Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Saussure

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

There's a somewhat BREATHLESS article (lots and lots and LOTS of facts and no real attempt to relate them in any systematic theoretical way) in the 17 July issue of Science: "Foundations for a New Science of Learning". It's by Meltzoff, Kuhl, and Movellan, and Sejnowski (i.e. some folks from where I currently am in Washington and others from where Mike is down in San Diego).
 
I say it's breathless rather than well articulated because it contains the following points which are simply thrown together, as if they were as significant as they are striking, without much theoretical subordination:
 
a) Learning is computational; that is, children seek phonological patterns and compute them statistically, according to frequency. This is the kind of associationist thinking that was Vygotsky's bete noire.
 
b) Learning is supported by brain circuits linking perception and action. Infants who are only 42 minutes old will imitate e.g. tongue protrusion (but not smiling!) This is the kind of behaviorist thinking that was Vygotsky's bete bleue.
 
b) Learning is social. Children pay attention to an object when an adult turns his head to look at it with his eyes open, but not when they are closed.  American infants learn Chinese phonology beautifully--when presented by a human. They have virtually no response at all to the SAME input presented by a television or a computer.CLEAR evidence for Tomasello's theory of mind, the EMPATHETIC basis of joint attention and communication.  
 
Now, we can do a whole lot better than this. On p. 285 Meltzoff et al discuss the findings that Martin mentioned, that is, that kids at 7 will discriminate /r/ and /l/ equally well, but that as soon as infants learn languages where the distinction is meaningful (e.g. English) and others learn ones where it isn't (Korean) this equality dwindles and disappears.
 
As Martin points out, this should tell you something about the points a), b), and c). They may all be true, but they are not equally significant. 
 
Actually, I think Vera's apparently tangential point about differences in anatomy offers a key. I am perfectly happy to consider myself an ape, and to see the activity I am currently engaged in as an exaptation for the extraneous purposes of communication of certain organs we apes evolved for respiration and food consumption and then their symbolic representation in first graphic and electronic form. 
 
But because the chain which links this communicative activity to my biomechanical endowment is so long and torturous, it seems to me rather trivial to try to explain anything in language with genetics (or, for that matter, with "practical activity"). 
 
Even the anatomical features I use even for speech: there is no such biological organ called the vocal tract; there is only a cultural exaptation of the respiratory and the digestic organs. What my grandmother used to tell me so insistently was perfectly true: if God wanted me to talk with my mouth full, he would have given me blowholes to breath with like a whale.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
PS: Martin--I am SURE that the word phone was not used in an extralinguistic way in the nineteenth century. It's really only Leonard Bloomfield who tries to use the contrastive, behaviorist (computational) method to derive phonemes from phones.
 
Bloomfield thought that we learn what /p/ and /b/ are by the Galton photograph method, and then compute them contrastively, or possibly by listening to lots of people say "I'm looking for a cap, not a cab".  But even people who still believe in IPA will not accept this; the evidence on vowel length is just too clear. 
 
Now, people accept that Bloomfield's phonemes are REIFICATIONS, they are things we only really know about from WRITTEN language and they are not psychologically real for illiterates or Chinese speakers for that reason.
 
dk

--- On Wed, 7/29/09, Vera P John-Steiner <vygotsky@unm.edu> wrote:


From: Vera P John-Steiner <vygotsky@unm.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Saussure
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, July 29, 2009, 9:56 AM





Hi,
I would just like to add a reference to Tomasello's recent work comparing chimps and children with the latter's strong
orientation to collaborative interaction, and of course the anatomical differences between the two species in terms of
the speech apparatus.
Vera

On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 09:42:59 -0400
Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
> David, Monica,
> 
> Can we agree then on something like this: the affordances/constraints  of the young child's social situation (especially relations and  interactions with significant others) contain sufficient organization/ information to able the child to acquire language on all levels -  acoustic (syllables not phonemes, following Vygotsky), lexical  (following Vygotsky, and also recent work by Eve Clark on how child- directed adult speech provides information about conventional word- meaning), and grammatical (following Bruner) - without needing to appeal to innate capacities (such as the LAD)? (Though obviously since  chimps can't do it, something biological is necessary.)
> 
> Martin
> 
> On Jul 25, 2009, at 3:25 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
> 
>> Martin:
>> 
>> Yes, definitely! If you read pp. 49-50 in the Minick translation of  Thinking and Speech, we get Vygotsky's remarks on Saussure's  phonology in pure form. Of course, he rejects (again and again) the  Saussurean view of semantics; it's nothing but associationism. But  since he rejects associationism on the basis of its arbitrariness,  its lack of an intelligent link, and its lack of system, he has to  reject Saussurean phonemes too, no?
>> 
>> No! As you say, there are two points here for Vygotsky to  appropriate. The first is that the phoneme is part of a gestalt,  specifically, a contrast with some other word (e.g. "back" and  "bag"). But the second is that that gestalt is defined by MEANING  and not by sound.
>> 
>> Here is where Vygosky really parts company, not only with Saussure  and structuralism but also with Gestaltism. For Saussure, the  relationship between phoneme and meaning is entirely arbitrary; but  for Vygotsky it is fully determined by the social situation of  development.
>> 
>> For Gestaltism, the structural relationship is not unique to  language; it's shared with perception. But for Vygotsky the  consciousness that is created by thought is never reducible to the  consciousness that is created by perception.
>> 
>> The question I have is what Saussure would have made of all this.  Saussure was actually quite skeptical about his own system; he had  good reason to instruct his wife and students not to publish any of  his work. And as the article Mike sent around (on the Mandelshtam  poem) makes clear, he had big big problems with precisely the  concepts at issue: the arbitrariness and linearity of language.
>> 
>> Notice that Vygotsky doesn't really use the word "phonetic" very  much. The word which is usually translated as "phonetic" is actually  "phasal". But in the example Vygotsky gives about the psychological  vs. grammatical predicate/subject, where he talks about 
>> psychological/grammatical gender, and number, and even tense, it is  very clear that for Vygotsky ALL the linear aspects of language, the  aspects which (unlike thought) include TIME in their  compositionality, are to be considered "phasal", not just phonetics.
>> 
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education
>> 
>> --- On Fri, 7/24/09, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Intensions in context and speech complexity ;  From 2-?
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Friday, July 24, 2009, 8:03 AM
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jul 23, 2009, at 2:46 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
>> 
>>>   I think Vygotsky actually finds the single kernel of truth in  Saussure's course when he argues that a science of phonetics needs  to be founded on MEANING MAKING and not on the physical description  of noises people make with their mouths. However, his ability to  find this kernel in a mountain of structuralist chaff should not  deceive you; he is no uncritical consumer of Saussureanism.
>>> 
>> David,
>> 
>> Coincidentally I was reading yesterday the section in Problems of  Child Psychology (vol 5 of the Collected Works) where Vygotsky again  makes this point.  It is evidently Saussurian linguistics that V is  enthusiastic about: he refers to it as phonology and contrasts it  with an older phonetics which focused solely on articulatory  definitions. Phonology has the advantage of seeing the sounds of  language as a system, and so the child never learns a single sound  in isolation but always one sound against the background of the  others. V points out that this is a basic law of perception: figure/ ground, and also that the ground in the case of oral language is  provided by the speech of adults (so the 'ideal' endpoint of  development is present and available from the start, as emphasized  in the passage that Lois quoted a few days ago).
>> 
>> V is critical once again of analyses that divide a phenomenon into  elements and in doing so lose the properties of the whole.  Phonology, he says, has the advantage that in studying the sounds of  a language as a system it doesn't divide it into separate elements,  nor does it lose the central property of language, namely that it  has meaning. V adds that sounds always have meaning: "the phoneme,"  he writes "is not just a sound, it is a sound that has meaning, a  sound that has not lost meaning, a certain unit that has a primary  property to a minimal degree, which belongs to speech as a  whole" (271).
>> 
>> V's analysis makes a good deal of sense to me. But my own limited  knowledge of Saussure - guided in part by Roy Harris' writing - has  indeed included the dogma that the sound level of language carries  no meaning. You are saying, I think, that V has a reasonable reading  of Saussure, if not the canonical one. Can you say more about this  way of reading Saussure? V seems to be suggesting that the child  does not learn first sounds, then words, but always acquires the  sounds of language in the context of the use of words in 
>> communicative settings, and this has the consequece that the sounds  would be aquired as aspects of a meaningful unit. Am I on the right  track here?
>> 
>> Martin_______________________________________________
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> xmca mailing list
>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> 
> Martin Packer, Ph.D.
> Associate Professor
> Psychology Department
> Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 15282
> (412) 396-4852
> 
> www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/
> 
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca



      
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca