analysis: unhappiness

[Richard Hudson]

  Dear Ted,
Thanks for this. Sorry I misrepresented your goals; I'm afraid I was 
stereotyping you. But then, I was also stereotyping myself. It looks as 
though we both share the same global goal that I sketched in my earlier 
message: a comprehensive model for language which covers both structure 
and processing, and both behaviour and cognition; and which allows 
individual variation in all four. Hooray! All we need is the wisdom to 
'think global and act local', as they keep telling us. I'm afraid it's 
all too easy to get side-tracked into something narrow and easier.

Best wishes, Dick


> 2. Dick (by the way, thank you for the kind responses, and your 
> positive tone):
>
> "Your [the psycholinguists'] goal is to find general processes and 
> principles that apply uniformly across individuals, so you have to use 
> methods to check for generality."
>
> in contrast to "my focus is on items and structures, and I start from 
> the assumption that these can and do vary across speakers."
>
> Many cognitive psychologists / cognitive scientists (all the ones I 
> know at MIT for example) are interested in both cognitive 
> generalizations across people and ways in which people differ 
> cognitively.  In fact, some methods (e.g., the individual differences 
> approach where co-variation of various behaviors / characteristics is 
> examined across individuals) have been specifically developed to study 
> differences among individuals.  Both kinds of data are important for 
> understanding human cognition, including language.  This applies to 
> language research directly: generalizations across people are 
> important, but so are individual differences.  In either case, 
> quantitative data are necessary to evaluate research questions and 
> test hypotheses.
>
> On a related note, it is a mistake to characterize researchers with a 
> background in "psychology" or cognitive science as being interested in 
> "processing", and researchers with a background in "linguistics" as 
> being interested in "knowledge" or "representation / structure".  Both 
> psychologists and linguists should be interested in *both* 
> representation and processing (and learning, for that matter).  We 
> wrote a little about this confusion in Gibson & Fedorenko (in press), 
> which we include at the end of the message.
>