34.1567, Review: Neurolinguistics, Psycolinguistics: Tissari (2022)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-34-1567. Fri May 19 2023. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 34.1567, Review: Neurolinguistics, Psycolinguistics: Tissari (2022)

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Date: 11-Mar-2023
From: Heli Tissari [heli.tissari at umu.se]
Subject: Neurolinguistics, Psycolinguistics: Tissari (2022)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/33.3317

AUTHOR: Heli Tissari
TITLE: Frequency in Language
SUBTITLE: Memory, Attention and Learning
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2022

REVIEWER: Heli Tissari

INTRODUCTION

To understand the book “Frequency in Language: Memory, Attention and
Learning”, one could begin by reading its last chapter. The aim of the
book is not simply to collect and report information about frequency
in language. Rather, the book is a manifesto. It is a call to shift
the focus of cognitive linguistics. Divjak writes (pp. 260-261):

“The general cognitive abilities that are typically mentioned in
introductions to cognitive linguistics and that have given rise to the
bulk of work done within this framework relate to categorization
(abstraction, analogy) and imagination (imagery, metaphor, metonymy,
blends). But there is also memory, attention and learning, and these
have far less often been the focus of (cognitive) linguists’
attention. This book aimed to close that gap[.]”

SUMMARY

The topic of Divjak’s book has elsewhere been called ‘probabilistic
processing’, explained as follows (Littlemore 2009: 36):

“[P]robabilistic processing refers to the remarkable sensitivity that
[language] learners have regarding the relative frequency with which
certain forms are used in particular contexts in the input they
receive, and their ability to match their output according to what
they think might be appropriate. In other words, probabilistic
processing can be seen as a kind of ‘intuitive statistics’.”

Divjak sets a bold aim already in the Introduction, suggesting that
“[t]he time has come to shift gears to theoretical questions that go
beyond demonstrating frequency effects” (p. 3), that is, beyond
showing that probabilistic processing occurs. She explains further
that “it is not well known in linguistic circles how frequency
achieves these effects” (p. 3). The aim of the book is thus to start
explaining what happens in the mind/brain when we learn and use a
language.

The book is divided into four parts. The first part deals with
frequency; the second part deals with memory; the third with
attention; and the fourth with predicting and learning.

The first chapter deals with the history of studies of word
frequencies, starting from as early as sixteenth-century word lists.
It then tells how psychologists started to discover word frequency
effects. For example, it mentions the lexical decision paradigm where,
“subjects decide whether a string of letters forms a word or not” (p.
24) and tend to recognize high-frequency words faster than
low-frequency words. Divjak laments the fact that much of the research
into word frequencies has focused on single words and that people have
only recently started to also consider the context in which the words
occur. She then continues to discuss “word frequency distributions and
the beginning of quantitative linguistics” (pp. 29-38). She mentions
many names but pays particular attention to Zipf’s work, explaining
Zipf’s first and second law and his principle of economy and least
effort. We thus learn, for example, that “[i]n any text, the most
frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second
most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent
word, and so on” (p. 31, Zipf’s first law).

In the second chapter, Divjak shifts the attention to grammar. In her
own words, she “focus[es] on how grammar could be the mind’s response
to repetition and look[s] at linguistic theories that rely on
frequency of occurrence as a proxy for experience” (pp. 38-39). In
other words, in this chapter, she takes seriously the cognitive
linguistic idea that language is usage-based, meaning, among other
things, that children learn grammar in the process of hearing it being
used. She has boldly titled the chapter “Measuring exposure: Frequency
as a linguistic game changer” (pp. 40-71). In considering how
frequency could be a linguistic game changer, she discusses, among
other things, work related to Goldberg’s construction grammar (e.g.,
Goldberg 2009), and Stefanowitsch and Gries’s work on collostructions
(e.g., 2003), thus tying her work to the cognitive linguistic
paradigm. She ponders, for example, the role of positive and negative
evidence in language learning. At the end of the chapter, she
nevertheless says that we do not yet know much about language
cognition.

In Chapter Three, Divjak continues to “explore how frequency of
occurrence could support the emergence of structure” (p. 72). She
starts with explaining how humans detect statistical patterns and how
common patterns are conventionalized. Then, she turns to probabilistic
grammar and, lastly, to information theory. She begins the section on
probabilistic grammar by referring to Chomsky’s argument that the
“problem” of language learning “is unsolvable without strong prior
constraints on the language, given that the linguistic stimulus is
poor, i.e. partial and full of errors” (p. 80; she refers to Chomsky
1965). According to her:

“[t]aking a probabilistic standpoint makes learning look more
tractable: learning no longer requires (re)constructing one particular
grammar with certainty; it merely requires approximating it (speakers
might, for example, learn slightly different idiolects) with
sufficiently high probability” (p. 81).

Information theory, in its turn, is a “mathematical model of
information transmission and a valuable tool for understanding the
difficulties associated with such transmission” (p. 89). It has to do
with the probability that something is going to happen, and can be
applied, for example, to the predictability of what someone is going
to say.

Towards the end of the chapter Divjak returns to drawing a line
between Chomskyan and cognitive linguistics, stating that “[k]nowledge
of language does not need to be understood as a minimal set of
categorical rules or constraints, but as a (possibly redundant) set of
gradient rules, which may be characterized by a statistical
distribution” (pp. 95-96).

Chapter Four begins the second part of the book, dedicated to memory.
In this chapter, Divjak asks such questions as “How does frequency
help commit experiences to memory?”, “How do experiences change the
brain?”, and even “What is memory?”. She defines ‘memory’ as follows:
“Memory is the cover term for the ability to make what is learned
persist through time” (p. 99). She considers memory, among other
things, from the point of view of duration, dividing it into sensory
memory (<1 sec), working memory (<30 sec) and long-term memory (p.
105). She also discusses the “physiology or neurobiology of memory”
(pp. 108-114), as well as “memory systems, memory processes and neural
mechanisms of memory storage” (pp. 115-119). She does all this to
finally arrive at “computational models of memory for language” (pp.
118-119) and “memory effects that have been shown to play a crucial
role in language learning” (p. 119 and onwards). The first of these
effects is very familiar by now, namely frequency.

In her summary of the fourth chapter, Divjak issues a sub-manifesto:
“For linguists, the time has come to delve deeper into research on
memory.” (P. 128) She justifies her manifesto as follows: “Because
memory for linguistic information is like memory for other
information, frequency effects in language are memory effects and we
need to understand how frequency achieves these effects.” (P. 128)

Divjak builds the following bridge between Chapters Four and Five (p.
129): “An important insight to take with us into the next chapter is
that frequency alone does not ensure a memory trace is left.” The key
word of Chapter Five is ‘entrenchment’, which Divjak defines as the
“process by which linguistic experiences are mentally encoded and
committed to memory” (p. 131). She begins the chapter by delimiting
the borders of what she is going to discuss, which she does by
comparing entrenchment in the mind with conventionalization in
society. She then provides an analysis of entrenchment into three
types: (1) “entrenchment as reduction in cognitive effort and increase
in automatization” (pp. 137-139), (2) “entrenchment as unit formation
for access and retrieval” (pp. 139-141), and (3) “entrenchment as
chunking, possibly resulting in fusion” (pp. 141-143). She gives the
“phonological reduction of English auxiliaries, such as I’ve, I’m and
I’ll” as one example of fusion (p. 141).

Moving forward in Chapter Five, Divjak poses new questions: “How are
repeated experiences recorded?” (pp. 143-148), “What is entrenched?”
(pp. 148-150), “Is a threshold number of occurrences required for
entrenchment?” (pp. 150-151), “Which frequency measure is ideal for
predicting entrenchment?” (pp. 151-153), and “Is repetition frequency
itself causal?” (pp. 153-155). The last question has to do with the
fact that “[t]he frequency with which words occur is strongly
correlated with other characteristics” (p. 153). Explaining this
further, Divjak points out that “[h]ighly frequent words tend to be
short in length, concrete rather than abstract, easily imaginable and
they are acquired at an early age” (p. 153; Whaley 1978). After her
thorough discussion of entrenchment, Divjak sounds a by now familiar
note by bluntly stating that the “notion of entrenchment is frequently
invoked in linguistic research, but the concept remains vague” (p.
155).

Then begins the third part of the book, which deals with attention.
Divjak is again critical of the use of this term (p. 180): “The term
‘attention’ is typically used in a vague manner, including within
psychology, where it originated.” She nevertheless dedicates an entire
chapter to “The brain’s attention-orienting mechanisms” (pp. 161-181),
and another chapter to “Salience: Capturing attention in and through
language” (pp. 182-202). We can see here how she is all the time set
out to characterize the general cognitive abilities which also apply
to language before she applies them to language in particular
(consider her manifesto).

Divjak suggests that “attention researchers typically define attention
as the selection of information” (p. 163). She discusses psychological
experiments dealing both with “attention and auditory perception” (pp.
164-166) and “attention and visual perception” (pp. 166-167). She
talks about attention that is directed “bottom-up” and attention that
is directed “top-down”. “Bottom-up” attention has to do with what
captures a person’s attention in the immediate situation, while
“top-down attention” has to do with “goals and tasks under cognitive,
volitional control” (p. 168). She asks a very interesting question (p.
169): “Can linguistic processes take place without deliberate effort?”
She suggests that syntactic processing is automatic while semantic
processing is not. She discusses linguistic tasks related to object
recognition and scene perception, and finally tackles the big question
of the relationship between attention and memory.

Lastly in the chapter, Divjak explains very clearly why “attention is
important for linguists” (p. 180). This is above all “because some
have argued that attention, not repetition frequency, determines which
information is encoded in memory” (p. 180). She then further explains
that “[a]ttention plays a role for language in at least three
respects” (p. 180). Firstly, it “may well be crucial for language
development” (p. 180); and secondly, we are not capable of processing
all the information about our surroundings but need attention to make
selections. The third aspect has to do with explicit and implicit
memories: the former “require conscious attention during encoding” (p.
180), while the latter do not.

In Chapter Seven, Divjak juxtaposes linguists’ as opposed to
psycholinguists’/psychologists’ understandings of attention and
language. She asks, among other things, what salience is in language
and linguistics. She suggests that linguists operate with at least
four definitions of salience: (1) “cognitive salience refers to a
temporary mental activation state” and “ontological salience denotes
an inherent property of entities in the real word”; (2) “salient is
that which is foremost on one’s mind”; (3) salience is the “frequency
with which a word is used to denote an experience”, or (4) “salient is
that which is least expected” (p. 196). She summarizes the importance
of salience as follows (pp. 197-198): “By its definition, salience
refers to any (aspect of a) stimulus that makes it apparent to the
perceiver. And what stands out has a better chance of being noticed
and encoded in memory.”

Chapters Eight to Ten belong to the final section of the book. Chapter
Eight deals with predicting, and Chapter Nine deals with learning.
Divjak begins Chapter Eight by discussing “[p]redicting from stored
memories” (pp. 206-212), but the bulk of the chapter is dedicated to
“memoryless prediction”, and more specifically, “Bayesian predictive
coding frameworks” (pp. 212-223). Divjak explains the attraction of
Bayesian frameworks as follows (p. 231): “[B]iological implausibility
has long plagued linguistic models and theories, and methodological
insularity has impeded interdisciplinary approaches. A Bayesian
approach promises to resolve both issues.” She explains that many
disciplines have adapted Bayesian modelling of the brain and have been
able to explain many things with the help of it. At the same time, she
is nevertheless wary of Bayesian modelling because “[t]he ideal and
rational Bayesian observer uses evidence in the best possible way to
perform in a close to optimal fashion”, but the same does not
necessarily apply to humans: “we appear to survive on good enough
behaviour” (p. 131).

Since I am running out of space in this review, I will only mention
one interesting detail from Chapter Nine. Divjak seems to be
enthusiastic about Skinner’s (1957) monograph “Verbal Behavior”, which
she calls “[t]he most direct application of insights from learning
theory to language” (p. 243). In her view, Chomsky (1959), in a famous
review, “distorted Skinner’s views” (p. 243). Chapter Ten I have
already discussed in the introduction.

EVALUATION

Above all, I would like to say that Divjak takes Lakoff’s (1990)
Cognitive Commitment very seriously. The famous commitment “is a
commitment to make one’s account of human language accord with what is
generally known about the mind and the brain” (Lakoff 1990: 40).

Lakoff (1990: 41) points out that “[c]ognitively real generalizations
may not at all accord with generalizations arrived at by classical
techniques of linguistic analysis”. This is precisely the conclusion
that Divjak arrives at. She underlines that the linguistic categories
linguists (even cognitive linguists) tend to operate with were not
designed to “reflect the workings of the mind” (p. 271). Therefore,
“[w]e need to think about what to count, we need to think about how to
count and we need to think about the conclusions we can draw from all
that counting” (p. 270).

Curiously though, while following Lakoff’s advice, Divjak has taken a
rather big step from “the bulk of work done within [the cognitive
linguistic] framework” (p. 261). This is due to her ability to imagine
and put into words what could be done instead. Considering the
popularity of the cognitive linguistic approach, and even its
relatively recent quantitative turn (Janda 2013), this is no small
feat.

I want to make a couple more points before I finish this review.
Firstly, the feat that Divjak achieves with this book did not happen
overnight, nor did she do everything alone. Already in 2012, Divjak
and Gries edited a book titled “Frequency Effects in Language Learning
and Processing”. A quick search in this book produces 58 hits for the
word “learning”, 26 hits for the word “memory”, and 11 hits for the
word “attention”. It looks like the seeds for the current book.

Secondly, the intriguing question is who is going to follow Divjak’s
lead and how. If we compare the current book with such a cognitive
linguistics classic as “Metaphors We Live By”, it seems clear that it
is more challenging to become a cognitive linguist à la Divjak than to
become a cognitive linguist à la Lakoff and Johnson. That there is
already a paperback edition of Divjak’s book suggests that there is
nevertheless a public that is interested in the kind of issues she
promotes. I would assume that this public does not simply consist of
“old school” cognitive linguists interested in new insights but also
other linguists and, quite importantly, people from other disciplines
such as psychology and computer science.

REFERENCES

Chomsky, Noam. 1959. Review of Verbal behavior by B. F. Skinner.
Language 35(1). 26-58.
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press.
Goldberg, Adele. 2009. The nature of generalization in language.
Cognitive Linguistics 20(1). 93-127.
Gries, Stefan Th. & Dagmar Divjak (eds.). 2012. Frequency effects in
language learning and processing. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Janda, Laura. 2013. Cognitive linguistics – the quantitative turn: The
essential reader. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Lakoff, George. 1990. Is abstract reason based on image schemas?
Cognitive Linguistics 1(1). 39-74.
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press.
Littlemore, Jeannette. 2009. Applying cognitive linguistics to second
language learning and teaching. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Skinner, B. F. 1957. Verbal behavior. New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions:
Investigating the interaction of words and constructions.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2). 209-243.
Whaley, C. P. 1978. Word-nonword classification time. Journal of
verbal learning and verbal behavior 17. 143-154.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Heli Tissari works as an associate professor of English at Umeå
University in Sweden. Her research interests include cognitive and
corpus linguistics, emotions, English historical linguistics, and
semantics. Her latest published work used Natural Semantic
Metalanguage to explain the concept of ‘chastity’ in 18th century
English.



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