Modelling Language Behaviour

This book studies language behaviour in the larger context of modelling or­ ganismic behaviour more generally. It starts out from the basic premise that what is characteristic of organismic behaviour is that an organism uses its behavioural acts to accomplish something in its interactions with the world in which it finds itself. These two features, that an organism has a behav­ ioural repertoire and that it deploys specific behavioural acts from its repertoire in an intentional way, define the agentive nature of an organism. The study of organismic behaviour, then, must primarily concern itself with this agentive aspect of an organism and determine what structures and proces­ ses underlie these intentional organismic acts. We should be able to say what primitive structures and what primitive processes put together in what ways can give rise to the kinds of behavioural acts an organism engages in. Any explanation of behaviour that we formulate in terms of underlying structures and processes must be testable and must be consonant with the observed pheno­ menological aspects of such behaviour.

1 A Framework for Modelling Behaviour.- 1.1 Preliminary Remarks.- 1.1.1 On Language Behaviour.- 1.1.2 On the Study of Complex Behaviour.- 1.2 The Nature of Scientific Activity.- 1.2.1 What Scientific Theories Are About.- 1.2.2 Role of Agents in Performing Experiments.- 1.3 Explanations in the Physical and the Behavioural Sciences.- 1.3.1 Explanations in the Physical Sciences.- 1.3.2 Explanations in the Behavioural Sciences.- 1.4 The Need for a New Experimental Framework.- 1.4.1 Simulation as a Methodology for Behaviour Modelling.- 1.4.2 Psychologists’ Study of Behaviour.- 1.4.3 Controlling and Shaping Behaviour.- 1.4.4 Computer Simulation Studies.- 1.4.5 Concluding Remarks.- 2 The Mediating Role of Language Behaviour.- 2.1 Human and Animal Communication Systems.- 2.1.1 Human Communication System.- 2.1.2 Animal Communication Systems.- 2.1.3 Language Behaviour: Biological Basis.- 2.1.4 Language Behaviour: Characterizing Features.- 2.2 Organism as a Behavioural System.- 2.2.1 Child as a Behavioural System.- 2.2.2 Organism as an Agent.- 2.2.3 Organism as a Behavioural System.- 2.2.4 Additional Comments.- 2.3 Language Behaviour as a Second-Signalling System.- 2.3.1 Preliminary Remarks.- 2.3.2 Situational Aspects of the World.- 2.3.3 Describing, Manipulating, and Exploring.- 2.3.4 Language Behaviour as a Second-Signalling System.- 2.3.5 Language Behaviour and Artificial Worlds.- 3 Teaching Language Behaviour to Chimpanzees.- 3.1 Principal Objectives of the Review.- 3.2 The Washoe Project.- 3.2.1 Project Set-Up.- 3.2.2 Training Methods and Results.- 3.2.3 Comments on Washoe’s Performance.- 3.3 The Sarah Project.- 3.3.1 Project Background.- 3.3.2 The Nature of the Language and the World.- 3.3.3 Training and Testing.- 3.3.4 Some General Comments.- 3.4 The Lana Project.- 3.4.1 The World and the Nature of the Interaction.- 3.4.2 The Yerkish Language.- 3.4.3 Training Methodology and Performance.- 3.4.4 Object Naming and Colour Naming Experiments.- 3.4.5 Conversational Language Behaviour.- 3.4.6 Some General Comments on the Lana Project.- 3.5 General Comments on the Chimpanzee Language Learning Experiments.- 3.5.1 Limitations of the Experiments.- 3.5.2 The Case of Helen Keller.- 3.5.3 Language Behaviour and Affect.- 4 Language Behaviour Schemata and Tokens in English.- 4.1 Language and Behavioural Pragmatics.- 4.1.1 Scope of the Analysis.- 4.1.2 Language Schemata and Proforms.- 4.1.3 Pragmatics of Language Behaviour.- 4.2 Schemata for Descriptions.- 4.2.1 Naive Phenomenology.- 4.2.2 Specification of Time Relationships.- 4.2.3 Question Tokens (q-Tokens).- 4.2.4 Specification of Actions.- 4.2.5 Specifications of Attributes and Their Values.- 4.2.6 Other Relationship Specifiers.- 4.2.7 Specification of Locations and Displacements.- 4.2.8 Agent/Object Specification.- 4.2.9 Propositional Speech.- 4.3 Schemata for Commands.- 4.4 Schemata for Controls.- 4.5 Concluding Comments.- 5 Implications of the Model for Child Language Acquisition.- 5.1 Scope of the Chapter.- 5.1.1 Aim of the Chapter.- 5.1.2 Outline of the Chapter.- 5.2 The Language Acquisition Phenomena.- 5.2.1 Aspects of Child Language Acquisition.- 5.2.2 Behavioural Implications of the Aspects.- 5.3 Developmental Stages in Language Acquisition.- 5.3.1 Statement of the Problem.- 5.3.2 The Very Early Stages of Language Acquisition.- 5.3.3 Complexity in Child Language Behaviour.- 5.3.4 Analysis of Helen’s Speech.- 5.4 The Language Acquisition Process.- 5.4.1 Statement of the Problem and Solution.- 5.4.2 Imitation and Rehearsal.- 5.4.3 Analogizing.- 5.4.4 Some Additional Comments.- 5.5 Linguistics and Language Behaviour.- 5.5.1 Language and Language Behaviour.- 5.5.2 Linguistic Grammars and Behavioural Pragmatics.- 5.5.3 Oral Speech and Written Language.- 6 Computer Simulation of Language Behaviour.- 6.1 Relevance of Computer Simulation to Theory Construction.- 6.2 Interpretation Assignment in Grammar-Based Models.- 6.2.1 Interpreting Statements in Computer Languages.- 6.2.2 Grammar-Based Language Understanding Systems.- 6.3 PLAS, a Paradigmatic Language Acquisition System.- 6.3.1 The Behavioural Environment of PLAS.- 6.3.2 The Teaching Mode of Interaction.- 6.3.3 How PLAS Learns to Assign Interpretations.- 6.3.4 Similarities to Concept Formation in Children.- 6.3.5 Open Problems Yet to be Tackled.- 6.4 Modelling Conversational Language Behaviour.- 6.4.1 Pragmatics of Naive Conversational Interaction.- 6.4.2 Knowledge and Control in Conversation.- 6.4.3 Modelling the Role of Affect in Language Behaviour.- 6.5 Concluding Remarks.- 6.5.1 Summary of the Main Ideas.- 6.5.2 Relevance of the Model to Neurophysiology.- Appendix A Listing of Schemata in Helen’s Speech.- Appendix B Listing of Tokens in Helen’s Speech.- Appendix C PLAS: An Illustration of Its Performance.- References.- Author Index.