From: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com (Richard Wojcik,snake)
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: Cognitive Phonology (was Cognitive Linguistics...)
Date: 6 Oct 92 16:18:33 GMT
Reply-To: rwojcik@atc.boeing.com
Organization: Research & Technology

In article 8834@news.Hawaii.Edu, lee@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee) writes:
>In article <83905@bcsaic.boeing.com> rwojcik@atc.boeing.com writes:
>}...  (And chains of Processes are relevant because the "foreign"
>}target may be more than a single Process removed from any native target.)
>}...
>
>No, they're not relevant to what segments appear in the child's lexical
>forms -- its phonemes.  It's fine to consider a child's attempted
>imitations of adult speech forms to "foreign" borrowings, but what
>about the situation after the forms are borrowed?  When the child
>pronounces forms based on what it has memorized, lexical forms, it's
>not borrowing from itself.  The lexical forms are governed by the
>unsuppressed fortitions...

My point was this:  children do not and cannot use their immature process
system to make predictions about what is a valid phonemic representation.
If they did, then Stampe's theory of phonological acquisition could not make
sense.  What they do, in modifying pronunciations via process suppression, is 
to arrive at a system that allows them to make such predictions.  Therefore, 
they should be able to retain phonemic (lexical) targets that are destroyed
by unsuppressed fortitions.  Stampe has quite explicitly argued that children
have roughly adult phonemic forms even in the earliest stages of acquisition.
I think that your view of phonological acquisition smacks more of Jakobson's--
that the phonemic system becomes more elaborate over time.  You still want to
think of processes as generative rules, which essentially define inputs and 
outputs to derivations.  Generative phonology is necessarily stuck on the idea
that inputs are valid phonological forms.  That is the nature of a theory that
attempts to account directly for "well-formedness."  Natural phonology takes
derivational inputs to be phonetic forms of any sort, be they well-formed or
not.  Whether or not the speaker judges the form he is trying to pronounce as
well-formed may well rely on several strategies.  The strategy that says "you
can rely on fortitions to tell you what is phonemic" can only arise after the
learner has got his fortitions under decent control.  

The fundamental observation that David has used to make his "adult phonemes"
argument for learners is that pronunciations change globally across the lexicon
as children mature.  They don't have to relearn the phonemic reps of all those
words whose pronunciations used to be destroyed by some fortition.  If the 
fortition were governing the phonemic rep, then the child who suppressed the
offending fortition would have to rehear all the affected words to get the
articulation right after suppression.

>}Let's try this.  Pretend that you are an astronomer trying to explain why 
>}your photographs have a bearing on your work.  Then construct a similar 
>}explanation for why patterns of grammaticality judgments have a bearing on
>}linguistic theory.
>
>No, I won't try it.  Astronomers don't spend their time in theoretical
>discussion of photographs; it's not astronomy.  I'm not going to waste
>time in fruitless methodological debate; it's not linguistics.  This
>is the trap psychologists fall into -- let's not follow them.

Maybe you missed my point here.  An astronomer does not have to explain in 
brute detail how his photographs have a bearing on his work because we pretty
much understand how cameras and telescopes work.  If one had to construct an
argument, one could.  The workings of the brain (mind) are not so obvious.  
If you are going to use psychological intuitions as data, then you owe it to
us to explain the cognitive basis that allows your theory to make claims about
the data.  I think that Chomsky, with his Rationalist philosophy, has done his
best to do that.  But the cognitive underpinnings of generative theory still 
remain obscure, and it disturbs me sometimes to see the lengths to which 
modern generative linguists will go to pretend that a fundamental issue such
as this isn't really so important after all.  It's the dirty dishes left over
after you have dined on richly interesting data.

-----
Disclaimer:  Opinions expressed above are not those of my employer.

    Rick Wojcik   (rwojcik@atc.boeing.com)   Seattle, WA
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