. Within individuals, variations in
this relation were not shown in comparing
interpretation vs. description, but seemed
to vary according to the particular picture
seen, which suggests that frequency of
pauses is related to emotions.

A Systematization of the Whorfian Hypothesis. By Joshua A. Fishman. Behavioral

Science, vol. 5 (1960), pp. 232-339.
This is an organization of the great variety
of studies pertaining to the Whorf hypothesis. Fishman divides the studies according to
two dimensions: the level of the language at
Agrammatism and Inflectional Morissue-lexical or grammatical categories, and phology in English. By Harold Goodglass
the level of non-language phenomena at and Jean Berko. Journal of Speech and
issue-cultural or individual-behavioral.
Hearing Research, vol. 3 (1960), pp. 257four
of
these
are
267.
Examples
approaches
Whorf's examples about English and Eskimo
With a sentence completion test, inflection
terms for snow, the Brown-Lenneberg re- of nouns, verbs and adjectives was tested in
search on color terms and memory, Whorf's persons with aphasic disorders. Whereas
comments on Hopi time sense and its Berko's research with children's morphology
cultural manifestations, and Casagrande and has shown that phonological complexity of
McClay's studies of the Navaho verb stem particular allomorphs seems to be related
and sorting behavior. The formulation brings most strongly to difficulty, in aphasics
together and usefully arranges the different phonological difficulty is less important than
types of relevant studies. A large number of function. Some aphasics could not supply
recent studies by experimental psychologists any allomorphs at all, no matter how simple,
are omitted which fall in the same category for a particular morpheme. The degree of
as the Brown-Lenneberg research, being con- mastery for all the forms studied was corcerned with the influence of learning labels related: plural, possessive, comparative,
on differentiation of stimuli or on mediation superlative, and third singular present.
Mastery of the simple past was unrelated
during problem-solving.
to other inflections. There is some evidence
of
Two
Hesitation
to
Study
Comparative
suggest the independence of morphological
Phenomena. By Frieda Goldman-Eisler. skills from syntactic aspects of grammar.
Language and Speech, vol. 4(1961), pp.
18-26.
Quantitative Study of the Speech of
Recorded utterances were collected while Australian Children. By F. W. Harwood.
informants described, interpreted, and sum- Language and Speech, vol. 2 (1959), pp.
marized picture series. It was found that 236-272.

NO. 3

ABSTRACTS AND TRANSLATIONS

A sample of speech of 24 Australian

children around 5 years old was collected
stenographically in a variety of situations
for syntactic analysis. Many statistical
tables are presented showing frequencies
of syntactical structures and sequences.
The author argues that the children's
language can be described as a phrase structure grammar without the use of transformations. Two alternative sentence-generating
sets of rules were tested: a set of rules stated
only in terms of possible sequences, in
constituent form; and a multi-valued or
probabilistic system. Sentences generated
by the two systems are presented. The equiprobable sentences are too long, and are
somewhat similar to the low orders of approximation to English produced by Miller
and Selfridge; the probabilistic system seems
much more plausible but contains semantic
oddities, such as "We will be when I am
feet."
Evaluational Reactions to Spoken Languages. By W. E. Lambert, R. C. Hodgson,
R. C. Gardner, and S. Fillenbaum. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol.
60 (1960), pp. 44-51.
Bilingual speakers made recordings in
both languages, which were then presented
to French-speaking and English-speaking
Montreal students for ratings of personal
traits. The raters did not know that the
same voices were heard in both languages.
The English voices were rated more favorable by both groups, the French-speaking
raters being most negative toward the
French recordings. The listeners judged the
people who spoke English to be taller,
better-looking, more intelligent, more dependable, more ambitious, more kind, and
to have more character.
The Discrimination of Relative OnsetTime of the Components of Certain Speech
and Nonspeech Patterns. By A. M.
Liberman, Katherine S. Harris, Jo Ann
Kinney, and H. Lane. Journal of Experi-

207

mental Psychology, Vol. 61 (1961), pp.

379-388.
An extension of earlier Haskins laboratory
research which showed that auditory discrimination of speech stimuli along the
acoustic continuum including /b-d-g/ is
maximal at phoneme boundaries and reduces
to chance within phoneme boundaries. The
present study also finds, with /b-t/, that
discrimination is superior at the phoneme
boundaries. By comparison with a similar
discrimination of a non-speech stimulusroughly an inversion of the frequency patterns of the stimulus-it makes the significant added point that the learning is a result
of acquired distinctiveness at the boundaries,
rather than loss of distinctiveness within
them.
The Perception of English Stops by
Speakers of English, Spanish, Hungarian
and Thai: A Tape-Cutting Experiment. By
John Lotz, Arthur S. Abramson, L. J.
Gerstman, Frances Ingemann, and W. J.
Nemser. Language and Speech, vol. 3 (1960),
pp. 71-77.
After cutting tapes containing monosyllabic English words starting with /s/ plus
consonant, the experimenters reinserted
the mutilated words into sentences, and
asked listeners to make a judgment which
would force them to choose between the
voiced and voiceless stop. Overwhelmingly
the American, but not the other listeners,
identified the stop as voiced. The lack of
aspiration is a dominant cue in English,
whereas the lack of voicing is the dominant
cue in the other languages.
Cross-Cultural Use of the Semantic Differential. By Howard Maclay and Edward E.
Ware. Behavioral Science, vol. 6 (1961), pp.
185-190.
Another paper from the Southwest Project in Comparative Psycholinguistics, this
report is another analysis of the data reported earlier by Suci in terms of the factor
structure of Hopi, Zuni, and Navaho judg-

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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AMERICAN LINGUISTICS

ments. Here, differences in ratings of seven

concepts on the semantic differential by the
three samples are evaluated. Over-all comparisons showed that the Hopi and Zuni
ratings were most similar and the Hopi and
Navaho the most dissimilar. The actual
content of the different ratings are fertile
grounds for anthropological post-diction,
but the tables presented for this purpose
have not been statistically corrected for
constant biases in the use of terms by each
group, independent of the particular concept
rated. The authors conclude that the technique has merit as an auxiliary anthropological method especially for the study of
covert culture.
Connotative Meanings of Certain Phoneme Sequences. By N. N. Markel and E. P.
Hamp. Studies in Linguistics, vol. 15
(1960-1), pp. 47-61.
In a study somewhat similar to Miron's,
nonsense words were constructed of two
vowel nuclei, /iy/ and /ah/, and five initial
consonant clusters, /gl/, /sp/, /fl/, /sm/
and /st/. These words were rated by informants on fifteen semantic differential scales.
First the contrast in vowel nuclei was tested
for each cluster, and there proved to be a
significant contrast for most of the words
on the scales FRESH-STALE, BRIGHTDARK, ACTIVE-PASSIVE, and TENSERELAXED, with the higher vowel carrying
the first meaning more strongly. A different
analytic approach was used for the consonant clusters, that is, they were not statistically compared with vowels held constant.
Instead, it was assumed that if the two
vowel nuclei used made no difference in the
ratings for a given scale of connotation, then
the ratings represented the influence of the
consonant cluster. The words /smiy/ and
sm&h/, for example, were both rated quite
bad, quite dirty, quite stale, quite unpleasant, quite weak, quite small, somewhat
light, and somewhat liquid. The authors
propose the term "psycho-morph" for
"non-morphemic sequences of one or more

VOL. XXVIII

phonemes for which a 'cultural' meaning

can in at least some of its occurrences be
established."
A Cross-Linguistic Investigation of Phonetic Symbolism. By M. S. Miron. Journal
of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol.
62 (1961), pp. 623-630.
A series of nonsense words in Japanese and
English were constructed by making combinations of a series of vowels and consonants occurring in both languages. A complex factorial study was conducted of
semantic differential judgments of the CVC
words by speakers of both languages. The
statistical analysis permitted assessment of
the influence of the vowels and the consonants in interaction as well as separately,
and showed that in both languages they had
strong effects on connotations. Americans
attributed greater strength to back than to
front vowels. Both groups judged front
consonants to have greater strength and
lower value than back consonants. Strength
and value were ascertained from pooling
judgments on a variety of attribute scales
(STRONG - WEAK, LARGE - SMALL)
found to be correlated. The method used
here contrasts with previous studies of
phonet'c symbolism which have employed
natural words and guessing of translations.
The factorial design permits more systematic evidence on a range of vowels and consonants.
The Problem of Stuttering in Certain North
American Indian Societies. By J. L. Steward.
Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders
Monograph Supplement, vol. 6 (1960), pp.
1-87.
A comparison of the Cowichans of Vancouver, with a stuttering incidence of .2
percent, and the Utes, with no reported
stuttering, was made to discover childrearing and verbal accompaniments to this
difference. In general, the Utes were found
to be more indulgent parents with regard to

NO. 3

ABSTRACTS AND TRANSLATIONS

a variety of early behavior-nursing, crying,

toilet training, body contact, and speech
acquisition. With regard to speech, the Utes
were found to expect repetition, reduplication, and "childishness" of language during
acquisition. They use diminutives and affection terms, and provide an age-graded series
of changes in their baby language in recogni-

209

tion of the gradualness of learning. In contrast, the Cowichans believe speech repetition to be undesirable and are more insistent
on early conformity to adult models. The
Utes, unlike the Cowichans, have no word
for stuttering. Novel cross-cultural data on
attitudes toward and practices regarding
language acquisition are included.