MENTAL DYNAMICS

Introduction

One way to divide intrapersonal communication into manageable categories for analysis is to
distinguish between what the mind does to stimuli, and how stimuli are represented in the mind.
For instance, Posner (1973) organized his masterful textbook on cognition into the statics of 
cognition (what is in memory) and the dynamics of cognition (what is done to what is in memory, 
i.e., mental operations). Crowder (1976) dissected the behavioral analysis of the mind into 
three broad approaches:

(1)  stage analysis: the acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information

(2)  coding analysis: the aspects of experience that are represented in memory

(3)  task analysis: the analysis of skills into subskills.

Think about how you store information in your memory (by statics or coding or mental
representations) and how you work on that information in your memory (mental operations).
You will begin to get a handle on understanding your own cognitive behavior.  The following 
exercise demonstrates some mental operations.






Linguistic Intuition: Conscious versus Nonconscious Mental Processing


Goals: This exercise raises for consideration the widely accepted distinction between
 conscious and nonconscious (or subconscous) levels of thought.  While people are generally 
 willing to attribute dreams to the subconscious, and tend to embrace the notion of subliminal
 perception, they are less familiar with the operations of the nonconscious (or subconscious)
 in everyday waking activities, such as talking and listening.  Recognition of the part that the
 nonconscious plays  in talk is the central goal of this exercise.

Approach:  Read and respond to each of 
the sentences below with your judgment of acceptability/unacceptability.  React to  each 
sentence with your "intuition," or gut response to its acceptability.  Respond with as little
reflection as possible, and certainly without trying to decide on grammatical rules. 










                 Which of the following sentences would you judge to be ungrammatical 
                          (and unacceptable)?



1 .    Sylvia wanted George to go.

2.     Sylvia wanted George go.

3.     Sylvia heard George to go.

4.     Sylvia hoped George go.

5.     Sylvia heard George go.

6.     Sylvia looked up the number.

7.     Clarence looked the number up.

8.     Morris walked up the hill.

9.     Morris walked the hill up.



       Which of the following sentences seem ambiguous?



10.    George wanted the Presidency more than Martha.

11.    Ahab wanted the whale more than glory.

12.    Visiting professors can be boring.

13.    Complaining professors can be boring.

14.    The matador fought the bull with courage.

15.    The matador fought the bull with swords.

16     They are cooking apples.

17.    He killed the woman with a gun.

18.    He sat by the bank.






Which of the following sentences would you judge to be unacceptable?



   1.    Sylvia wanted George to go.

 * 2.    Sylvia wanted George go.

 * 3.    Sylvia heard George to go.

 * 4.    Sylvia hoped George go.

   5.    Sylvia heard George go.

   6.    Sylvia looked up the number.

   7.    Clarence looked the number up.

   8.    Morris walked up the hill.

  *9.    Morris walked the hill up.



(Note: The starred sentences above are ones that most people find unacceptable,
  See Fromkin & Rodman, 1974, Chapter 6).




Which of the following sentences seem ambiguous?


10.  George wanted the Presidency more than Martha.


Did George want the Presidency more than Martha did? Or, did George want the 
Presidency more than he wanted Martha? (structural ambiguity)



11.  Ahab wanted the whale more than glory.


Ahab wanted both the the whale and glory; but, did glory want anything?


[People disagree on this one.  Native readers see no problem: "glory" would have
to be "Glory" for there to be an ambiguity parallel with the George-and-Martha 
sentence.  Linguists and psycholinguists, on the other hand, say that it is structurally
mbiguous because it seems to say, senselessly, that glory wanted something.  
You can chew on this one.] (structural ambiguity, anomalous)




12.  Visiting professors can be boring.


Is it that visiting (e.g., in a professor's offfice) can be a bore, or that professors
 visiting us (e.g. guest lecturers) sometimes numb their hearers? (structural ambiguity)




13.  Complaining professors can be boring.

(not ambiguous)


14.  The matador fought the bull with courage.


Did the courageous matador fight the bull, or did thecourageous bull fight the matador? 
(Or both!) (structural ambiguity)



15.  The matador fought the bull with swords.


Did the matador use swords against the bull, or did thematador encounter a well-armed 
bull? (structural ambiguity, anomalous)



16.  They are cooking apples.


Is it that we smell some apples cooking?  Or, those apples over there, are they for 
cooking? (structural ambiguity)


17.  He killed the woman with a gun.


Did he take a gun and kill the woman, or did he kill her despite the fact that she 
was the one holding the gun? (structural ambiguity)


18.  He sat by the bank.


Which bank did he sit beside--the river's or the First National? (lexical ambiguity)














 
Analysis

     If you are familiar with the linguistics literature, you mayrecognize these sentences 
and the underlying principles as com­ing from various articles and textbooks 
(for instance, Fromkin & Rodman, 1974; Clark & Clark, 1977; Slobin, 1979).
The sentences in this exercise help to show that native language users do have intuitions 
about their language, and that they seem to have more implicit knowledge about 
the rules of their language than they are able to make explicit. So, one lesson we
gain from this exercise is that native users of the language do have intuitions about the 
acceptability of sentences.



     Moreover, this demonstration makes clear that there is great agreement on linguistic
intuitions. Given this broad agreement between language users, we have good
reason to infer that there must be some base of knowledge that they share.Linguists 
refer to this base of knowledge as grammar, which comprises syntactic, semantic, 
phonological, and pragmatic knowledge. Condon (1985) provides a wonderful 
little introductory textbook for communication studies, integrating the linguist's
notion of grammar with the concerns of the student of communication, especially 
intrapersonal communication.

     Because grammar is a rule-based system, it becomes instructive to derive its rules
 from the implicit (or nonconscious) knowledge that people used in their responses 
to the exercise. Try some simple theories to account for the regularity of grammatical 
judgments, for instance, listing parts of speech in each sentence (a sequence of word-types
grammar). According to the sequence of word-types grammar, acceptability is
determined by an ordered sequence of parts of speech.

     When a sequence is found to be acceptable, it predicts by analogy other acceptable strings.
 For instance, sentence 1 predicts that the following sentence is acceptable: Sylvia 
reminded George to go. Prediction by analogy sometimes works, but sometimes it does not. For instance, 
1 incorrectly predicts that 3 will be acceptable, since they are both made up of the same 
sequence of parts of speech. However, we see that analogy does not predict intuitions 
about acceptability. Similarly, analogy does little to help in comparing sentences 2, 4, and 5; 
3 and 5;but 6 is to 7 as 8 is to 9. Drawing arrows between the sentences to be compared helps make 
the analogies clear.


     Sentences 10 through 18 allow us to consider the nature of intuitions about ambiguity. 
Class discussion will lead to the conclusion that there is as great agreement here as
 in acceptability judgments. This part of the exercise raises questions of types of ambiguity:


     lexical (18)-river bank or savings bank?

     structural (16)-someone is cooking the apples, or those apples are fruit intended for a pie?

     semantic (10)-which did George want more, the Presidency or  Martha?


     pragmatic, i.e., involving anomalous interpretations (15)-did the matador use swords 
against the bull?                                   
  Was  the bull equally well-armed (and did he fight back)?



     Feel free to speculate on how to account for linguistic intuitions.





References

Clark, H., & Clark, E.  (1977).  Psychology and language: An introduction to psycholinguistics.  
       New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Condon, J., Jr.  (1985).  Semantics and communication (3rd ed.)  New York: Macmillan.

Crowder, R.  (1976).  Principles of learning and memory.  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Fromkin,V., &  Rodman, R.  (1974).  An introduction to language. New York: Holt,
       Rinehart and Winston.  

Posner, M.  (1973).  Cognition: An introduction. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.

Slobin, D.  (1979). Psycholinguistics (2nd ed.). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.