- 中国学习者对英语规则形式和不规则形式的加工研究(英文版)
- 郑丽娜
- 3字
- 2021-03-30 16:14:04
Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research Background
In human history, scientists have been dedicating themselves to exploring how human languages operate in our brains. The development of computer science and the appearance of sophisticated psychological and neurological experimental instruments in recent years have enabled linguists and psychologists to address this issue. As a result, the last several decades have witnessed an unprecedented number of empirical studies of the human language processing, representation, acquisition, use and disorders, allowing this centuries-old mystery to be extensively investigated and better explained (Pinker, 1991: 530). One area which has received increasing attention in the past thirty years for psycholinguistics, cognitive science, neuroscience, brain science and language acquisition is how regular and irregular forms are processed in the human brain. Its central topic is whether there is a dissociation of processing between regular and irregular forms.
The issue of the processing of regular and irregular forms is important for the nature of language representation and the operating mechanism of human languages in that two main capacities characterizing the use of the human language, namely mental grammar and mental lexicon, can be reflected by the use of regular and irregular forms (Ullman, 2001a, 2001b, 2004). Thus, regular and irregular forms serve as an arena for the test of the dual structure of the human language faculty (Clahsen et al., 2010).
The mental grammar is a system of productive, combinatorial grammatical rules that assemble morphemes and simple words into sequential and hierarchical complex words, phrases or sentences. The psychological mechanism to handle the mental grammar is the symbolic computation. The rules in the mental grammar constrain how lexical forms combine into complex representations, and contribute to interpreting the meanings of complex representations even if they have never been heard or seen before. This grammatical capacity to derive meaning from well-formed complex structures underlies the incredible productivity and creativity of human languages. And regular forms are generated by rules that add suffixes to the stem, thus combinatorial, productive and predictable. Their generation is just like the computation of phrases and sentences in mental grammar. Regulars in a language are open-ended and new members can be easily added.
The mental lexicon, on the other hand, is a repository of stored information and contains thousands of arbitrary sound-meaning pairings underlying the morphemes like words of a language, or idiomatic phrases whose meanings cannot be derived transparently from their components. The psychological mechanism to handle the mental lexicon is memory. And irregular forms are often generated in an unpredictable way with grammatical features incorporated into their lexical entries. For a given irregular stem, for example, language learners cannot predict what form its past tense might take. Thus, irregulars have to be learnt on a case-by-case basis and memorized individually, just like individual words in the mental lexicon. Irregulars of a language are generally unproductive, and a closed list in that very few new members can be added.
The research on the processing of regular and irregular forms, therefore, may shed light on the interaction between the mental lexicon and the mental grammar, psychological status of grammatical rules and the implementation of the components of language in the brain.
According to Pinker and Ullman (2002: 456), the debate on the processing of regular and irregular forms began with a report of the connectionist model by Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) and a critique by Pinker and Prince (1988). Since then a number of different approaches and models have been put forward. At first, traditional grammar assumes a clear dichotomy between regular forms and irregular forms by proposing the regulars are formed by concatenating a suffix to the stem while the irregulars are unpredictable and must be individually memorized. Later, the single-mechanism approach (e.g., Chomsky & Halle, 1968; Halle & Mohanan, 1985; McClelland & Patterson, 2002; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986) postulates that both regular and irregular forms are processed in a single route of either a rules system or an associative memory, whereas the dual-mechanism approach (e.g., Pinker, 1991, 1998, 1999, 2006; Pinker & Ullman, 2002; Ullman, 2001a, 2001b, 2004; Ullman et al, 1997) proposes that regular forms are processed by a rules system or a procedural memory while irregular forms are processed by an associative memory or a declarative memory. More recently, the dual-route model (e.g., Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997), which is a hybrid model combining computation and storage of inflected words, assumes that both decomposition and whole-word access are activated simultaneously, and the faster route wins the competition. Finally, there are also some other proposals that combine rule-based processing with the use of linguistic probabilities (e.g., Yang, 2002; Baayen, 2003; Bod, Hay & Jannedy, 2003; Gor, 2003, 2010).
Additionally, a variety of paradigms and tasks have been employed to probe the issue of the processing of regular and irregular forms, including acceptability ratings, familiarity ratings, speeded production tasks, visual or cross-modal lexical decision tasks, priming tasks, computer simulation, eye-tracking, event-related potentials (ERPs), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), positron emission tomography (PET) as well as Magnetoencephalography (MEG). V arious research fields have been explored, including child first language acquisition, adult first language processing, first language disorders and more recently second language (L2) acquisition, even third language acquisition. In the research, both production and perception data have been collected and analyzed. Until now, however, the debate is far from over, and the processing of regular and irregular forms is still one of the most contentious issues in cognitivescience (Pinker & Ullman, 2002).