For today’s blog, I wanted to take a step back from language as it exists today to look at the history of specific languages. The article I chose discussed the origins of Spanish and the deviations that exist in the language. Learning about its history reveals the extent to which language is affected by the political operations taking place (conquests, etc).
Spanish originated in the Iberian Peninsula; the inhabitants learned Latin from Roman traders, settlers, administrators, and soldiers under Roman rule in 19 BCE and mixed it with their native languages (namely, Iberian, Celtic, and Carthaginian). The result is a language referred to as Vulgar Latin, which borrowed the basic models from Latin, but borrowed and added words from other languages. This remained the official language until about 719 CE, when the Moors, Arabic-speaking Islamic groups, conquered the region. As a result, Vulgar Latin expanded and changed as it borrowed many words from the Arabic dialects.
When the Christian kingdoms reconquered Moorish Spain, they carried Castilian (a dialect from the Northern Central plains that was a hybrid between Vulgar Latin and Arabic) South as they moved across Spain. In the 13th century, King Alfonso X worked to make Castilian the official language of Spain, and made his scholars write original works in Castilian and translate existing scientific, legal, and literary works into Castilian. Castilian became the written and educational standard in Spain under the rule of Isabella and Ferdinand; however, several other spoken dialects remained. The most prominent of these was Andalusian, spoken in the southern region of Spain.
The Spanish language crossed the ocean along with the Spanish explorers, conquistadors, and colonizers beginning in the 1400’s. Both the Castilian and Andalusian dialects were brought along; Castilian was used in administrative and cultural centers such as Mexico City and Lima in Peru, while the Andalusian dialect became dominant in Argentina and Central America, which were regions remote from the influence of the Spanish government's administrative centers.
The Spanish spoken in the Americas today differs from European Spanish because it borrowed many words from the languages of the indigenous peoples. These differences are reflected both in the actual words and grammar of the language. One interesting difference is the use of “vos” (meaning “you”) instead of “tu” in South American countries like Uruguay, Ecuador, and Argentina. While “vos” was once used in Castilian Spanish, it is no longer a part of the language. One explanation for this is:
“In Spain, although vos denoted high social status by those who were addressed as such (monarchs, nobility, etc.), these people never actually used the pronoun themselves since there were not any people above them in society. Those who used vos were the inferiors (lower classes and peasants). When the waves of Spanish immigrants arrived to populate the New World, they were primarily comprised of these lower classes and peasants. They would then want to raise their social status from what it was in Spain and would demand to be addressed as vos. Everyone thus became vos in the Americas, and the pronoun was transformed into an indicator of low status not only for the addresser, but also for the addressee. Conversely, in Spain today vos is still considered a highly exalted archaism that is confined to liturgy, and its use by native Spaniards is seen as deliberate archaism.”
Although this explanation sounds plausible, it does not explain why vos is barely used in Mexico or in other South American countries like Paraguay, Bolivia, and Chile.
And it’s not just the words and grammar that are different across the Spanish-speaking countries; the accent changes noticeably from place to place. Hispanic linguist Bertil Malmberg gave one explanation for the different accents in Mexico and Spain. He explained that there is a tendency in Spanish to prefer syllables that end in vowels, which leads to a weakening of final consonants. However, in Mexican Spanish, it is vowels that lose strength, while consonants are fully pronounced, which he claims is caused by the influence of English from the geographically close United States. Mexican Spanish further tends to imitate English in its tendency towards stress timing (in a stress-timed language—like English—syllables may last different amounts of time, but there is a constant amount of time on average between two consecutive stressed syllables).
It’s an interesting idea: that a language can be influenced simply by the close and ubiquitous presence of a language with different standards of pronunciation. It makes me think about my own experience as a Spanish speaker living in the US; when I speak to other Spanish speakers, they comment that my Spanish is distinct—it’s not exactly Mexican nor South American nor Castilian. I know that part of the reason for this is because although I speak Spanish at home, I don’t hear it in public or in the media, so my knowledge of regional slang is severely limited: in terms of slang and colloquialisms, I know only what I hear from my parents. But maybe another part of it is that my Spanish is influenced by the patterns of speech I hear in English?
http://media.www.signal-online.net/media/storage/paper771/news/2007/11/28/News/Spanish.Not.Your.Standard.Language-3117377.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_dialects_and_varieties
http://www.alsintl.com/languages/Spanish.shtml
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Can Music Transcend Language?
At the annual Latin Grammy awards, Ricky Martin championed the power of Latin music and the Spanish language, telling reporters, “Music breaks borders and unites cultures.”
And yet the success-—or lack of—-of foreign language songs in English-speaking countries, notably the US and the UK, says otherwise. Songs that aren’t in English just don’t rate the same success. The songs of Juanes, the biggest-selling pop artist in Latin American, for example, have yet to cross over to non-Spanish speakers. While his songs play continuously on virtually every Spanish-language radio station, only a minimal percentage of non-Latin stations are playing his music.
Other Latin artists, like Shakira or Ricky Martin, who have attained popularity across the cultures, have prepared different albums for different countries, recording both in English and Spanish. And only certain types of songs are able to cross-over: the biggest recent hits belong to Daddy Yankee with "Rompe" in 2006 and, prior to that, "Gasolina." As the article points out, “both are reggaeton tracks, synonymous with danceable.” And “the last big Spanish-language hit on mainstream U.S. radio was ‘Macarena,’ the queen of easy-to-dance-to tracks. That was a decade ago.”
Of Juanes, a British article states, “He's now trying to extend his popularity to the UK, with his album Mi Sangre (My Blood). His label, Polydor, has big plans for him, convinced our sceptical island is ready to welcome him as our continental neighbours have. But there's one thing Polydor seems to have forgotten - the British don't buy records not sung in English.”
My thoughts on this? I’ve always thought that music lyrics must be the hardest thing to translate; it’s where the gap between languages appears most sharply. In music, lyrics have to be perfectly fitted to the rhythm of the song (down to the number of syllables) and have a certain appealing sound; the words are so important for the song’s meaning. The word choice radically affects the song’s tone, and there are certain expressions in each language that will not survive literal translation. The translations end up sounding just silly, as in the case of Chinese singer Jay Chow, whose song titles translate to “Hair Like Snow” and “Romantic Mobile Phone.” So it was gratifying to read that Juanes refuses to compromise the integrity of his songs by translating them into English for the different market.
As well, the fact that songs in English achieve popularity in other countries whereas foreign language music doesn’t fare as well in English-speaking countries speaks to the connection between language and culture. There are a lot of factors that could be involved in the disparate rates of success: the US’ role as a major player in the world of entertainment, the attitudes of the Americans and the British towards all things foreign (an ingrained perceived cultural superiority?), the ubiquity of the English language all over the world. So music has to overcome far more than the language barrier in order to truly cross cultures!
http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN0938009720071110
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1757374,00.html
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.htmlres=9F0CE7DD163EF93AA2575AC0A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
And yet the success-—or lack of—-of foreign language songs in English-speaking countries, notably the US and the UK, says otherwise. Songs that aren’t in English just don’t rate the same success. The songs of Juanes, the biggest-selling pop artist in Latin American, for example, have yet to cross over to non-Spanish speakers. While his songs play continuously on virtually every Spanish-language radio station, only a minimal percentage of non-Latin stations are playing his music.
Other Latin artists, like Shakira or Ricky Martin, who have attained popularity across the cultures, have prepared different albums for different countries, recording both in English and Spanish. And only certain types of songs are able to cross-over: the biggest recent hits belong to Daddy Yankee with "Rompe" in 2006 and, prior to that, "Gasolina." As the article points out, “both are reggaeton tracks, synonymous with danceable.” And “the last big Spanish-language hit on mainstream U.S. radio was ‘Macarena,’ the queen of easy-to-dance-to tracks. That was a decade ago.”
Of Juanes, a British article states, “He's now trying to extend his popularity to the UK, with his album Mi Sangre (My Blood). His label, Polydor, has big plans for him, convinced our sceptical island is ready to welcome him as our continental neighbours have. But there's one thing Polydor seems to have forgotten - the British don't buy records not sung in English.”
My thoughts on this? I’ve always thought that music lyrics must be the hardest thing to translate; it’s where the gap between languages appears most sharply. In music, lyrics have to be perfectly fitted to the rhythm of the song (down to the number of syllables) and have a certain appealing sound; the words are so important for the song’s meaning. The word choice radically affects the song’s tone, and there are certain expressions in each language that will not survive literal translation. The translations end up sounding just silly, as in the case of Chinese singer Jay Chow, whose song titles translate to “Hair Like Snow” and “Romantic Mobile Phone.” So it was gratifying to read that Juanes refuses to compromise the integrity of his songs by translating them into English for the different market.
As well, the fact that songs in English achieve popularity in other countries whereas foreign language music doesn’t fare as well in English-speaking countries speaks to the connection between language and culture. There are a lot of factors that could be involved in the disparate rates of success: the US’ role as a major player in the world of entertainment, the attitudes of the Americans and the British towards all things foreign (an ingrained perceived cultural superiority?), the ubiquity of the English language all over the world. So music has to overcome far more than the language barrier in order to truly cross cultures!
http://www.reuters.com/article/entertainmentNews/idUSN0938009720071110
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/filmandmusic/story/0,,1757374,00.html
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.htmlres=9F0CE7DD163EF93AA2575AC0A965958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all
Thursday, November 8, 2007
A (Literally) Backwards Language
It was refreshing to read about the street-slang culture of France, because I definitely have a view of the French as being snobbish about the purity of their language (especially hearing about others’ experiences in France!) But a newly produced slang dictionary called the “Lexik des cites” is now being hailed as a cultural achievement in France. The dictionary was created by ten men and women from southern Paris and translates caillera, which is the mix of old argot, Arabic, black American, African, Creole, and Romany primarily spoken by the minority low-income populations.
The article gave some examples of these slang words:
kéblo: inhibited (reverse form of bloqué, or blocked)
bellek: look out (from African Arabic)
un meskin: poor sod (from Arabic meaning of poor; means ungenerous in standard French)
un flow: smooth talker (from US rap)
un frolo: boy (from the film The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
kalech: skint (from old Parisian calèche, a wagon to the poor house)
It’s surprising to see the diversity of sources from which the words are derived; the language seems to be culled from across geographical, historical, cultural, and social spheres.
One of these sources is verlan, a popular slang in which standard French spellings or syllables are reversed or recombined, or both. For example, “Bonjour, ça va?" or "Good day, how are you?" becomes "Jourbon, ça av?"And the word Verlan itself is a Verlanization of the term l'envers, meaning "the reverse.”
This language—for I would argue that Verlan has become a language—has a really interesting history. The first documented use of Verlan dates back to the 19th century, when it was used as a code language among criminals. But it was revived in France's banlieus, the peripheral areas outside major cities, where the government built high-rise housing for its immigrant worker population after World War II, and which later became home to many North African workers in the 1960’s and 70’s. These second generation immigrants of the banlieus were thus caught between cultures: they were born in France, but did not feel integrated into France, living in an area that had been intentionally built apart from the mainstream society. So Verlan became “a way of their establishing their language and their own distinct identity.” Verlan then spread across the other immigrant groups of the banlieus, mainly sub-Saharan Africans and Caribbean blacks, becoming the “speech of the disenfranchised,” as anthropologist Vivienne Mela puts it. It further served as a way of connecting these different groups who didn’t have a common language.
From the banlieus, Verlan was discovered by mainstream French in the 1980's after a series of major riots brought the problems of the immigrant housing to the attention of most French; the language became more popular after the publication of several books and productions of movies about life in the banlieus. Its popularity—especially with young liberals—can be explained by the fact that the language had a subversive element: it both became a metaphor of opposition and the counter-culture, and represented solidarity with and awareness of the immigrant community. Today, Verlan has gained widespread popularity among young people across France, seeping into film dialogue, advertising campaigns, French rap and hip-hop music, and even making it into some of the country's leading dictionaries.
And, interestingly, Verlan has become a way for the French to speak about more taboo topics, such as race, ethnicity, and sex. Natalie Lefkowitz, a professor of French applied linguistics, says that, “Verlanizing words changes their tone and meaning.” The Verlanized words for Arab, black or Jew, for example, "allow you to mark racial and culture differences without insulting people.” And a recent study documented about 350 Verlan terms, which tended to cluster around taboo topics. It’s as though the remnants of illicitness and informality that surround Verlan gives the speakers a sense that the words carry less weight and makes it easier to discuss these topics. But maybe it also has to do with the identity of the speakers; Verlan is most widely spoken by young people, who—independently of Verlan—have different vocabularies (both in content and form) from those of older generations.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article2827616.ece
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~cskarocz/french370/boumkoeur/verlan.html
The article gave some examples of these slang words:
kéblo: inhibited (reverse form of bloqué, or blocked)
bellek: look out (from African Arabic)
un meskin: poor sod (from Arabic meaning of poor; means ungenerous in standard French)
un flow: smooth talker (from US rap)
un frolo: boy (from the film The Hunchback of Notre Dame)
kalech: skint (from old Parisian calèche, a wagon to the poor house)
It’s surprising to see the diversity of sources from which the words are derived; the language seems to be culled from across geographical, historical, cultural, and social spheres.
One of these sources is verlan, a popular slang in which standard French spellings or syllables are reversed or recombined, or both. For example, “Bonjour, ça va?" or "Good day, how are you?" becomes "Jourbon, ça av?"And the word Verlan itself is a Verlanization of the term l'envers, meaning "the reverse.”
This language—for I would argue that Verlan has become a language—has a really interesting history. The first documented use of Verlan dates back to the 19th century, when it was used as a code language among criminals. But it was revived in France's banlieus, the peripheral areas outside major cities, where the government built high-rise housing for its immigrant worker population after World War II, and which later became home to many North African workers in the 1960’s and 70’s. These second generation immigrants of the banlieus were thus caught between cultures: they were born in France, but did not feel integrated into France, living in an area that had been intentionally built apart from the mainstream society. So Verlan became “a way of their establishing their language and their own distinct identity.” Verlan then spread across the other immigrant groups of the banlieus, mainly sub-Saharan Africans and Caribbean blacks, becoming the “speech of the disenfranchised,” as anthropologist Vivienne Mela puts it. It further served as a way of connecting these different groups who didn’t have a common language.
From the banlieus, Verlan was discovered by mainstream French in the 1980's after a series of major riots brought the problems of the immigrant housing to the attention of most French; the language became more popular after the publication of several books and productions of movies about life in the banlieus. Its popularity—especially with young liberals—can be explained by the fact that the language had a subversive element: it both became a metaphor of opposition and the counter-culture, and represented solidarity with and awareness of the immigrant community. Today, Verlan has gained widespread popularity among young people across France, seeping into film dialogue, advertising campaigns, French rap and hip-hop music, and even making it into some of the country's leading dictionaries.
And, interestingly, Verlan has become a way for the French to speak about more taboo topics, such as race, ethnicity, and sex. Natalie Lefkowitz, a professor of French applied linguistics, says that, “Verlanizing words changes their tone and meaning.” The Verlanized words for Arab, black or Jew, for example, "allow you to mark racial and culture differences without insulting people.” And a recent study documented about 350 Verlan terms, which tended to cluster around taboo topics. It’s as though the remnants of illicitness and informality that surround Verlan gives the speakers a sense that the words carry less weight and makes it easier to discuss these topics. But maybe it also has to do with the identity of the speakers; Verlan is most widely spoken by young people, who—independently of Verlan—have different vocabularies (both in content and form) from those of older generations.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article2827616.ece
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/~cskarocz/french370/boumkoeur/verlan.html
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Editing Our Speech
Because the process of speaking involves so many complex processes, we’re bound to mess up occasionally. But our brains actually have a sort of editing process in place to correct our mistakes. Psycholinguist Willem Levelt discusses how speech perception interacts with speech production; he states that the type of feedback our brain receives involves:
Am I saying what I meant to say?
Is this the way I meant to say it?
Is what I am saying socially appropriate?
Am I selecting the right words?
Am I using the right syntax and morphology?
Am I making any phonological errors?
Is my articulation at the right speed and pitch?
He postulates that, “The major feature of editor theories is that production results are fed back through a device that is external to the production system. This device can be distributed in the sense that it can check in-between results at different levels of processing. The editor may, for instance, monitor the construction of the preverbal message, the appropriateness of lexical access, the well-formedness of syntax, or the flawlessness of phonological-form access.”
While I agree that editing monitors all levels of speech—when I’m speaking, I may realize I’ve pronounced a word wrong, or chosen the wrong word, or phrased something the wrong way (all of which involve different levels of the speech production process)—I don’t really understand the idea of this device as something external. Does he mean it is physically separate in the brain from our language production center? Or chronologically separate (it gets involved only after we have begun to speak)? Or is the device simply a neurologically different process from that of the speech production process?
Researcher Claudy Oomen explains that Levelt saw speech production as comprised of three stages—conceptualization, formulation, and articulation (which is basically a less compartmentalized view than the speech production levels described in the previous blog)—and saw the monitoring mechanism as proceeding through perception, so speakers can detect their own speech errors “by parsing their inner and overt speech in the same way.” That is, the mechanism is active in correction both before and after articulation. Levelt presents the idea of a “flow-through monitor”—one that allows the production process to continue while the conceptual/inner loop monitoring is taking place (so errors detected before articulation can still become overt).
But another hypothesis presents the idea that monitoring is “an integral part of the production process, allowing direct access to the various processing components of speech production” (like lexical selection); this hypothesis suggests that if an error is detected during any of the stages of the speech production process, further processing is canceled while the error is repaired, all before articulation. This model includes a sensory register model for checking overt speech.
Other linguists have pursued Levelt’s idea of a feedback system; one researcher developed a technique of replaying a person's speech to that person's own ears, subject to a variable time delay. From his studies, he came to the conclusion of a multiple loop control hierarchy, with four levels of feedback:
The Thought Loop: The highest level feedback loop monitors the pragmatic appropriacy of the output.
The Word Loop: The second highest loop monitors speech production for word selection accuracy.
The Voice Loop: The third highest loop monitors speech production at whole-syllable level for morphological accuracy.
The Articulating Loop: Finally, the lowest loop monitors speech production checking that the right phonemes have been used within each syllable.
This "loop" system seems logical; it corresponds to the stages proposed in the speech production model. Although it's important to remember that the speech production model itself is just that--a model. As Lera noted in class, it is only one way of explaining our language system. And in terms of the editing mechanisms, it’s interesting to see the different models proposed to explain our system for correcting our speech; the ones I’ve presented are only two of many! The existence of all these different hypothesized models is further testimony to the difficulty inherent in giving definitive answers to questions about how our brain processes and uses language.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m761760977386125/fulltext.pdf
http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/speech-errors.html
Am I saying what I meant to say?
Is this the way I meant to say it?
Is what I am saying socially appropriate?
Am I selecting the right words?
Am I using the right syntax and morphology?
Am I making any phonological errors?
Is my articulation at the right speed and pitch?
He postulates that, “The major feature of editor theories is that production results are fed back through a device that is external to the production system. This device can be distributed in the sense that it can check in-between results at different levels of processing. The editor may, for instance, monitor the construction of the preverbal message, the appropriateness of lexical access, the well-formedness of syntax, or the flawlessness of phonological-form access.”
While I agree that editing monitors all levels of speech—when I’m speaking, I may realize I’ve pronounced a word wrong, or chosen the wrong word, or phrased something the wrong way (all of which involve different levels of the speech production process)—I don’t really understand the idea of this device as something external. Does he mean it is physically separate in the brain from our language production center? Or chronologically separate (it gets involved only after we have begun to speak)? Or is the device simply a neurologically different process from that of the speech production process?
Researcher Claudy Oomen explains that Levelt saw speech production as comprised of three stages—conceptualization, formulation, and articulation (which is basically a less compartmentalized view than the speech production levels described in the previous blog)—and saw the monitoring mechanism as proceeding through perception, so speakers can detect their own speech errors “by parsing their inner and overt speech in the same way.” That is, the mechanism is active in correction both before and after articulation. Levelt presents the idea of a “flow-through monitor”—one that allows the production process to continue while the conceptual/inner loop monitoring is taking place (so errors detected before articulation can still become overt).
But another hypothesis presents the idea that monitoring is “an integral part of the production process, allowing direct access to the various processing components of speech production” (like lexical selection); this hypothesis suggests that if an error is detected during any of the stages of the speech production process, further processing is canceled while the error is repaired, all before articulation. This model includes a sensory register model for checking overt speech.
Other linguists have pursued Levelt’s idea of a feedback system; one researcher developed a technique of replaying a person's speech to that person's own ears, subject to a variable time delay. From his studies, he came to the conclusion of a multiple loop control hierarchy, with four levels of feedback:
The Thought Loop: The highest level feedback loop monitors the pragmatic appropriacy of the output.
The Word Loop: The second highest loop monitors speech production for word selection accuracy.
The Voice Loop: The third highest loop monitors speech production at whole-syllable level for morphological accuracy.
The Articulating Loop: Finally, the lowest loop monitors speech production checking that the right phonemes have been used within each syllable.
This "loop" system seems logical; it corresponds to the stages proposed in the speech production model. Although it's important to remember that the speech production model itself is just that--a model. As Lera noted in class, it is only one way of explaining our language system. And in terms of the editing mechanisms, it’s interesting to see the different models proposed to explain our system for correcting our speech; the ones I’ve presented are only two of many! The existence of all these different hypothesized models is further testimony to the difficulty inherent in giving definitive answers to questions about how our brain processes and uses language.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/m761760977386125/fulltext.pdf
http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/speech-errors.html
Thursday, November 1, 2007
On the Tip of the Tongue
In other blogs, I’ve written about how speech disorders, production errors, and hesitation phenomena provide information on what happens in our minds when we are speaking. But linguist Paul Georg Meyer claims that “the most revealing errors…are the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.”
The TOT (tip-of-the-tongue) state is one familiar to everyone; it’s when we can’t seem to find a particular word that seems just out of our reach. We more or less know the word we want to say, but can’t bring it all the way to consciousness. Linguistics Harley and Brown describe the phenomenon as a moment when a person has been able to successfully access the abstract lemma* through semantic specification, and yet is unable to access the corresponding phonological word form.
It’s easy to induce this phenomenon artificially, which allows linguists to analyze our struggle for the right word. What the experiments showed is that people’s ability to recall specific words improved when they were provided with phonologically related words. Based on their experiments, researchers James and Burke theorized that language retrieval depends on memory of both a word’s meaning and its sound. Their Transmission Deficit Model they created based upon their research states that language production “depends on the strength of connections within a network that includes conceptual and phonological levels.” The theory suggests that TOTs occur when semantic, but not phonological nodes, receive adequate activation. That is, we may know the exact meaning, but if we can’t recall the sound, we cannot articulate—or even think of—the word.
This idea is more revolutionary than it may sound. For years, the traditional idea was that TOTs arose because words with similar sounds actually blocked the target word from coming through. This is more intuitive to us because it matches our experience of what TOTs feel like. Whenever I can’t think of a word, there’s always another word that repeatedly keeps coming to mind instead; it definitely feels as though this alternate word is preventing me from being able to attain my target word!
Because TOTs are generally induced by definitions of low-frequency words, it suggests that there is insufficient consolidation of the memory; the word has not been used often enough for our brain to store it within easy reach. The disuse of a word, then, seems to cause a weaker connection between its phonological and semantic forms (since we are relieved from the TOT state only when we are prompted with similar sounding words; the external prompting internally rebuilds that connection), and thus a lesser facility for language. Lera’s idea that language is not inherently instinctive—it is only our ability to learn language that is inherent—fits in with all of this; language is something we have the potential to learn and make better, but also something that is damaged by disuse.
* Lemma signifies the "headword" (or "citation form") of an entry in a glossary (for example, the lemma go consists of go together with goes, going, went, and gone)
Oh, and just something random and interesting: based on the theory that TOTs occur when phonological modes do not receive adequate activation, as well as the fact that depression affects cognition in terms of net reduction in cognitive processing resources, researchers conducted an experiment to test whether depressed people experience more TOT’s, reasoning that depressives would be more likely to experience inadequate activation of phonological modes. Their conclusion? Depressed individuals do, in fact, experience more TOT’s.
http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/speech-errors.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=I2hXL8WClNUC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=tip+of+the+tongue+phenom+linguistic&source=web&ots=KQVww7-ITp&sig=rBkcbzbly9uGrhUob-lCvHDQGmo
http://www.apa.org/releases/tot.html
http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov00/sw.html
http://arxiv.org/html/cs.CL/0103002
http://www.puc.edu/Faculty/Aubyn_Fulton/fulton/research/tot97.htm
The TOT (tip-of-the-tongue) state is one familiar to everyone; it’s when we can’t seem to find a particular word that seems just out of our reach. We more or less know the word we want to say, but can’t bring it all the way to consciousness. Linguistics Harley and Brown describe the phenomenon as a moment when a person has been able to successfully access the abstract lemma* through semantic specification, and yet is unable to access the corresponding phonological word form.
It’s easy to induce this phenomenon artificially, which allows linguists to analyze our struggle for the right word. What the experiments showed is that people’s ability to recall specific words improved when they were provided with phonologically related words. Based on their experiments, researchers James and Burke theorized that language retrieval depends on memory of both a word’s meaning and its sound. Their Transmission Deficit Model they created based upon their research states that language production “depends on the strength of connections within a network that includes conceptual and phonological levels.” The theory suggests that TOTs occur when semantic, but not phonological nodes, receive adequate activation. That is, we may know the exact meaning, but if we can’t recall the sound, we cannot articulate—or even think of—the word.
This idea is more revolutionary than it may sound. For years, the traditional idea was that TOTs arose because words with similar sounds actually blocked the target word from coming through. This is more intuitive to us because it matches our experience of what TOTs feel like. Whenever I can’t think of a word, there’s always another word that repeatedly keeps coming to mind instead; it definitely feels as though this alternate word is preventing me from being able to attain my target word!
Because TOTs are generally induced by definitions of low-frequency words, it suggests that there is insufficient consolidation of the memory; the word has not been used often enough for our brain to store it within easy reach. The disuse of a word, then, seems to cause a weaker connection between its phonological and semantic forms (since we are relieved from the TOT state only when we are prompted with similar sounding words; the external prompting internally rebuilds that connection), and thus a lesser facility for language. Lera’s idea that language is not inherently instinctive—it is only our ability to learn language that is inherent—fits in with all of this; language is something we have the potential to learn and make better, but also something that is damaged by disuse.
* Lemma signifies the "headword" (or "citation form") of an entry in a glossary (for example, the lemma go consists of go together with goes, going, went, and gone)
Oh, and just something random and interesting: based on the theory that TOTs occur when phonological modes do not receive adequate activation, as well as the fact that depression affects cognition in terms of net reduction in cognitive processing resources, researchers conducted an experiment to test whether depressed people experience more TOT’s, reasoning that depressives would be more likely to experience inadequate activation of phonological modes. Their conclusion? Depressed individuals do, in fact, experience more TOT’s.
http://www.smithsrisca.demon.co.uk/speech-errors.html
http://books.google.com/books?id=I2hXL8WClNUC&pg=PA254&lpg=PA254&dq=tip+of+the+tongue+phenom+linguistic&source=web&ots=KQVww7-ITp&sig=rBkcbzbly9uGrhUob-lCvHDQGmo
http://www.apa.org/releases/tot.html
http://www.apa.org/monitor/nov00/sw.html
http://arxiv.org/html/cs.CL/0103002
http://www.puc.edu/Faculty/Aubyn_Fulton/fulton/research/tot97.htm
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