Mind Your Language (Continued)

Louis Goldstein, who joined the College faculty in 2007, set a new paradigm in linguistics when he and his colleague theorized that the discrete mental and physical components of speech are interrelated. Photo credit: Phil Channing

“The kind of techniques that can be done here with respect to speech, the real-time MRI imaging — there’s nowhere else in the world you can do that,” Goldstein said in his office, where he keeps a large, framed photograph of Catherine Browman, with whom he worked at Yale and Haskins Laboratories to develop the new field.

“I was naturally attracted to the technology, but in the end the people resources are much more important than technology,” Goldstein said. “There’s a core group here to do really interesting work.”

Goldstein’s life work to date has been far more than “interesting.” It has radically changed the principles of phonological theory.

In a soft-spoken, straightforward manner, Goldstein discussed the theory that he and Browman proposed in 1986.

About 30 years earlier, in the 1950s, when scientists were first able to analyze sounds and physical movements associated with speech, they made an unexpected discovery that the physical description of speech bore little obvious relation to the linguists’ description of speech as a sequence of symbols called phonemes.

“This apparent incompatibility naturally fell into the larger divide between mind and body — nice, cognitive categories — categories that said words are a sequence of symbolic units versus the messy facts of speech,” Goldstein said.

Mid-century linguist Charles Hockett, who said speech was analogous to a row of brightly colored but unboiled Easter eggs, crystallized this theory. The act of producing a message on the part of a speaker involves smashing the eggs into bits, he said.

“That puts the person who is listening in the position of having to be Sherlock Holmes,” Goldstein said. “They have to look at the bits of eggshell and yolk and reconstruct what the sequence of eggs must have been to give rise to this mess on the floor.”

Goldstein and Browman refuted Hockett’s theory. They argue that the cognitive and physical properties of speech systems, particularly regarding action in the motor system, are not independent of one another.

“In fact, if you know how to look at the actual physical substance of talking, then you actually see all of these phoneme-like component units of words,” he said. “The discrete cognitive units are right in the body movements, if you know where to look. It’s all seamless. They are not different systems at all.”

Language and mind research in the College is renowned both for world-class scholars and cutting-edge technology. Above, a sample MRI showing the human vocal tract at work. Below, sensors attached to a research subject’s tongue. MRI image courtesy of Dani Byrd. Tongue photo courtesy of Louis Goldstein.

In recent studies, Mintz and Rachel Walker, associate professor of linguistics, have tested the theory that infants take cues from vowel sounds to determine when words begin and end.

One way to explain how babies understand when a word ends is that they may intuitively understand vowel harmony — a rule exhibited by many languages that places restrictions on the vowels occurring together in a single word. Having nothing to do with musical harmony, these restrictions are based on the way vowels are produced.

For example, some languages prohibit “front vowels” and “back vowels” in the same word. (Front vowels are shaped by the tongue in the front of the mouth, such as in the word “beat,” and back vowels in the back of the mouth, such as in the word “boot.”)

In such a language, a stream of speech with adjacent syllables containing front and back vowels would signal listeners that the syllables are part of different words.

“So far,” said Mintz, associate professor of psychology and linguistics, “the studies have suggested that attending to harmony patterns and using harmony as a cue for detecting words in fluent speech might be an innate capacity shared by all infants.”

Mintz, too, has a connection to Chomsky, although one generation removed. At the University of Rochester, Mintz was a student of acclaimed psycholinguist Thomas Bever, who was Chomsky’s pupil at MIT.

MIT’s reputation as the nerve center for linguistics gathered renewed momentum around the late 1970s, when Chomsky began lecturing on his soon-to-be published Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures, which introduced a new theory.

Later referred to as the Principles and Parameters Model, the theory represented a crucial change in the paradigm of syntax, and was a radical revision of Chomsky’s earlier work.

Schein recalled arriving as a graduate student at MIT in 1978, precisely at this pivotal moment.

“It was a conceptual breakthrough and the study of language has never been the same,” Schein said.

Chomsky and Higginbotham supervised Schein’s dissertation, the foundation for his first book, Plurals and Events (MIT Press, 1993). In it, Schein offers original theories about pluralities.

Since then Schein has contributed greatly to the semantics of plural expressions and the logic of plurals. But in his upcoming book, Conjuction Reduction Redux, he discusses the semantic meaning of the conjunction — sentences connected by the word “and.”

All of this research has contributed to the growing reputation of the College’s philosophy and linguistics departments. In the current Philosophical Gourmet Report, USC College ties for second among philosophy of language programs. Also called the Leiter Report, the publication ranks the nation’s 110 graduate philosophy programs and categories within programs.

Higginbotham, former director of the School of Philosophy, said growth comes when scholars are willing to take chances in the creation of new knowledge. Scholars never know in advance which ideas will work and which ones will not.

“Werner Heisenberg devoted the last 20 years of his life to a program that failed,” he said. “Einstein notoriously never solved the unified field theory problem. There are lots of other examples. The only thing certain in philosophy is that there will be another revolution.”

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