16.1457, Review: Phonology/Morphology/Hispanic Ling: Eddington

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-1457. Mon May 09 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.1457, Review: Phonology/Morphology/Hispanic Ling: Eddington

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1)
Date: 09-May-2005
From: Matthew Carlson < mtc173 at psu.edu >
Subject: Spanish Phonology and Morphology 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 09 May 2005 05:08:40
From: Matthew Carlson < mtc173 at psu.edu >
Subject: Spanish Phonology and Morphology 
 

AUTHOR: Eddington, David
TITLE: Spanish Phonology and Morphology
SUBTITLE: Experimental and quantitative perspectives
SERIES: Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 53
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-136.html


Matthew T. Carlson, Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, 
Pennsylvania State University

DESCRIPTION

Eddington presents this volume as an argument for quantitative and 
experimental approaches to the study of linguistics in general, and 
Spanish phonology and morphology in particular. Such approaches have 
become more popular in recent years, shifting attention to more 
experimental methodology as an alternative to formal linguistic analysis. 
In contrast to the latter, Eddington paints a picture of experimental 
approaches as marginal, or in "left field" (xiii), and therefore 
potentially controversial, but he takes pains to point out that the 
research he discusses here is but one part of a rich and varied field in 
which formal linguistics also has a role to play. The book is directed 
toward linguists and students with limited experience with what Eddington 
classifies as empirical approaches to linguistics. It is therefore not a 
comprehensive review of the literature on Spanish falling into this 
category. It is instead an introduction, presenting and exemplifying the 
unique contribution of this type of experimental methodology, the kind of 
questions it may begin to answer, and what techniques may be appropriate 
for answering them. In the following I will summarize the contents of each 
chapter, followed by an assessment of the book's merits and weaknesses.

Chapter 1: This chapter sets the stage for the rest of the book by drawing 
a sharp dividing line between experimental approaches to language and 
grammar and formal linguistic analysis. The crucial distinction is based 
on the psychological reality of the analyses resulting from each approach. 
Eddington distinguishes between formal linguistics as a non-empirical 
science and experimental and quantitative approaches, which he classifies 
as empirical. He discusses the notion of falsifiability and the role of 
idealizations or heuristics (e.g. the ideal speaker-listener), and 
explains why these are not in themselves falsifiable theoretical 
constructs. He follows with the types of evidence that formal and 
experimental approaches may draw on, paying particular attention to the 
weaknesses of autonomous methods, that is, methods that attempt to isolate 
analyses from particular individual speakers, a practice Eddington 
attributes primarily to formal approaches. While the bulk of the chapter 
appears devoted to pointing out that traditional formal linguistic methods 
are incapable of determining the psychological relevance of their 
resulting analyses, Eddington is careful to point out that both formal and 
empirical approaches are valuable, provided their domains are kept 
separate. Thus, Eddington dichotomizes formal and experimental approaches 
to linguistics, the first of which may be understood to concern the 
consequences of laws and representations, and the second to concern the 
substance and content of those laws (Mohanan 1997).

Chapter 2: In this chapter Eddington argues for the use of experimentation 
in linguistics and defends its use against several common objections. He 
makes it clear that experiments, understood to include also more 
naturalistic data that is analyzed statistically to test an explicit 
hypothesis, provide the kind of non-autonomous, empirical, and 
spatiotemporal data that he argues are required to determine the 
psychological relevance of linguistic realities. The chapter is structured 
primarily around a list of several criticisms of experimental methodology, 
including the knowledge base on which it rests, its relevance to 
linguistic competence (vs. performance), external validity, and its 
ability to distinguish between competing analyses. This discussion 
clarifies the domain of empirical approaches as pertaining to actual 
language processing and performance, and points out that idealizations 
(e.g. competence) and notational artifacts (e.g. diacritics in underlying 
representations) fall outside the domain of experimental research. 
Eddington closes the chapter with brief discussions of experimental 
approaches to English phonology, including a series of studies testing the 
psychological reality of the English vowel shift, exemplifying the 
experimental rigor needed to make specific conclusions in light of 
potentially conflicting results.

Chapter 3: The goal of this chapter is to show that analyses based on 
small data sets and the intuitions of a few individuals, as Eddington 
argues is often the case, frequently do not capture the psychological 
pertinence, or even the descriptive facts of linguistic phenomena. The 
discussion is centered on studies addressing several phenomena in Spanish 
morphophonology, including vowel opening following syllable final /s/-
deletion, coronal and velar softening (e.g. dividir~divisi-n, 
divide~division), depalatalization (e.g. do-a~don, Mrs.~Mr.), intonation, 
and change-of-state verbs. While the chapter makes no attempt at a 
comprehensive review of this literature, Eddington uses a series of 
examples to show that historical evidence, detailed phonetic analysis, 
perceptual and productive experiments, and corpus analyses can reveal 
highly complex and nuanced patterns of language behavior that defy 
attempts to arrive at simple or elegant generalizations. He argues, 
however, that psychological pertinence, and not elegance, is the goal of 
the approach advocated in this book, and that evidence from the methods 
exemplified here uncovers a level of detail that is missing in studies 
that rely on the speaker intuitions and the small data sets on which most 
traditional formal analyses rely.

Chapter 4: Eddington devotes this chapter to demonstrating that frequency 
must be considered as a factor in determining the psychological reality of 
linguistic phenomena. Two different measures of frequency are discussed, 
type frequency (the number of units that participate in a given pattern) 
and token frequency (the number of times a unit appears). Eddington then 
gives an example of a study (Perez 1998) in which frequency appears as an 
uncontrolled confounding variable, and shows how frequency may be used to 
clarify an otherwise odd result. The importance of measuring frequency in 
empirical studies of language is further illustrated at the level of 
phoneme clusters, words, and collocations. While again not providing a 
comprehensive review of the phenomena in question, Eddington presents data 
showing that the frequency of certain phoneme clusters may be used to 
provide a more grounded account of phenomena such as /e/-epenthesis and 
the tendency of /VsC-/ onsets to be produced as /esC-/. Frequency is also 
implicated in the tendency for frequent word combinations to become 
lexicalized as single units. However, this chapter is not an exhaustive 
review of the literature on frequency, and provides only a taste of the 
problems that arise in attempts to examine the role of this complex but 
crucial variable in language processing.

Chapter 5: Whereas in the majority of the book Eddington discusses 
experimental methods and evidence, in this chapter he presents an 
alternative way of constructing theory to that of formal analysis, one 
that produces empirically testable predictions. He spends the bulk of the 
chapter discussing Skousen's (1989, 1992) Analogical Model as a 
representative of exemplar-based models of language processing in general. 
The discussion is framed in terms of the debate concerning the roles of 
computation and the lexicon in grammar, with this class of models 
representing the maximal involvement of the lexicon, in contrast to models 
that "require speakers to glean generalizations from the data and 
formulate them into systems of rules or constraints" (p. 98). Eddington 
goes on to discuss the level of detail in the lexicon as well as its 
structure within contextual space, and gives examples of how this 
structure may be modeled in computer algorithms in order to test various 
predictions. Particular attention is given to the fact that exemplar-based 
models are able to account for frequency effects and gradience. The use of 
such models is supported by reviews of the literature on gender 
assignment, the formation of nouns ending in -i-n, and dialectal 
differences in diminutive formation, drawing on corpus-based computational 
simulations as well as studies of child language acquisition, markedness, 
and speech errors. 

Chapter 6: In contrast to the presentation of a theoretical approach that 
is empirically testable in Chapter 5, Chapter 6 contains a review of 
experimental and empirical studies of three highly studied phenomena in 
Spanish, diphthongization, syllable structure, and stress. The chapter 
does not contain a thorough review of earlier research that would 
presumably fall into the non-empirical category, but rather a discussion 
of a number of studies that have first attempted to establish the 
psychological relevance of these phenomena to actual language processing 
in native speakers, and then to probe their origins and structure. The 
evidence presented in these studies includes historical sound change, 
nonce probe tasks, computational simulations, forced choice and lexical 
decision experiments, as well as corpus surveys. These inquiries revealed 
that some phonological phenomena have a distinct psychological reality 
(e.g. the syllable) whereas others have more limited effects on language 
processing (e.g. diphthongization, syllable weight). This chapter thus 
attempts to show a highly nuanced view of several phenomena that have 
traditionally received a large amount of attention in the literature.

Chapter 7: Eddington more specifically addresses the question of 
morphological processing in this chapter. In doing so he focuses again on 
the question of psychological reality, in particular the question of 
whether morphological processing is a separate kind of processing in 
itself or whether it is a combination of the effects of 
orthographic/phonemic and semantic processing, given that morphemes are 
relatively stable phonological units with strong semantic links across 
lexical items. To elucidate this problem, Eddington discusses evidence 
from lexical decision task studies that employed priming across modalities 
and between scripts, where the degree of orthographic and semantic overlap 
of primes was manipulated. He discusses the contradictory nature of some 
of these results, and their implications for the interaction between 
orthographic, semantic, and morphological processing. These studies relied 
on several different languages, and Eddington turns in the following 
section to similar work conducted on Spanish. He then discusses a group of 
models of morphology in which "morphemes can be viewed as interconnected 
patterns that exist in two or more words that are both semantically and 
orthographically/phonologically similar" (p. 135). He closes the chapter 
by reviewing several studies that investigated whether words in Spanish 
and English are stored with or without their gender (Spanish only) and 
plural morphemes (for plural forms), thus probing the psychological 
reality of separate gender and plural morphemes.

Chapter 8: The final chapter of the book serves as a brief summary of the 
contents of each chapter and of the main thrust of the book, as discussed 
above.

Appendix: Based on the assumption that many linguists receive only limited 
training in experimental design, data collection, and statistical 
analysis, Eddington devotes a substantial appendix to a discussion of the 
tools necessary for quantitative and experimental inquiry into Spanish 
phonology and morphology. He first discusses four common types of 
statistical analysis, the correlation, chi-square tests, logistic 
regression, and analysis of variance, outlining the specific purpose of 
each, the type of data required, statistical significance, and other 
issues specific to each kind of test. The following section contains a 
discussion of basic experimental design, focusing on the lexical decision 
task and on questions of number of subjects and of obtaining approval for 
the use of human subjects. He then proceeds to a discussion of various 
threats to the internal and external validity of experiments, briefly 
offering examples of solutions to each one. The appendix also contains a 
list of software resources, including statistical packages, software for 
running experiments, electronic corpora and computer language simulations. 
Eddington provides references to these resources and to user's manuals, 
especially when these are available electronically.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

As mentioned above, this book is a concise introduction to and defense of 
the use of experimental and quantitative methodology in endeavoring to 
account for language structure in a psychologically relevant way. It 
provides a careful and enlightening tour of the ways that an experimental 
approach may make a unique and valuable contribution to the study of 
language, and makes a compelling argument that the problem of 
psychological reality falls outside the domain of formal linguistic 
analysis. In doing so, it sets up empirical approaches in opposition to 
the methodology of formal linguistics, charging that the latter belongs to 
the realm of non-empirical sciences such as pure mathematics and logic. 
The relationship between these two approaches, however, is somewhat 
ambiguous, and this is a primary weakness of the book. Eddington 
explicitly stresses the inherent value in formal approaches, but provides 
only the briefest indication of what this value might be, only that the 
domain of formal analyses must be kept separate from that which concerns 
psychological reality. In later chapters, however, Eddington at times uses 
formal analyses to elucidate the linguistic structure that may be 
subjected to tests of psychological reality, suggesting a more symbiotic 
relationship between the approaches. This possibility, while potentially 
interesting and helpful, is only briefly alluded to (p. 28), and formal 
analyses are, in the main, not included in the reviews of literature.

As an overview of the application of empirical methodology to problems in 
Spanish phonology and morphology, however, the book provides a valuable 
introduction. It covers experimental studies of a variety of levels of 
phonology and morphology, touching on variation in the realization of 
individual phonemes, prosodic features such as stress, morphophonological 
alternations, and the behavior of classes of words such as change-of-state 
verbs. Eddington also includes a wide variety of experimental methods, 
from computational simulations and corpus analyses through questionnaires 
to studies of online lexical processing using the lexical decision task. 
The book is nonetheless not a treatise on experimental methodology, and a 
number of domains of research into the psychological reality of linguistic 
structures are excluded. One particularly salient absence, given the 
emphasis on frequency effects, is the research on frequency effects and 
phonotactic probability in lexical access, which relies on such online 
measures as the lexical decision (e.g. Vitevitch & Luce, 1998; e.g. 
Vitevitch & Luce, 1999). 

Due to this lack of discussion of some areas of research, the boundaries 
of empirical methodology are left somewhat unclear. For instance, 
Eddington includes naturalistic data collection among these approaches 
(Ch. 2), particularly stressing its value as a way of bolstering the 
external validity of findings obtained in the laboratory, but he provides 
little guidance about how a researcher might obtain or use such evidence 
in this way. He also does not go into detail about the contrast between 
questionnaires, which provide data about metalinguistic judgments and 
intuitions, and online measures of processing. This distinction is 
crucial, in that intuitions may depend on different mechanisms than online 
processing, regardless of whether the intuitions are the investigators, or 
are collected from a large sample of speakers.

Nonetheless, this book is an argument for the value of experimental and 
quantitative methods, and not a comprehensive treatise on methodology. As 
such, it provides enough information to set out some of the primary 
questions that may be addressed from an experimental approach, as well as 
some of the problems with using such a methodology. To this end, the 
appendix may be particularly helpful to readers who desire to begin to 
apply experimental methods. Eddington includes copious references to 
larger works on statistical analysis, experimental design, and so forth, 
and provides web addresses where, at least at the time of publishing, 
researchers can obtain software and support for conducting research on a 
variety of empirical questions concerning morphological and phonological 
structure. This book is thus both a valuable contribution to the debate 
over the psychological reality of linguistic analyses, and a helpful 
resource for those who wish to explore what experimental and quantitative 
methodology can reveal about language structure and processing, pointing 
them to more extensive resources that may provide a solid foundation for 
experimental design and empirical investigation.

REFERENCES

Mohanan, K. P. (1997). LINGUIST List posting, April 23, 1997. 
http://linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-575.html

Pérez, H. E. (1998). "Incidencia de dos rasgos acústicos en la percepción 
de la correlación /p-t-k/ vs. /b-d-g/". Revista de Lingüística Teórica y 
Aplicada. 36, 113-125.

Skousen, R, (1989). Analogical modeling of language. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

--------------- (1992). Analogy and structure. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Vitevitch, M. S., & Luce, P. A. (1998). "When words compete: Levels of 
processing in perception of spoken words". Psychological Science, 9(4), 
325-329.

Vitevitch, M. S., & Luce, P. A. (1999). "Probabilistic phonotactics and 
neighborhood activation in spoken word recognition". Journal of Memory and 
Language, 40, 374-408. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Matthew Carlson is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Hispanic Linguistics at 
the Penn State University. His primary research is on the role of 
frequency and usage in the adult second language acquisition of Spanish 
phonology. Other interests include usage-based approaches to grammar and 
to phonology in particular, working memory and phonological memory, and 
the effects of literacy and orthography on SLA.





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