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The sequence can be understood as any of four grammatically correct sequences, each with at least four discrete sentences, by adding punctuation:
The first, second, and fourth relate a simple philosophical proverb in the style of Parmenides that all that is, is, and that anything that does not exist does not. The phrase was noted in "Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable".
This phrase appeared in the 1968 American movie "Charly", written to demonstrate punctuation to the main character Charly's teacher, in a scene to demonstrate that the surgical operation to make the character smarter had succeeded.
In relation to psychology, pair by association is the action of associating a stimulus with an arbitrary idea or object, eliciting a response, usually emotional. This is done by repeatedly pairing the stimulus with the arbitrary object.
For example, repeatedly pairing images of beautiful women in bathing suits elicits a sexual response in most men. Advertising agencies repeatedly pair products with attractive women in television commercials with the intention of eliciting an emotional or sexually aroused response in the consumer. This causes the consumer to be more likely to buy the product than when presented with a similar product without such an association.
Additionally, there is ongoing research into the effects ecstasy/polystimulant use has on paired-associate task/learning. In a study by Gallagher et al., it was found that those who used ecstasy/polydrugs had in general more false positive responses, clicking yes (in agreement) when asked if a word pair had been previously presented even if the reality was false, compared to non-users. It was proposed that because creating the association between word pairs requires executive resources, which has been known to be hampered in ecstasy users. This is what has prevented the binding of word pairs. However, as stated by the author, it is not possible to fully attribute these deficits in the task, but it bears noting that there are differences occurring.
Behaviorists will often use paired association tests to determine the strength of verbal behavior, in particular, B.F Skinner's concept of the verbal response class called intraverbals.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (German: "Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik"; Dutch: "Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek") is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located in Nijmegen, Gelderland, the Netherlands. Founded in 1980 by Pim Levelt, it is the only institution in the world entirely dedicated to psycholinguistics, and is also one of only three among a total of 90 within the Max Planck Society to be located outside Germany. The Nijmegen-based institute currently occupies 5th position in the Ranking Web of World Research Centers among all Max Planck institutes (7th by size, 4th by visibility). It currently employs about 235 people.
The institute specializes in language comprehension, language production, language acquisition, language and genetics, and the relation between language and cognition. Its mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological, social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how human minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how to learn languages of quite different types. The MPI for Psycholinguistics is a globally recognized center of linguistics and presents with its international archive of endangered languages a significant contribution to the preservation of the common heritage of mankind. This archive is sponsored since 2000 by the Volkswagen Foundation and offers on the internet about 50 projects.
The MPI for Psycholinguistics has six primary organizational units:
The Language and Cognition Department, headed by Stephen C. Levinson, investigates the relationship between language, culture and general cognition, making use of the "natural laboratory" of language variation. In this way, the department brings the perspective of language diversity to bear on a range of central problems in the language sciences. It maintains over a dozen field sites around the world, where languages are described (often for the first time), field experiments conducted and extended corpora of natural language usage collected. In addition, the department is characterized by a diversity of methods, ranging from linguistic analysis and ethnography to developmental perspectives, from psycholinguistic experimentation to conversation analysis, from corpus statistics to brain imaging, and from phylogenetics to linguistic data mining.
Established in October 2010, the Language and Genetics Department is headed by Simon E. Fisher. The department takes advantage of the latest innovations in molecular methods to discover how the human genome helps to build a language-ready brain. It aims to uncover the DNA variations which ultimately affect different facets of human communicative abilities, not only in children with language-related disorders but also in the general population. Crucially our work attempts to bridge the gaps between genes, brains, speech and language, by integrating molecular findings with data from other levels of analysis, including cell biology, experimental psychology and neuroimaging. In addition, it hopes to trace the evolutionary history and worldwide diversity of key genes, which may shed new light on language origins.
The Language Comprehension Department, headed by Anne Cutler, undertakes empirical investigation and computational modeling of the understanding of spoken language. Until 2009, the work within the department was largely divided between two research projects: decoding continuous speech and phonological learning for speech perception. From 2009 onwards, most of the work of the department goes into the project called Mechanisms and Representations in Comprehending Speech. This project focuses on core theoretical issues in speech comprehension such as on how episodic memories - such as hearing someone speak in an unfamiliar dialect - influence the speech perception system, or how is prior knowledge about one's language (phonotactic probabilities, lexical knowledge, frequent versus infrequent word combinations) used during perception.
While still under reorganization, the Language Acquisition Department until September 2012 investigated processes of language acquisition and use in a broad perspective. The department combined attention to both first and second languages, researching production as well as comprehension of speakers of different ages and cultures, and the developmental relationship between language and cognition. The focus was on morpho-syntax, semantics and discourse structure. Headed by Wolfgang Klein, Language Acquisition previously launched three institute projects, namely, Information Structure in Language Acquisition, Categories in Language and Cognition and Multimodal Interaction. The Language Acquisition Department has reopened in 2016 heading by Caroline Rowland.
The Neurobiology of Language Department, headed by Peter Hagoort, focuses on the study of language production, language comprehension, and language acquisition from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. This includes using neuroimaging, behavioral and virtual reality techniques to investigate the language system and its neural underpinnings. Research facilities at the Max Planck Institute include a high-density electroencephalography (EEG) lab, a virtual reality laboratory and several behavioral laboratories. Having a part of the department stationed at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, it also has access to a whole-head 275 channel MEG system, MRI-scanners at 1.5, 3 and 7 Tesla, a TMS-lab, and several additional EEG laboratories.
The Psychology of Language Department, headed by Antje S. Meyer, identifies characteristics of the cognitive system that determine behavior in a broad range of linguistic tasks and the relationships between language production, comprehension, and learning via speaking, listening and cognition. The department also understands variability in adult language production and comprehension. Using various approaches, the Psychology of Language utilizes a combination of experimental and correlational work and inclusion of diverse samples of participants. With such methods, it has close links to the Language and Genetics and Neurobiology of Language departments.
This MPI research group, headed by Daniel Haun, investigates the social and cognitive foundations of human communication in infancy specifically on infants' developing social cognition and social motivation in relation to their emerging prelinguistic communication within social and cultural contexts. Their work is motivated by the idea that there is a psychological basis of human communication that develops ontogenetically prior to language and can be first expressed in gestures.
Started in 2009, the research group investigates language diversity and change as part of an integrated cultural evolutionary system. Headed by Michael Dunn, the group takes a modern evolutionary perspective, using computational tools from genetics and biology, and integrating probabilistic, quantified approaches to phylogenetics with rigorous tests of different models of the interaction between elements of language, contact and geography, and cultural variation.
The research group, headed by Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., tries to determine the role of information structure in explaining cross-linguistic differences in grammatical systems out of the idea that the interaction of pragmatics and grammar happens on several levels and differs from language to language. Another major task of the group is to investigate and re-evaluate the status of the information structure primitives (topic, focus, contrast, etc.) as cross-linguistically valid categories. To achieve this, the members of the group combine extensive corpus analysis of the data in their respective languages with production experiments; all findings are further cross-checked through standard information structure tests (question-answer pairs, aboutness tests, association with focus sensitive items).
Change from below is linguistic change that occurs from below the level of consciousness. It is language change that occurs from social, cognitive, or physiological pressures from within the system. This is in opposition to change from above, wherein language change is a result of elements imported from other systems.
Change from below first enters the language from below the level of consciousness; that is, speakers are generally unaware of the linguistic change. These linguistic changes enter language primarily through the vernacular and spread throughout the community without speakers' conscious awareness. Since change from below is initially non-salient, the changing features are not marked characteristics and are difficult for speakers or linguists to perceive. As the changes occur, they will ultimately become stable changes that are stigmatized.
New linguistic changes that enter the language from below are most commonly used by the interior socioeconomic classes, as displayed by William Labov's curvilinear principle. Change from below is seen in Labov's Philadelphia study, where a series of new vowel changes was most often used by the interior classes. Age and gender similarly affect the way changes occur, where younger or female individuals are more likely to exhibit the change than older or male individuals in the community. However, gender, age, and social class act independently in transmission.
Change from below challenges societal norms; women (especially upper working class women, and those who are socially entrenched and involved in their community) lead this linguistic change. However, forms that have overt prestige are more prized by these groups, so when changes from below rise to the level of awareness, they are frequently stigmatized and rejected by the very people using them.
Change from below typically begins in informal speech. Often, those utilizing the changing forms are young speakers using the language as a form of resistance to authority. The changes made by individuals such as these, who are upwardly mobile and intentionally nonconformist, then diffuse into the speech of broader groups as described by Bill Labov’s Constructive Nonconformity Principle.
The first phase of change from below is the acquisition of language by children. Typically, children learn the patterns of female caretakers.
The second phase of change from below is the advancement of informal changes by young individuals.
The third phase of change from below sees the individual’s speech shift towards more standard forms, and the change become socioeconomically diffused and stigmatized.
Experimental pragmatics is an academic area that uses experiments (concerning children's and adults' comprehension of sentences, utterances, or story-lines) to test theories about the way people understand utterances—and, by extension, one another—in context (this is an area known as pragmatics).
Given that an utterance generally does not fully determine the message it is destined to convey, the main question this field asks is, how does a listener fully comprehend a speaker's intention? For example, if one were to read about a singer who says "That was a brilliant performance" to her colleague after they both sang beautifully, the utterance would seem sincere and truthful. If the same utterance were made after both sang terribly, the utterance would be perceived as ironic. The very same utterance can have two entirely different interpretations as a function of the speaker's intended meaning.
Experimental pragmatics adopts existing cognitive and psycholinguistic techniques in order to carry out its investigations. While developmental progressions can reveal how interlocutors across several ages interpret utterances with clear pragmatic potential, reading times can reveal how sentences are processed (as relatively easy or difficult). While EEGs can reveal sharp on-line measures for determining how a word is integrated into a sentence, fMRI can reveal what areas of the brain are recruited when processing one reading over another.
Philosophers have laid the groundwork for much of the work in pragmatics. Modern investigations can be traced back to Paul Grice and his philosophical approach to utterance understanding. Grice’s initial contribution was to propose a novel analysis in which he distinguished between "sentence meaning" (what the words and grammar mean) and "speaker’s meaning" (what the speaker actually intended to communicate by uttering a sentence). According to Grice, understanding an utterance requires access to, or making hypotheses about, the speaker’s intention and thus involves going beyond the meanings of the words in the sentence.
Two major European grants have supported the field. The European Science Foundation's (ESF's) Research Network Program (EURO-XPRAG) sponsored European collaborations, workshops and conferences between 2009 and 2014. The German Research Foundation (DFG) established the priority program XPRAG.de in 2014.
In linguistics, predicate transfer is the reassignment of a property to an object which would not otherwise inherently have that property. Thus, the expression "I am parked out back" conveys the meaning of "parked" from "car" to the property of "I possess a car". This avoids incorrect polysemous interpretations of "parked": that "people can be parked", or that "I am pretending to be a car", or that "I am something which can be parked". This is supported by the morphology: "We are parked out back" does not mean that there are multiple cars; rather, that there are multiple passengers (having the property of being in possession of a car).
The question whether the use of language influences spatial cognition is closely related to theories of linguistic relativity—also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis—which states that the structure of a language affects cognitive processes of the speaker. Debates about this topic are mainly focused on the extent to which language influences spatial cognition or if it does at all. Research also concerns differences between perspectives on spatial relations across cultures, what these imply, and the exploration of potentially partaking cognitive mechanisms.
Research shows that frames of reference for spatial cognition differ across cultures and that language could play a crucial role in structuring these different frames.
Three types of perspectives on space can be distinguished:
Languages like English or Dutch do not exclusively make use of relative descriptions but these appear to be most frequent compared to intrinsic or absolute descriptions. An absolute frame of reference is usually restricted to large scale geographical descriptions in these languages. Speakers of the Australian languages Arrernte, Guugu Yimithirr, and Kuuk Thaayore only use absolute descriptions.
The relative and intrinsic perspectives seem to be connected as there is no known language which applies only one of these frames of reference exclusively.
(1.) It has been argued that people universally use an egocentric representation to solve non-linguistic spatial tasks which would align with the relative frame of reference.
(2.) Other researchers have proposed that people apply multiple frames of reference during their daily lives and that languages reflect these cognitive structures.
In the light of the current body of literature the second view seems to be the more plausible one.
The dominant frames of reference have found to be reflected in the common types of gesticulation in the respective language. Speakers of absolute languages would typically represent an object moving north with a hand movement towards the north. Whereas speakers of relative languages typically depict a movement of an object to the right with a hand movement to the right, independent of the direction they are facing during speech. Speakers of intrinsic languages would, for example, typically represent human movement from the perspective of the mover with a sagittal hand gesture away from the speaker.
A study by Boroditsky and Gaby compared speakers of an absolute language—Pormpuraawans—with English speakers. The task on which they compared them consisted of the spatial arrangement of cards which showed a temporal progression. The result was that the speakers of the relative language (Americans) exclusively chose to represent time spatially as progressing from left (earlier time) to right (later time). Whereas the Pormpuraawans took the direction they faced into account and preferred to depict time as progressing from east (earlier time) to west (later time) the most.
Confounding variables could potentially explain a significant proportion of the measured difference in performance between the linguistic frames of reference.
These can be categorized into three types of confounding factors:
Gentner, Özyürek, Gürcanli, and Goldin-Meadow found that deaf children, who lacked a conventional language, did not use gestures to convey spatial relations (see home sign). Building on that, they showed that deaf children performed significantly worse on a task of spatial cognition compared to hearing children. They concluded that the acquisition of (spatial) language is an important factor in shaping spatial cognition.
Several mechanisms accounting for or contributing to the possible effect of language on cognition have been suggested:
Code-mixing is the mixing of two or more languages or language varieties in speech.
Some scholars use the terms "code-mixing" and "code-switching" interchangeably, especially in studies of syntax, morphology, and other formal aspects of language. Others assume more specific definitions of code-mixing, but these specific definitions may be different in different subfields of linguistics, education theory, communications etc.
Code-mixing is similar to the use or creation of pidgins; but while a pidgin is created across groups that do not share a common language, code-mixing may occur within a multilingual setting where speakers share more than one language.
Some linguists use the terms code-mixing and code-switching more or less interchangeably. Especially in formal studies of syntax, morphology, etc., both terms are used to refer to utterances that draw from elements of two or more grammatical systems. These studies are often interested in the alignment of elements from distinct systems, or on constraints that limit switching.
Some work defines code-mixing as the placing or mixing of various linguistic units (affixes, words, phrases, clauses) from two different grammatical systems within the same sentence and speech context, while code-switching is the placing or mixing of units (words, phrases, sentences) from two codes within the same speech context. The structural difference between code-switching and code-mixing is the position of the altered elements—for code-switching, the modification of the codes occurs intersententially, while for code-mixing, it occurs intrasententially.
In other work the term code-switching emphasizes a multilingual speaker's movement from one grammatical system to another, while the term code-mixing suggests a hybrid form, drawing from distinct grammars. In other words, "code-mixing" emphasizes the formal aspects of language structures or linguistic competence, while "code-switching" emphasizes linguistic performance.
While many linguists have worked to describe the difference between code-switching and borrowing of words or phrases, the term code-mixing may be used to encompass both types of language behavior.
While linguists who are primarily interested in the structure or form of code-mixing may have relatively little interest to separate code-mixing from code-switching, some sociolinguists have gone to great lengths to differentiate the two phenomena. For these scholars, code-switching is associated with particular pragmatic effects, discourse functions, or associations with group identity. In this tradition, the terms "code-mixing" or "language alternation" are used to describe more stable situations in which multiple languages are used without such pragmatic effects. See also Code-mixing as fused lect, below.
In studies of bilingual language acquisition, "code-mixing" refers to a developmental stage during which children mix elements of more than one language. Nearly all bilingual children go through a period in which they move from one language to another without apparent discrimination. This differs from code-switching, which is understood as the socially and grammatically appropriate use of multiple varieties.
Beginning at the babbling stage, young children in bilingual or multilingual environments produce utterances that combine elements of both (or all) of their developing languages. Some linguists suggest that this code-mixing reflects a lack of control or ability to differentiate the languages. Others argue that it is a product of limited vocabulary; very young children may know a word in one language but not in another. More recent studies argue that this early code-mixing is a demonstration of a developing ability to code-switch in socially appropriate ways.
For young bilingual children, code-mixing may be dependent on the linguistic context, cognitive task demands, and interlocutor. Code-mixing may also function to fill gaps in their lexical knowledge. Some forms of code-mixing by young children may indicate risk for language impairment.
In psychology and in psycholinguistics the label "code-mixing" is used in theories that draw on studies of language alternation or code-switching to describe the cognitive structures underlying bilingualism. During the 1950s and 1960s, psychologists and linguists treated bilingual speakers as, in Grosjean's term, "two monolinguals in one person". This "fractional view" supposed that a bilingual speaker carried two separate mental grammars that were more or less identical to the mental grammars of monolinguals and that were ideally kept separate and used separately. Studies since the 1970s, however, have shown that bilinguals regularly combine elements from "separate" languages. These findings have led to studies of code-mixing in psychology and psycholinguistics.
Sridhar and Sridhar define code-mixing as "the transition from using linguistic units (words, phrases, clauses, etc.) of one language to using those of another within a single sentence". They note that this is distinct from code-switching in that it occurs in a single sentence (sometimes known as "intrasentential switching") and in that it does not fulfill the pragmatic or discourse-oriented functions described by sociolinguists. (See Code-mixing in sociolinguistics, above.) The practice of code-mixing, which draws from competence in two languages at the same time suggests that these competences are not stored or processed separately. Code-mixing among bilinguals is therefore studied in order to explore the mental structures underlying language abilities.
A "mixed language" or a "fused lect" is a relatively stable mixture of two or more languages. What some linguists have described as "codeswitching as unmarked choice" or "frequent codeswitching" has more recently been described as "language mixing", or in the case of the most strictly grammaticalized forms as "fused lects".
In areas where code-switching among two or more languages is very common, it may become normal for words from both languages to be used together in everyday speech. Unlike code-switching, where a switch tends to occur at semantically or sociolinguistically meaningful junctures, this code-mixing has no specific meaning in the local context. A fused lect is identical to a mixed language in terms of semantics and pragmatics, but fused lects allow less variation since they are fully grammaticalized. In other words, there are grammatical structures of the fused lect that determine which source-language elements may occur.
A mixed language is different from a creole language. Creoles are thought to develop from pidgins as they become nativized. Mixed languages develop from situations of code-switching. (See the distinction between code-mixing and pidgin above.)
There are many names for specific mixed languages or fused lects. These names are often used facetiously or carry a pejorative sense. Named varieties include the following, among others.
Whereas some are more recent, for example, in his play Pygmalion George Bernard Shaw famously recognised the disparities of accent (even in a native context) when he wrote:
The "own-accent bias" is the inclination toward, and more positive judgement of, individuals with the same accent as yourself compared to those with a different accent. There are two main theories that attempt to explain this bias: affective processing and prototype representation.
The affective processing approach proposes that the positive-bias exhibited for others who speak with an own-accent is produced by a (potentially unconscious) emotional reaction. Put simply, people like others who have the same accent as themselves for that precise reason; they like it. This theory has developed, and draws support, from neuroscientific research investigating affective prosody (a key component underlying accent) and vocal emotion, which has found activation (predominantly in the right hemisphere) in important brain regions associated with the processing of emotion. These regions include:
Additional to the processing of memory and emotion, the amygdalae have important roles as “relevance detectors" for the discernment of relevant social information. Therefore, these brain regions that deal with social relevance and vocal emotion are probable candidates for a neural network concerning accent-based group membership that would drive the affective processing of accents.
Rebecca Treiman is an American psychologist. She is the Burke and Elizabeth High Baker Professor of Child Developmental Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis and head of the Reading and Language Lab there. Treiman's research focuses on spelling and reading, and especially on the linguistic factors that affect these processes.
Born in Princeton, New Jersey to Sam Bard Treiman and Joan Little Treiman, Rebecca Treiman received a B.A. in linguistics from Yale University (1976) and a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania (1980). She was a faculty member at Indiana University and Wayne State University before moving to Washington University in St. Louis.
Treiman has written two books on children's spelling, and has published research articles on the processes involved in reading and spelling in children and adults. She has over 200 publications and an h-index of over 85. In addition, Treiman has edited or co-edited several books on spelling and reading. Treiman was editor in chief of the "Journal of Memory and Language" from 1997 to 2001. She was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading in 2014.
James Bruce Tomblin (born February 10, 1944) is a language and communication scientist and an expert on the epidemiology and genetics of developmental language disorders (DLD). He holds the position of Professor Emeritus of Communication Sciences and Disorders at the University of Iowa.
Tomblin received the Alfred K. Kawana Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publications from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) in 2009 and ASHA Honors in 2010. He received the Callier Prize in Communication Disorders in 2011 for "remarkable advances in the epidemiology, etiology, assessment and treatment of children's language disorders."
Tomblin has co-edited several books including "Understanding Individual Differences in Language Development Across the School Years" (with Marilyn Nippold), and U"nderstanding Developmental Language Disorders: From Theory to Practice" (with Courtenay Norbury and Dorothy V. M. Bishop).
Tomblin went to La Verne College from 1963–1966, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology. He attended graduate school at the University of Redlands from 1966–1967, where he received his Master of Arts in Speech Pathology and was awarded his membership in American Speech and Hearing Association Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech-Language Pathology (CCC-SLP). Tomblin completed his PhD in Communication Disorders at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1970. He held faculty positions at Syracuse University and SUNY Upstate Medical Center prior to joining the faculty of the University of Iowa in 1972.
Tomblin was named Spriestersbach Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Iowa in 1999 and was named Honorary Fellow of the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in 2013. His research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.
Elissa Lee Newport is a Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship between language development and language structure, and most recently on the effects of pediatric stroke on the organization and recovery of language.
Newport graduated from Ladue Horton Watkins High School in Ladue, Missouri in 1965.
Newport attended Wellesley College from 1965 to 1967 and in 1969 graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University. Newport received a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975, where her advisors were Lila Gleitman and Henry Gleitman.
She was a member of the faculty in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Illinois before joining the faculty at the University of Rochester, where she was chair of the department and the George Eastman Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In July 2012, she joined the faculty at Georgetown University where she became the founding director of the newly established Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery. Dr. Newport is married to Ted Supalla, who is also a professor in the Department of Neurology at Georgetown University.
In 2017, Newport and eight other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit with attorney Ann Olivarius against the University of Rochester for sexual misconduct by Professor Florian Jaeger of the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. The lawsuit followed upon an independent investigation by the university, about which Newman said "It is not acceptable to say that people have behaved offensively and inappropriately to our students, but nobody did anything wrong. It is not an acceptable conclusion to arrive at. Shame on you." In 2020, the University settled the case for $9.4 million.
Newport has been recognized by a number of organizations for the impact of her theoretical and empirical contributions to the field of language acquisition. She has been elected as a fellow in the American Philosophical Society, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. Her research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the Packard Foundation.
In 2015, she was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences. She had previously received the Claude Pepper Award of Excellence from the NIH, and the William James Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Research, the highest honor given by the Association for Psychological Science (APS).
Victoria Alexandra Fromkin (; May 16, 1923 – January 19, 2000) was an American linguist who taught at UCLA. She studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors and applied this to phonology, the study of how the sounds of a language are organized in the mind.
Fromkin was born in Passaic, New Jersey as "Victoria Alexandra Landish" on May 16, 1923. She earned a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1944. She married Jack Fromkin, a childhood friend from Passaic, in 1948, and they settled in Los Angeles, California. She decided to head back to school to study linguistics in her late 30s. She enrolled at UCLA, received her master's in 1963 and her Ph.D in 1965. Her thesis was entitled, "Some phonetic specifications of linguistic units: an electromyographic investigation". That same year, Fromkin joined the faculty of the linguistics department at UCLA.
Her line of research mainly dealt with speech errors and slips of the tongue. She collected more than 12,000 examples of slips of the tongue, which were analyzed in a number of scholarly publications, notably her 1971 "Language" article and an edited volume, "Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence".
From 1971 to 1975, Fromkin was part of a team of linguistic researchers studying the speech of the "feral child" known as Genie. Genie had spent the first 13 years of her life in severe isolation, and Fromkin and her associates hoped that her case would illuminate the process of language acquisition after the critical period. However, the study ended after rancorous disputes over Genie's care, and the loss of funding from the National Institute of Mental Health. Fromkin published several papers about Genie's linguistic development, and her PhD student, Susan Curtiss, wrote a dissertation about Genie's linguistic development under Fromkin's supervision.
In 1974, Fromkin was commissioned by the producers of the children's television series "Land of the Lost" to create a constructed language for a species of primitive cavemen/primates called the Pakuni. Fromkin developed a 300-word vocabulary and syntax for the series, and translated scripts into her created Pakuni language for the series' first two seasons.
For the action-sci-fi movie Blade (film), Fromkin created another constructed language for the vampires in the film.
She became the first woman in the University of California system to be Vice Chancellor of Graduate Programs. She held this position from 1980 to 1989. She was elected President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1985. Fromkin was also chairwoman of the board of governors of the Academy of Aphasia. She was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 1996.
Fromkin died at the age of 76 on January 19, 2000 from colon cancer. The Linguistic Society of America established the "Victoria A. Fromkin Prize for Distinguished Service" award in her honor in 2001. This award recognizes individuals who have performed extraordinary service to the discipline and to the Society throughout their career.
Fromkin contributed to the area of linguistics known as speech errors. She created "Fromkin's Speech Error Database", for which data collection is ongoing.
Fromkin recorded nine different types of speech errors. The following are examples of each:
Fromkin theorized that slips of the tongue can occur at many levels including syntactic, phrasal, lexical or semantic, morphological, phonological. She also believed that slips of the tongue could occur as many different process procedures. The different forms were:
Fromkin's research helps support the argument that language processing is not modular. The argument for modularity claims that language is localized, domain-specific, mandatory, fast, and encapsulated. Her research on slips of the tongue has demonstrated that when people make slips of the tongue it usually happens on the same level, indicating that each level has a distinct place in the person's brain. Phonemes switch with phonemes, stems with stems, and morphemes switch with other morphemes.
Crain was awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship (2004–2009), and is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (2006–current). He is currently the chair of the National Committee on Mind and Brain (Australian Academy of Science), and is a presidential nominee on the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee for the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Crain is a visiting professor at the Beijing Language and Culture University, China, and at the Kanazawa Institute of Technology, Japan. He was appointed Macquarie University Distinguished Professor in 2010.
Morton Ann Gernsbacher is Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is a specialist in autism and psycholinguistics and has written and edited professional and lay books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. She is currently on the advisory board of the journal "Psychological Science in the Public Interest" and associate editor for "Cognitive Psychology," and she has previously held editorial positions for "Memory & Cognition" and "Language and Cognitive Processes." She was also president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2007.
Gernsbacher received a B.A. from the University of North Texas in 1976, an M.S. from University of Texas at Dallas in 1980, and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Human Experimental Psychology in 1983. She was employed at the University of Oregon from 1983-1992 before joining the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she has remained ever since.
Gernsbacher is married and has one child.
Marta Kutas (born September 2, 1949) is a Professor and Chair of cognitive science and an adjunct professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. She also directs the Center for Research in Language at UCSD. Kutas is known for discovering the N400, an event-related potential (ERP) component typically elicited by unexpected linguistic stimuli, with her colleague Steven Hillyard in one of the first studies in what is now the field of neurolinguistics.