27.1800, Review: Cog Sci; Lang Acq; Neuroling; Psycholing: Li (2015)

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Subject: 27.1800, Review: Cog Sci; Lang Acq; Neuroling; Psycholing: Li (2015)

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Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2016 15:57:33
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics 3 Volume Paperback Set

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36141297


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-4394.html

EDITOR: Ping  Li
TITLE: The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics 3 Volume Paperback Set
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Geoffrey Sampson, University of Sussex

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This three-volume work comprises collections of separately-authored chapters
on the psycholinguistics of the three leading languages of East Asia:  Volumes
1, 2, and 3 cover Chinese, Japanese, and Korean respectively.  The first two
were originally published, in hardback, in 2006, and the Korean volume in
2009; they went into paperback as a set in 2015.  The editors suggest that
these three languages may be the only non-Indo-European languages to have
attracted significant psycholinguistic research interest to date.

Most of the authors (except in the Chinese case, the overwhelming majority)
are native speakers of the languages they write about, though there is also a
sprinkling of Western authors and co-authors, and quite a few of the Orientals
are based in Western institutions.

The Korean volume is not only newer but much longer than the other two.  This
is perhaps surprising, considering that Korean is easily the smallest of the
three languages in speaker numbers; the volume has more chapters than the
Chinese volume, and the chapters are longer than in  the Japanese volume. 
(Precise figures, excluding prelims, are:  Chinese, 32 chapters, 455 pp.;
Japanese, 44 chapters, 409 pp.; Korean, 44 chapters, 638 pp.)

In order to give the volumes some internal structure, the chapters are grouped
into sections on “Language acquisition”, “Language processing”, and, in the
Chinese case, “Language and the brain” – though these divisions are not
particularly rigid, for instance the first chapter in the Chinese “Language
and the brain” section, by Terry Kit-fong Au, is really about the so-called
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.  Au’s chapter is very interesting (he argues that
Alfred Bloom’s famous 1981 claim that Chinese lacks grammatical support for
hypothetical thinking rested on an inadequate knowledge of spoken Chinese
idiom); but it is not about brain mechanisms, as some of the following
chapters are.  (For instance, Li Hai Tan & Wai Ting Siok find measurable
differences in language-related areas of brain anatomy between native speakers
of English and Chinese, which they attribute to different processes involved
in acquiring the respective languages.)

Within the bounds of this review I cannot undertake to list every individual
subject covered in the 120 chapters of the three volumes, but I hope that the
topics I do take up will give readers a reasonable impression of the books’
overall coverage, which is very extensive.

All three languages discussed contrast with European languages in many ways. 
Chinese is the language of the world’s oldest surviving civilization, and the
language with by far the most speakers in the world.  It is much closer than
any European language to the pure “isolating” type, with very little
morphophonemic alternation.  It is genetically unrelated to the languages of
the other two volumes; but, because most aspects of the relatively young
cultures of Korea and Japan derived ultimately from China, Chinese has had a
massive impact on those languages.  As a source of vocabulary, Chinese is more
significant for both Korean and Japanese than Latin and Greek together are for
English (and it has influenced them in other ways too).  Korean and Japanese
are believed probably to be related to each other, though if so the
relationship is a distant one.  Both are agglutinating languages; an important
grammatical category for both Korean and Japanese is relative social status of
speaker and hearer.  Korean has traces of having been a vowel-harmony language
in the not very distant past, and it has complex morphophonemic rules which
create differences between surface and underlying phonological forms that seem
large by comparison with any European language.  Korean and Japanese are
verb-final; Chinese is sometimes seen as in transition from VO to verb-final. 
All three languages have an astonishingly high incidence of homophones; in
Chinese there are very few morphemes which are not homophonous with at least
several, often many, other morphemes.

In terms of script, Chinese uses a logographic script in which, essentially,
morphemes are in a one-to-one relationship with written forms.  Korean is
nowadays written mainly in a phonographic script in which, unlike in European
alphabetic writing, the separate phonetic features comprised in a consonant or
vowel segment are independently represented in the written form of that
segment, and those written forms are grouped into syllable (rather than word)
units.  Until recently the many Chinese loans in Korean were written as
Chinese graphs; the modern trend is to use the phonographic script for them
too, but this creates problems for readers because of the high incidence of
homophones referred to above.  Japanese is written in a remarkably complicated
script in which lexical roots are written with Chinese graphs but where,
unlike in Chinese, the same graph can represent diverse morphemes in different
contexts, and elements of the language not written in Chinese are spelled out
in one or other of two syllabic systems.

All in all, it seems clear that if languages differ in the ways in which they
are processed psychologically, East Asian languages should offer plenty of
scope for describing differences from the heavily-studied languages of Western
Europe.  And these books certainly do that.

Sometimes, the material here is novel because it relates to structural aspects
of East Asian languages for which European languages have no parallel.  An
example would be  chapters on the psycholinguistics of individuator words,
commonly called “classifiers” or “measure words”.  One way to explain what
these are is to say that, in East Asian languages, all nouns are mass nouns. 
As in English we say “two ounces of gold” or “two ingots of gold” but not,
usually, “two golds”, so in Chinese one does not say “two dogs” but rather
what might be literally translated as “two _tiao_ of dog”, where _tiao_ is an
individuator for dogs, roads, and some other long and wriggly things.  A
language will have one or a few default individuators that can be used very
generally and are acquired at an early age, and perhaps a few dozen more
specific individuators, like _tiao_, which are acquired later.  It is
interesting to learn from Mary S. Erbaugh’s chapter that, in Chinese, one of
the specific individuators acquired earliest and most reliably is the one for
books, which are surely not the most salient objects in the world of an
average Western child.  Hyeongjin Lee investigates experimentally whether the
grammar of individuators correlates with distinctive mental ontology on the
part of Korean-speakers.

Again, European-language linguists are used to the idea that grammar will
often be influenced by questions of which pieces of knowledge are or are not
shared by speaker and hearer.  Haruko Minegishi Cook suggests that one
important area of Japanese grammar, essential for competent conversational
participation, depends on whether or not emotional attitudes are shared by the
participants – something for which I can think of no parallel in European
languages.  Cook uses children’s early acquisition of this grammar to argue
against Piaget’s claim that children universally begin with egocentric speech.
 And this perhaps links to claims by Toshiki Murase & Tamiko Ogura and by
Patricia Clancy that the nature of Japanese and Korean “motherese” is
different from Western motherese:  “Japanese mothers are more affective or
empathy oriented and less information oriented [in speaking to children] than
North American mothers”; “Korean mothers use more verbs in active play than
American mothers, who rely more on labeling”.

In other cases, the linguistic categories discussed are familiar but these
languages offer counter-evidence to what Western linguists have taken as
reliable generalizations about language acquisition and behaviour.  The point
just mentioned about nouns and verbs in motherese connects to one of those.  A
number of Western linguists have argued that nouns have priority over verbs in
language acquisition, with nouns learned earlier and in greater numbers, and
they have given reasons why that should be so, sometimes relating the issue to
generative ideas about innate linguistic knowledge.  However, many of these
authors claim that, in East Asian languages, it just is not so, and indeed
that verbs take priority over nouns.  Yuriko Oshima-Takane uses data on this
to argue that children’s language-acquisition is determined by superficial
properties of the child’s experience more than by deeper factors relating to
the structure of the language acquired.  (The facts are complicated, though;
You-kyung Chang-Song & Soyeong Pae believe that the Korean data can be
reconciled with the Western noun-first generalization.)

Even when the conclusion of a study is that, with respect to the topic
examined, the Oriental language(s) in question does or do not differ from
European languages, this is often well worth establishing.  Leading Western
researchers have claimed that eye-fixation times in the reading process are
longer for Chinese than for alphabetic scripts, which might not seem
surprising, but Gary Feng finds that the durations are not significantly
different.  People sometimes think of an isolating language like Chinese as a
language “without grammar”, and since “specific language impairment” in the
West tends to manifest itself particularly in relation to morphology, one
might expect that Chinese children would be relatively immune; however, Paul
Fletcher, Stephanie Stokes, & Anita M.-Y. Wong find that “learning an
isolating language is no antidote to potential grammatical problems”.

The three volumes have separate editors, who seem to have made independent
decisions about specific topics to be covered – the volumes are not parallel
in that respect.  Sometimes this may simply reflect different research
priorities among students of the respective languages.  For instance, the
Japanese volume has a chapter by Yasushi Terao on speech errors, but there are
no comparable chapters in the other volumes, and it may be that few Chinese or
Korean researchers have chosen to study them.  The Korean volume has three
chapters, and the Chinese volume one chapter, on aphasia, whereas I noticed no
mention of that topic in the Japanese volume.  On the other hand, only
different choices by editors could explain why there is nothing in the Chinese
volume similar to the valuable chapter by Masayuki Asahara, Yasuharu Den, &
Yuji Matsumoto on electronic research resources available for Japanese, since
it would certainly be possible to compile a similar survey for Chinese.  (I do
not know the situation in Korea.)

EVALUATION

One danger with a book of this kind is that contributors may see it as a
chance to put their own pet research projects in the shop window, whereas
readers will be hoping for a broader survey of the state of play in the
contributor’s field.  A few chapters in these volumes do feature an
unattractively high proportion of self-citations, but on the whole the authors
have done a very good job of providing a conspectus of current knowledge and
thinking, making the books an excellent resource for anyone planning to embark
on new work in the area, or simply to ascertain the current consensus.

A related problem is that academics deeply versed in a particular research
issue may fail to appreciate how much needs to be explained to outsiders.  A
perfect balance here is unachievable, because there are so many different
levels of knowledge that diverse readers may bring to a book.  Nevertheless,
on the whole I thought these contributors got it about right.  My impression
was that cases where too much was assumed occurred particularly in the
Japanese volume.  For instance, Keiko Koda on “Development of lexical
competence among second-language readers” discusses differences between
English-speaking and Japanese- or Chinese-speaking readers in terms of a
concept of “phonological inaccessibility” which is not explained and, to me,
not self-explanatory.  And Yukie Horiba on “Reading in Japanese as a second
language” discusses a writing style apparently common to all three Oriental
languages which he calls the _ki-sho-ten-ketsu_ style, without explanation;
the romanization is not accompanied by _kanji_, so I have no basis for
guessing what this might refer to.  However, contributors to the Japanese
volume might reasonably excuse their terseness by pointing to the fact that
the space allotted to their individual chapters is much less than for the
other languages. 

The standard of English is in the main excellent, considering that most
authors and editors are not native speakers.  (I did find some scattered
passages particularly in the Korean volume to be difficult or impossible to
follow.)

Although these books are heavily concerned with empirical data, inevitably a
number of contributions are influenced by generative theories of “Universal
Grammar” (UG).  When this leads to writing which uses observable facts to
argue for or against nativist models, this is very welcome.  For instance,
Heejeong Ko, Tania Ionin, & Kenneth Wexler use data on the mastering of
article usage in English by adult native speakers of Korean (which lacks
articles) in order to argue that the L2-acquisition process depends on access
to UG, while conversely Soo-Ok Kweon uses such speakers’ acquisition of the
English contraction _wanna_ to argue that adult L2 learners have no such
access.  This sort of controversy is how knowledge advances, I believe.

However there are other contributions, particularly in the Japanese volume,
which merely treat UG as axiomatic in a way that seems rather naive. 
Consider, for instance, the chapter by Edson T. Miyamoto.  In Japanese the
various case roles of nominal constituents in a clause are explicitly marked
by postpositions (there are no roles marked only by position, like subject and
direct object in English); and the ordering of the different roles is rather
free.  However, Miyamoto has found a generative article which claims that,
underlying an example of free word order, there will be a grammar which
produces constituents in a fixed canonical order, after which an optional rule
scrambles them into other orders.  Consequently Miyamoto carries out a series
of reaction-time experiments designed to show that utterances where scrambling
has applied are harder to process than ones where it has not.  It is not clear
to me that there is any need for a hypothesis as far-reaching as Universal
Grammar to explain the timing differences Miyamoto observes, and I see no real
reason to think that when case roles occur in a given order in an utterance,
they did not occur in that order at all stages of production.

Perhaps it is not yet well known in Japan how sceptical many linguists
elsewhere have become about the generative style of linguistics.  Scholars of
the two other languages clearly do appreciate this.  The editors of the
Chinese volume begin their introductory chapter by discussing the present-day
tension between believers in and sceptics about language universals.  The
editors of the Korean volume make a similar point in their preface, writing
for instance that “The search for universals in language processing is a
worthy pursuit, but such universals should be discovered and confirmed, not
assumed”; and the lead editor, Chungmin Lee, uses his own chapter on “The
acquisition of modality” to argue that the ages at which English- and
Korean-speaking children master the grammar of modality are so different as to
refute the notion of an innate Language Acquisition Device.

Despite their complexity, I spotted few errors in these volumes.  Inevitably
there are some.  The chapter by Yu-Chin Chien & Barbara Lust contains repeated
mistakes in the _pinyin_ romanization of Chinese examples (for instance,
ignoring tones, the standard Chinese for ‘tell’ is spelled _gaosu_, not
_gaoshu_ or _gaushu_).  A remark by Jun Yamada in connexion with statistics on
the incidence of dyslexia in different cultures implies that Yamada regards
Japanese script as one of the world’s simpler writing systems – pretty well
everyone else who has discussed the matter concurs with Richard Sproat’s
judgement (2000: 132) that Japanese script is “surely the most complex modern
writing system”.  Douglas Honorof & Laurie Feldman’s statement that Chinese
graphs represent not morphemes but syllables is possibly ambiguous, but as it
would be understood by most linguists it is seriously misleading:  in a
syllabic script, a given phonological syllable is written in a given way
irrespective of what word it occurs in, but in Chinese script distinct
morphemes are normally written differently even if they are homophones, though
with marginal exceptions each morpheme is one syllable long.  Examples in a
chapter by Chungmin Lee & Sook Whan Cho are glossed and translated
inconsistently:  a Korean word _tanpwung_ is glossed ‘colored.leaves’ in one
example but as just ‘leaves’ in another, and translated in both as ‘fallen
leaves’.  It was startling to find Nobuhiro Furuyama turning the famous German
psychologist Wilhelm Wundt into a Dutchman, “Willem Wunt”.  And there are
sporadic cases of individual Chinese graphs transliterated with wrong tones,
and so forth.  But it might be difficult to execute a publishing enterprise on
this scale with a much lower incidence of errors.

Turning from the contents of these books to editorial issues:  now that it is
becoming commoner than it once was for East Asian scholars to publish in
English, it strikes me that English-language editors and publishers need to
think more than they have in the past about adapting copy-editing standards to
cater for East Asian realities.

Consider the issue of personal names.  Throughout East Asia, inherited family
names precede individuals’ given names, the opposite of practice in most
Western countries, though when publishing in English some (but not all) East
Asian scholars defer to Western norms by reversing their names, which looks
strange to those used to Oriental names.  (I have never seen the late Chinese
leader referred to as Tsê-tung Mao, or Zedong Mao in modern _pinyin_
transliteration.)  Some academics’ names appear in opposite orders in
different Western publications.  In China there is only a small set of family
names (the Chinese cliché is “100 names”, though I believe the true figure is
somewhat larger), and they are almost all single syllables, though a few have
two syllables.  Given names are coined very freely; most often they comprise
two syllables, but single-syllable given names are quite common.  (Korean
personal names, like other aspects of Korean culture, are modelled on Chinese
practice.  Japanese family and given names are commonly polysyllabic.)

Take the name of the general editor of these volumes, shown on the title page
as “Ping Li”.  Evidently both his names are monosyllables (I know it is “his”,
because the brief bio in the prelims uses the masculine pronoun – from the
name alone one could not tell).  If the name were shown in Chinese alongside
the romanized form, it would be easy to see which of the two names was a
family name; but these volumes make only sparing use of Oriental scripts
(except in chapters whose topic is reading and learning to read), and we are
not shown the Chinese form of “Ping Li”.  As it happens, both “Ping” and “Li”
are possible romanizations of Chinese family names.  My guess is that Li is
the family name here (i.e. this is a case where a name has been displayed in
Western sequence), simply because Li is a much commoner family name than Ping.
 If that is right, then the general editor would appear in the index or the
list of references among the Ls, as “Li, Ping” – with a comma that looks
spurious to an Orientalist, since “Li Ping” would be the standard form of the
name.  But of course my guess could be wrong, and the place to look for the
general editor might be among the Ps.

It gets worse when we come to literature citations.  For instance, p. 6 of
vol. 1 cites “Chen and Peng (1994)”, giving only the authors’ family names, as
is usual in Western scholarly publishing.  However, Chen is another very
common Chinese family name, and the list of references at the end of the
volume has almost two pages of Chen entries.  The only way to locate Chen and
Peng (1994) is to wade through these pages entry by entry, starting with
“Chen, Baocun, Chen, Guicheng, Chen, Hao, & Zhang, Zaizhan (eds). (1988)” –
note that these are four people, not eight – and continuing with “Chen,  E.-S.
(2002)” and “Chen, E.-S. (2003)”, until eventually “Chen, Y., & Peng, D.-L.
(1994)” turns out to be the very last Chen entry.  This is wretchedly
time-consuming.

The muddles that arise are many.  I tried to check the academic credentials of
the contributor Li Hai Tan, mentioned above, but in the “Notes on
contributors” he (she?) is listed neither under the Ls nor under the Ts (nor
the Hs) – an omission very likely to be connected to the unclarity about where
he or she _should_ be listed.

Obviously, Western reference practices have been influenced by the fact that a
Western person’s family name is a highly distinctive part of his whole name. 
This does not work for East Asia.  (It would work even less well if this set
of books covered Vietnamese; more than half of all Vietnamese share the same
family name.) Surely it is desirable to adapt Western conventions to make
readers’ lives easier?  In my own writing I have found that the only practical
approach is to list East Asian names always in East Asian family-name-first
order (without spurious commas), irrespective of how the person has chosen to
present his name in a particular English-language publication, and to include
given names or at least initials following East Asian family names in
literature citations.  (In this review, though, I have shown names as they
appear in the volumes reviewed; one cannot standardize on family-name-first
when it is not always clear which is the family name.)  To date, Oriental
academics seem to have seen it as more important to conform rigidly to every
detail of the conventions evolved within Western scholarly practice than to
adapt those conventions to their own realities.  As East Asians become more
frequent contributors to the international republic of scholarship, it is to
be hoped that they will be more inclined to modify unsuitable Western
conventions.

But let me not end my review on a carping note.  This set of books is an
admirable achievement.  It will surely become a landmark in its field for many
years to come.

REFERENCES

Bloom, A.H.  1981.  The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: a study in the impact
of language on thinking in China and the West.  Lawrence Erlbaum (Hillsdale,
N.J.).

Sproat, R.  2000.  A Computational Theory of Writing Systems.  Cambridge
University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Oriental Studies at Cambridge University in
1965, and studied Linguistics and Computer Science as a graduate student at
Yale University before teaching at the universities of Oxford, LSE, Lancaster,
Leeds, and Sussex. After retiring from his Computing chair at Sussex he spent
several years as a research fellow in Linguistics at the University of South
Africa. Sampson has published in most areas of Linguistics and on a number of
other subjects. His most recent book is a new edition of ''Writing Systems''
(Equinox, 2015).





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