~ 152 <4-> The Language Instinct man and cop differ in formality.) No one really knows why languages are so stingy with words and profligate with meanings, but children seem to expect it (or perhaps it is this expectation that causes it!), and that helps them further with the gavagai problem. If a child already 6 knows a word for a kind of thing, then when another word is used for it, he or she does not take the easy but wrong way and treat it as a synonym. Instead, the child tries out some other possible concept~ + For example, Markman found that ifyou show a child a pair ofpewter tongs and call it bijf, the child interprets biff as meaning tongs ill general, showing the usual bias for middle-level objects, so when The sounds of Silence asked for "more biffs," the child picks out a pair of plastic tongs. But if you shOW the child a pewter cup and call it bijf, the child does not interpret biffas meaning "cup," because most children already know a word that means "cup," namely, cup. Loathing synonyms, the chil­ dren guess that biffmust mean something else, and the stuff the cup When I was a student I worked in a laboratory at McGill University is made of is the next most readily available concept. When asked for that studied auditory perception. Using a computer, I would synthe­ more bijfs, the child chooses a pewter spoon or pewter tongs. size trains of overlapping tones and determine whether they sounded Many other ingenious studies have shown how children home in like one rich sound or two pure ones. One Monday morning I had an on the correct meanings for different kinds of words. Once children odd experience: the tones suddenly turned into a chorus ofscreaming know some syntax, they can use it to sort out different kinds of mean· munchkins. Like this: (beep boop-boop) (beep boop-boop) (beep ing. For example, the psychologist Roger Brown showed children a boop-boop) HUMPTY-DUMPTY-HUMPTY-DUMPTY-HUMPTY­ picture ofhands kneading a mass oflittle squares in a bowl. Ifhe asked DUMPTY (beep boop-boop) (beep boop-boop) HUMPTY-DUMPTY­ them, "Can you see any sibbing?," the children pointed to the hands. HUMPTY-DUMPTY-HUMPTY-HUMPTY-DUMPTY-DUMPTY If instead he asked them, "Can you see a sib?," they point to the (beep boop-boop) (beep boop-boop) (beep boop-boop) HUMPTY­ bowl. And if he asked, "Can you see any sib?," they point to the stuff DUMPTY (beep boop-boop) HUMPTY-HUMPTY-HUMPTY­ inside the bowl. Other experiments have uncovered great sophistica­ DUMPTY (beep boop-boop). I checked the oscilloscope: two tion in children's understanding of how classes of words fit into sen­ streams of tones, as programmed. The effect had to be perceptual. tence structures and how they relate to concepts and kinds. With a bit of effort I could go back and forth, hearing the sound So what's in a name? The answer, we have seen, is, a great deal. as either beeps or munchkins. When a fellow student entered, I In the sense of a morphological product, a name is an intricate strW:­ recounted my discovery, mentioning that I couldn't wait to tell Pro­ ture, elegantly assembled by layers ofrules and lawful even at its quiJi.. fessor Bregman, who directed the laboratory. She offered some iest. And in the sense of a listeme, a name is a pure symbol, part of ~ advice: don't tell anyone, except perhaps Professor Poser (who cast of thousands, rapidly acquired because of a harmony between the directed the psychopathology program). mind of the child, the mind ofthe adult, and the texture of reality. Years later I discovered what I had discovered. The psychologists 154 '"*"' The Language Instinct The Sounds of Silence '"*"' 155 Roben Remez, David Pisoni, and their colleagues, braver men than making-an astonishing illusion with the pleasing name "McGurk I am, published an article in Science on "sine-wave speech." They effect," after one of its discoverers. synthesized three simultaneous wavering tones. Physically, the sound Actually, one does not need electronic wizardry to create a was nothing at all like speech, but the tones followed the same con­ speech illusion. All speech is an illusion. We hear speech as a string of tours as the bands ofenergy in the sentence. "Where were you a year separate words, but unlike the tree falling in the forest with no one to ago?" Volunteers described what they heard as "science fiction hear it, a word boundary with no one to hear it has no sound. In the sounds" or "computer bleeps." A second group of volunteers was speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are told that the sounds had been generated by a bad speech synthesizer. no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces They were able to make out many ofthe words, and a quarter ofthem between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when could write down the sentence perfectly. The brain can hear speech we reach the edge ofa stretch ofsound that matches some entry in our content in sounds that have only the remotest resemblance to speech. mental dictionary. This becomes apparent when we listen to speech in Indeed, sine-wave speech is how mynah birds fool us. They have a a foreign language: it is impossible to tell where one word ends and valve on each bronchial tube and can control them independently, the next begins. The seamlessness of speech is also apparent in "oro­ producing two wavering tones which we hear as speech. nyms," strings ofsound that can be carved into words in two different Our brains can flip between hearing something as a bleep and ways: hearing it as a word because phonetic perception is like a sixth sense. The good can decay many ways. When we listen to speech the actual sounds go in one ear and out the The good candy came anyways. other; what we perceive is language. Our experience of words and The stuffy nose can lead to problems. syllables, ofthe "b"-ness of b and the "ee"-ness of ee, is as separable The stuffhe knows can lead to problems. from our experience of pitch and loudness as lyrics are from a score. Sometimes, as in sine-wave speech, the senses ofhearing and phonet­ Some others I've seen. ics compete over which gets to interpret a sound, and our perception Some mothers I've seen. jumps back and forth. Sometimes the two senses simultaneously inter­ Oronyms are often used in songs and nursery rhymes: pret a single sound. If one takes a tape recording of da, electronically removes the initial chirplike portion that distinguishes the da from ga I scream, You scream, and ka, and plays the chirp to one ear and the residue to the other, We all scream what people hear is a chirp in one ear and da in the other~a single For ice cream. clip of sound is perceived simultaneously as d-ness and a chirp. And sometimes phonetic perception can transcend the auditory channel. If Mairzey doats and dozey doats you watch an English-subtitled movie in a language you know poorly, And little lamsey divey, after a few minutes you may feel as if you are actually understanding A kiddley-divey do, the speech. In the laboratory, researchers can dub a speech sound like Wouldn't you? ga onto a close-up video of a mouth articulating va, ba, tha, or da. Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear, Viewers literally hear a consonant like the one they see the mouth Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair. The Sounds of Silence .....e-. 157 156 ~ The Language Instinct first tried to develop reading machines for the blind in the 1940s, they Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy, devised a set ofnoises that corresponded to the letters ofthe alphabet. Was he? Even with heroic training, people could not recognize the sounds at In fir tar is, a rate faster than good Morse code operators, about three units a In oak none is. second. Real speech, somehow, is perceived an order of magnitude In mud eel is, faster: ten to fifteen phonemes per second for casual speech, twenty In clay none is. to thirty per second for the man in the late-night Veg-O-Matic ads, Goats eat ivy. and as many as forty to fifty per second for artificially sped-up speech. Mares eat oats. Given how the human auditory system works, this is almost unbeliev­ And some are discovered inadvertendy by teachers reading their stu­ able. When a sound like a click is repeated at a rate of twenty times a second or faster, we no longer hear it as a sequence ofseparate sounds dents' term papers and homework assignments: but as a low buzz. Ifwe can hear forty-five phonemes per second, the Jose can you see by the donzerly light? [Oh say can you see phonemes cannot possibly be consecutive bits ofsound; each moment by the dawn's early light?] of sound must have several phonemes packed into it that our brains It's a doggy-dog world. [dog-eat-dog] somehow unpack. As a result, speech is by far the fastest way ofgetting Eugene O'Neill won a Pullet Surprise. [Pulitzer Prize] information into the head through the ear. My mother comes from Pencil Vanea. [Pennsylvania] No human-made system can-match a human in decoding speech. He was a notor republic. [notary public] It is not for lack of need or trying.