The cognitive basis for linguistic structures1

Abstract

The Rockefeller University (at present, The University of Arizona) Originally published in R. Hayes (ed.), Cognition and Language Development (New York: Wiley & Sons, 1970), 279–362. We can all agree that the capacity to symbolize and communicate in language has powerful effects on how we think and behave, but how does the way we think affect the structure of our language? This article explores the ways in which specific properties of language structure and speech behavior reflect certain general cognitive laws. Recent investigations of language have made an important simplifying assumption: the primary subject for linguistic description is linguistic knowledge, as opposed to linguistic behavior. This heuristic strategy has facilitated progress in the formal description of the “abstract” structures of language, but has left open the question of how such structures are learned by children and utilized by adults. Previous attempts to integrate linguistic structure and speech behavior have been efforts to find direct mappings of abstract linguistic structures onto language learning, speech perception, and speech production. Although the details of these mappings differ, the basic postulate is the same: actual speech behavior is some regular function of the abstract linguistic structure originally isolated in linguistic investigations. That is, grammar rests at the epicenter of all language behavior, with different functions of grammatical structure accounting for different kinds of behaviors (for example, talking, listening, memorizing, and the like).