CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A. Rationalization of the Importance of CBR

As a college student, there are many times used in many chances to find references
from books. Ever as a new, we are difficult to choose the article of a book to understand. In
that case, we chose one and then can’t clearly understand the contents in all away side, for
example, the language of the book, the contents and the weakness also the strength of the
book. For that reason, the author of this CBR to fulfill the task in Psycholinguistics, and also
wants to give the benefits for readers to get understand easier in critical a book to give the
way readers to get understood and critical in reading book.

B. The Purpose of Writing CBR

CBR is a critical report of the contents of the book that comparing one book with
another that requires us to think critically. CBR aims to summarize, analyze, criticize and
compare the contents of the book that will be known as the weaknesses and advantages of the
book. CBR is important to train our ability in analyzing and knowing the contents of the book
as a whole (summary, weaknesses, and advantages). CBR is also useful for both the author
and the reader. For the writer, CBR can train the writer's ability in analyzing something and
also the author can increase his knowledge about the book to be criticized. And for the reader,
this CBR is useful for increasing knowledge and reference of the reader about the criticized
material.

C. The Benefits of CBR

In the work of this CBR gives every individual can improve their creativity in digging
the book by understanding every material presented.

D. The Identity of the Book

1. Title : The Psychology of Language : From Data to Theory

2. Edition : Second Edition

3. Author : Trevor Harley

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4. Town of Publishing : New York

5. Year of Publishing : 2001

6. Publisher : Psychology Press Ltd

7. Page/s : 580 Pages

8. ISBN : 0-203-34597-5

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 CHAPTER II

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK

A. The Purpose of the Book

From the previous edition, the writer mention that although language might
not be all that makes us human, it is hard to imagine being human without it. Given
the importance of language in our behavior, it is perhaps surprising that until not so
long ago, relatively scant attention was paid to it in undergraduate courses. Often at
best it was studied as part of a general course on cognitive psychology. That situation
has changed. Furthermore, the research field of psycholinguistics is blossoming, as
evinced by the growth in the number of papers on the subject, and indeed, in the
number of journals dedicated to it. With this growth and this level of interest, it is
perhaps surprising that there are still relatively few textbooks devoted to
psycholinguistics. The writer hopes this book will fill this gap. It is aimed at
intermediate and advanced-level undergraduates, although new postgraduates might
also find it useful, and the writer would be delighted if it found other readers.

B. The Materials Presented

a. How to Describe Speech Sounds

We can describe speech sounds at two levels. Phonetics describes the acoustic
detail of speech sounds (their physical properties) and how they are articulated, while
phonology describes the sound categories each language uses to divide up the space
of possible sounds.

A phoneme is a basic unit of sound in a particular language. Two phones are

said to be an instance of the same phoneme in a particular language if the difference
between them never makes a difference to the meaning of words. Different phones
that are understood as the same phoneme in a language are called allophones.

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 There are three types of phonetics depending on the emphasis: articulatory
(which emphasizes hoe sounds are made), auditory or perceptual (which emphasizes
how sounds are perceived), and acoustic (which emphasizes the sound waveform and
physical properties).

The basic of source of sounds is the larynx, which produces a range of

harmonics. Different sounds are then made by changing the shape of the vocal tract.
There are two different major types of sounds, they are vowels and consonants.

b. Vowels

Vowels (such as a, e, i, o, and u) are made with a relatively free flow of air,
and are determined by the way in which the shape of the tongue modifies the airflow.
For example, the /i/ sound in “meat” is an example of high front vowel because the air
flows through the mouth with the front part of the tongue in a raised (high) position.

c. Consonants

Consonants (such as p, b, t, d, k, g) are made by closing or restricting some

part of the vocal tract at the beginning or end of a vowel. We can classify consonants
according to their place of articulation, whether or not they are voiced, and their
manner of articulation. The place of articulation is the part of the vocal tract that is
closed or constricted during articulation. For example, /p/ and /b/ are called bilabial
sounds and are made by closing the mouth at the lips, whereas /t/ and /d/ are made by
putting the tongue to the back of the teeth.

d. Higher-level structure of sounds

Words can be divided into rhythmic units called syllables. One way of
determining the number of syllables in a word is to try singing it-each syllable will
need a different note (Redford et al., 1999). For example, the word syl-la-ble has three
syllables. Many words are monosyllabicÐ they only have one syllable. Syllables can
be analyzed in terms of a hierarchical structure. The syllable onset is an initial
consonant or cluster (e.g. /cl/); the rime consists of a nucleus, which is the central
vowel, and a coda, which comprises the final consonants. In English, all of these
components are optional, apart from the nucleus. The rules that describe how
components syllables combine with each other differ across languages—for example,

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Japanese words do not have codas, and in Cantonese only nasal sounds and glottal
stops are possible codas.

e. The Linguistics Theory of Chomsky

Chomsky argued that language is a special feature which is innate, species-

specific, and biologically pre-programmed, and which is a faculty independent of
other cognitive structures. For Chomsky, the goal of the study of syntax is to describe
the set of rules, or grammar, that enables us to produce and understand language.

Chomsky (1968) argued that it is important to distinguish between our

idealised linguistic competence, and our actual linguistic performance. Our linguistic
competence is what is tapped by our intuitions about which are acceptable sentences
of our language, and which are ungrammatical strings of words. Hence we know that
the sentence “The vampire the ghost loved ran away” is grammatical, even if we have
never heard it before, while we also know that the string of words “The vampire the
ghost ran away” is ungrammatical. Competence concerns our abstract knowledge of
our language. It is about the judgements we would make about language if we had
sufficient time and memory capacity. In practice, of course, our actual linguistic
performance—the sentences that we actually produce—is limited by these factors.
Furthermore, the sentences we actually produce often use the more simple
grammatical constructions. Our speech is full of false starts hesitations, speech errors,
and corrections. The actual ways in which we produce and understand sentences are
also in the domain of performance.

f. Describing Syntax and Phrase-Structure Grammar

Chomsky proposed that phrase-structure rules are an essential component of

our grammar, although he went on to argue that they are not the only component. An
important aspect of language is that we can construct sentences by combining words
according to rules.

Phrase-structure rules describe how words can be combined, and provide a

method of describing the structure of a sentence. The central idea is that sentences are
built up hierarchically from smaller units using rewrite rules. The set of rewrite rules
constitute a phrase-structure grammar. Rewrite rules are simply rules that translate a
symbol on the left-hand side of the rule into those on the right-hand side. For

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example, (1) is a rewrite rule that says “a sentence (S) can be rewritten as a noun
phrase (NP) followed by a verb phrase (VP)”:

(1) S NP+VP

In a phrase-structure grammar, there are two main types of symbol: terminal

elements (consisting of vocabulary items or words) and nonterminal elements
(everything else). It is important to realize that the rules of grammar do not deal with
particular words, but with categories of words that share grammatical properties.
Words fall into classes such as nouns (words used to name objects and ideas, both
concrete and abstract), adjectives (words used to describe), verbs (words describing
actions or states, or an assertion), adverbs (words qualifying verbs), determiners
(words determining the number of nouns they modify, such as “the”, “a”, “some”),
prepositions (words such as “in”, “to”, and “at”), conjunctions (words such as “and”,
“because”, and “so”), pronouns (“he”, “she”, “it”) and so on. Surface and deep
structure.

At this point it is useful to make a distinction between two types of word.

Content words do most of the semantic work of the language, and function words do
most of the grammatical work. Content words include nouns, adjectives, verbs, and
most adverbs.

Function words include determiners, conjunctions, prepositions, and

pronouns (he, she, it). Function words tend to be short and used very frequently.
Whereas the number of content words is very large and changing (we often coin new
content words, such as “television” and “computer”), the number of function words is
small and fixed (at about 360).

Phrases are constituents that can generally be systematically replaced by a

single word while maintaining the same sentence structure. Hence in the sentence
“The nasty vampire laughed at the poor ghost”, “The nasty vampire” is a phrase (as it
can be replaced by, for example, “Vlad”), whereas “The nasty” is not; “laughed at the
poor ghost” is a phrase (for example, it can be replaced by just “laughed”), but “at
the” is not. Phrases combine to make clauses.

Clauses contain a subject (used to mention something), and a predicate (the

element of the clause that gives information about the subject). Every clause has a

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verb. Sentences contain at least one clause but may contain many more. The essential
idea of a phrase-structure grammar is the analysis of the sentence into its lower-level
constituents, such as noun phrases, verb phrases, nouns, and verbs. Indeed, this
approach is sometimes called constituent analysis.

Constituents are components of larger constructions. Two other syntactic

notions are very important: these are the subject and object of a sentence. Strictly
speaking, the subject of a sentence is the noun phrase that is immediately dominated
by the highest-level element, the sentence node. An easy test to discover the subject of
a sentence is to turn the sentence into a question that can be answered by “yes” or
“no” (Burton-Roberts, 1997).

We desire more of a grammar than that it should merely be able to generate

sentences. We need a way to describe the underlying syntactic structure of sentences.
This is particularly useful for syntactically ambiguous sentences.

The underlying structure of a sentence or phrase is sometimes called its

phrase structure or phrase marker. It should be reiterated that the important idea is
capturing the underlying syntactic structure of sentences; it is not our goal to explain
how we actually produce or understand them. Phrase-structure rules provide us with
the underlying syntactic structure of sentences we both produce and comprehend.

Natural language could only be described by a much more complex phrase-

structure grammar that contained many more rules. We would also need to specify
detailed restrictions on when particular rules could and could not be applied. We
would then have a description of a grammar that could generate all of the sentences of
a language and none of the non-sentences.

Obviously another language, such as French or German, would have a

different set of phrase-structure rules. Although these grammars might be very large,
they will still contain a finite number of rules. In real languages there is potentially an
infinite number of sentences. How can we get an infinite number of sentences from a
finite number of rules and words? We can do this because of special rules based on
what are known as recursion and iteration.

There are different types of phrase-structure grammar. Context-free grammars

contain only rules that are not specified for particular contexts, whereas context-

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sensitive grammars can have rules that can only be applied in certain circumstances.
In a context-free rule, the left-hand symbol can always be rewritten by the right-hand
one regardless of the context in which it occurs. For example, the writing of a verb in
its singular or plural form depends on the context of the preceding noun phrase.

g. The Formal Power Grammars: Automata Theory

Chomsky (1957) showed that natural language cannot be characterized by a

finite-state device. In particular, a finite-state device cannot produce arbitrarily long
sequences of multiple centre-embedded structures, where the sequence of embedding
could carry on for ever. You can only produce these sorts of sentences if the
automaton has a memory to keep track of what it has produced so far.

In effect, Chomsky showed that no matter how many previous words were
taken into account, a finite-state device cannot produce or understand natural
language. An important extension of this argument is that children cannot learn
language simply by conditioning. Chomsky went further and argued that neither
context-free nor context-sensitive grammars provided an account of human language.

He argued that it is necessary to add transformations to a phrase-structure

grammar; the resulting grammar is then a Type 0 grammar, and can only be produced
by a Turing machine. Chomsky thought that transformations were needed to show
how sentences are related to each other. They also simplify the phrase-structure rules
necessary and provide a more elegant treatment of the language. Finally, there is some
linguistic evidence that appeared to show that no context-free or context-sensitive
grammar can account for certain constructions found in natural language.

Hence it seems that natural human language can only be produced by the most
powerful of all types of grammar. Although this conclusion was accepted for a long
time, it has recently been disproved. First, it is not clear that all the complex
dependencies between words described by Chomsky and Postal are necessarily
grammatical. Second, there is a surprising formal demonstration by Peters and Ritchie
(1973) that context can be taken into account without exceeding the power of a
context free grammar. Third, Gazdar, Klein, Pullum, and Sag (1985) showed that a
context-free languages can account for the phenomena of natural language thought to
necessitate context sensitivity if more complex syntactic categories are incorporated
into the grammar.

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C. The Methods of Presented Materials

The writer presented the materials by using a throughout explanation using

several theories to support the explanation. Many theories are taken from experts that
has conducted a research and also wrote a book regarding the same topic but the
writer made it into a more complex but also simple.
The writer also put many examples in many forms such as : tables, diagrams,
pictures, and also cases. This were done after the writer put a throughout explanation,
an example was given and then a brief re-statement. The writer seems to focused
more on the example as it was given multiple times for the same topic.

D. The Achievement of the Purpose by Each Element

As the writer wrote that the book is aimed at intermediate and advanced-level
undergraduates, the second chapter is able to gain an achievement for making each
section a lot more easier to understand. The throughout explanation and lots of
example was the exact reason why this book is capable of making readers understand
faster. As the target was for intermediate and advanced-level undergraduates, the
book is also suitable for post graduates. So the writer’s purpose that is mentioned in
the early chapter is meant to be completed. As the writer mentioned that while the
book is aimed at intermediate and advanced-level undergraduates, although new
postgraduates might also find it useful, and the writer would be delighted if it found
other readers.

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 CHAPTER III

STRENGTHS OF THE BOOK

A. The Purpose of the Book

The writer’s purpose for the book is to be able to fill in the gap of the
relatively few textbooks devoted to psycholinguistics. From the way the writer wrote
the book in a really complex and resourceful, the book is able to fill in the gap the
writer wishes for.

B. The Materials Presented

As the target was for intermediate and advanced-level undergraduates, the
book is also suitable for post graduates. Many theories and explanation was from
research that is done by expert and more importantly the validity and reliability is a
lot more trusted as the experts has published books with the same topic as the
material.

C. The Methods of Presented Materials

The methods in presenting the materials was clearly, because the materials
was presented in a kind of modern language with a lot more sensible words. The book
has some pictures, so the readers can more understand what the content of the book.
Also, the important words is bold, so the readers will know the point of the materials
presented.

D. The Achievement of the Purpose by Each Element

The achievement is clearly a strength for the book because it is able to make
the purpose of the book to be achieved.

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 CHAPTER IV

THE WEAKNESSES OF THE BOOK

A. The Purpose of the Book

Reviewer could not find any weakness because the purpose of the book was
clearly achieved.

B. The Materials Presented

Reviewer could not find any weakness because the materials presented
suitable for undergraduates and postgraduates.

C. The Methods of Presented Materials

The layout of the some sentence in the book is not correct (page 35 & 41).
Some of the materials there are too many examples that makes the book somehow
only contain examples if we could not clearly read the whole sentence of each
passage.

D. The Achievement of the Purpose by Each Element

Reviewer could not find any weakness because the achievement is clearly a
strength for the book and it is able to make the purpose of the book to be achieved.

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 CHAPTER V

THE CONCLUSION

A. Conclusion

A In conclusion, the book has very good materials and explanation, because as the
target was for intermediate and advanced-level undergraduates, the book is also
suitable for post graduates. Also in the book many theories and explanation was from
research that is done by expert. Even so, the book has weakness such as the layout of
the some sentence in the book is not correct and some of the materials there are too
many examples

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