Roger Brown did an experiment a long time ago that he reported in an article titled “The ‘Tip of the Tongue’ Phenomenon”. He drew from the Brown University Corpus a set of words of at least seven letters found less often than 4 in 1,000,000 words of text. He then gave definitions of them and asked freshman Psych students at Harvard to write down the word. If they thought they knew the word but couldn’t identify it precisely (It was on the tip of the tongue) then they were to write down every word that came to mind until they found the word or time ran out. He then did an analysis of the words they wrote, and he discovered that the most memorable letters were the first and the last, the second most memorable were the second and the second-last, etc. The least memorable were the middle letters. In Bruce’s example, note that the first and last letters of each content word are correct. Word length is also correct, and the rest is anagrammed. That means we can identify the word pretty easily. The hardest word for me in the quote was “rleaved” because of the switching of the internal <r> and <l>, which made me initially opt for “relieved”, even though that didn’t meet the anagram condition. But placing the <l> second made it highly salient.
Herb
From:
Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 2:42 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Language Change
Bruce,
This isn’t a direct reply to your question, but I thought it might be useful to introduce a distinction. People’s ability to draw meaning from sentences like the one you quoted may be saying something about the process of reading in addition to, or even in some cases as opposed to, the process of spoken language comprehension. If someone walked up to you and attempted to say those words roughly as they are spelled (“roughly” given that some of the clusters are non-English-able), you probably would have a great deal more trouble figuring out what was going on. That does not, of course, mean that such studies are irrelevant to theories of grammar, only that their relevance has to be interpreted in reference to the status of reading as an activity in *some* regards separate from innate language use.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
From:
Sent: Saturday, March 18, 2006 9:21 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Language Change
Did anyone notice the grammatical errors in the excerpt I sent yesterday?
I think there was a message in it about how our mind also seems to overlook grammar in trying to get meaning out of language. The first phrase in the second sentence is dangling grammatically independent of the sentence to which it is attached. It should probably be taken out as another sentence something like this:
The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid was rcneltey rleaved by smoe rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy.
The rest of that sentence is also a bit awkward, so I'm sure this is not really the best solution. Like a lot of what we do it was probably not felt important enough for a rewrite from the first draft (writer was uncomforatble in the new medium?). Inadvertently this made a second very important point. Another message was in the message. For a teacher it is like peeling an onion. Fix the first layer stuff first (like orthography), then the next layer will be revealed for revision.
My question: is the next layer to be corrected the syntax and then the morphological and phonological niceties after that. Does the syntax correct itself when we go directly to the semantics in making meaning? Do we experiment with different syntax until the correct meaning pops out, or does thinking of the meaning naturally let only that one (correct) way come to the surface? Maybe different authors can be allowed to find their own way.
I'm sure some of you can articulate this better than I have.
Bruce