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Beyond Chomsky versus Skinner: frequency, language processing and aphasia

The background for this special issue of Aphasiology on Frequency, Language Processing and Aphasia reaches nearly 60 years into the past. In 1959, Chomsky, critiquing Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, deployed an explosive set of arguments against the behaviourist analysis of language (Chomsky, 1959, 1967). Linguists in increasing numbers lined up behind Chomsky’s powerful contentions, and the overall effects were far-reaching. But because behaviourism invoked frequency and probability as explanations and as measures, linguists (who had none of our present tools for getting good numerical information about linguistic events), in endorsing Chomsky, seem to have been convinced for many years that because frequency could not explain everything, it could not explain ANYTHING. Other differences also divided most linguists from most psychologists interested in language (Ervin-Tripp & Slobin, 1966), even after the “cognitive revolution” in psychology (Miller, 2003) was well underway and behaviourismhad become history—in particular, psycholinguists attempting to test claims of linguistic theories often found it impossible to keep up with the relatively rapid evolution of those theories, so most of us just gave up on testing linguists’ claims and set about trying to understand sentence production and comprehension on our own. By now, most sub-areas of linguistics and psycholinguistics have rather different goals and different criteria for what constitutes progress towards them. Linguistics wants the “best” description of synchronic grammar (where what “best” means might be “most parsimonious grammar” or “most intuitively satisfying description of data from the largest number of languages” or something in between). And in general, linguists remain much more concerned with the mental representation of linguistic structures than how they are processed by speakers and hearers. Psycholinguistics, on the other hand, wants descriptions of human language processing that give the best approximation of people’s responses to a large range of processing demands, over a full range of populations. The importance of this difference will be evident from the papers in this special issue. One major implication of the work reported here is that psycholinguistics can and should look at the effects of a large set of potentially relevant variables rather than being constrained to considering just the variables that are sanctioned by particular linguistic theories. The variables discussed in this issue include (1) various kinds of morphological and lexical frequency measures—see Bastiaanse, Wieling, and Wolthuis; Baayen, Milin, and Ramscar; (2) expectedness/surprisal/conditional frequency—see Gahl and Menn; Gibson, Sandberg, Bergen, Fedorenko, and Kiran; Van Ewijk and Avrutin and (3) age of acquisition—see Brysbaert and Ellis; Baayen et al. A second major implication is that because of the brain’s capacity for both parallel processing and top-down processing, psycholinguistics is not constrained to the linear APHASIOLOGY, 2016 VOL. 30, NO. 11, 1169–1173 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02687038.2016.1168920