psychological reality

Esa Itkonen eitkonen at UTU.FI
Thu Oct 22 10:51:48 UTC 1998


The dichotomy 'concrete forms in storage & short computations vs. abstract
forms in storage & long computations' was THE issue when the question of
psychological reality was discussed in the 70's (and the question is still
with us today). Per Linell's 300-page book 'Psychological reality in
phonology' (CUP 1979) is devoted to this issue (see e.g. the section on
'Demand for excessive computing'). I don't think it would hurt anybody to
have a look at this book, which shows, once again, that very often
(although not always) what we would like to see as progress is nothing but
ignorance of the past. The dichotomy 'memorization vs. rule-generalization
(i.e. analogy)' is a somewhat separate issue because it concerns learning;
and something that has first been learned by analogy can later become
memorized as such.

Esa Itkonen



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