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Word associations and the development of lexical memory
Cognition, 5 (1977) @Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne
Word associations
- Printed
in the Netherlands
and the development
of lexical memory
SANDY PETREY State University
of New York at Stony Brook
Abstract Endel Tulving’s distinction between “episodic” and “semantic” memory defines changes with age in word association norms in a more informative and more comprehensive manner than the syntactic classifications normally used. The principal development as subjects mature is an episodic-semantic shift. Young children associate primarily to the stimulus’s perceived contexts, older subjects to its abstract semantic content. Endel Tulving’s binary opposition between “episodic” and “semantic” memory has proven its utility by precisely defining methodological and theoretical distinctions in several areas of cognitive psychology. This paper will test the value of that opposition in considering a restricted set of linguistic data to which it has not yet been applied, the well-documented differences between children’s and adults’ word-association norms. Usually described by different syntactic characteristics, changes with age in responses to verbal stimuli are in fact more comprehensively defined by the distinctions between the episodic and semantic storage-retrieval systems. Although the paper entitled “Episodic and Semantic Memory” is Tulving’s (1972) most thorough discussion of the subject, his subsequent work includes more succinct and accessible summaries: . ..episodic memory is concerned with storage and retrieval of temporally dated, specially located, and personally experienced events or episodes, and temporal-spatial relationships among such events... Semantic memory is the system concerned with storage and utilization of knowledge about words and concepts, their properties, and interrelations. Thus, episodic information about a word refers to information about the event of which the word is the focal element, or one of the focal elements, while semantic information about a word is entirely independent of the word’s occurrence in a particular situation or its temporal co-occurrence with some other words. (Tulving and Thomson, 1973: 354)
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Two points in that passage will be crucial to this paper. (1) Despite the normal use of “semantic”, Tulving’s semantic memory is not synonymous with “information about lexical items”. As the last sentence specifies, we store and retrieve both semantic and episodic information about words. (2) The two kinds of contexts, linguistic and non-linguistic, correspond to two sorts of episodic information about words. Episodic knowledge includes both memory of a word’s co-occurrence with other words (its verbal context) and of the event of which it is a focal element (its situational context). Both contexts are “personally experienced” or, using a term Tulving takes from Reiff and Scheerer (1959), “autobiographical”. Semantic memory has no autobiographical component. Tulving himself considers word associations a pure example of inquiry into semantic memory (Tulving, 1972: 402). It is true that word-association norms reveal far more about semantic memory than the results of experiments on verbal learning which, because they involve cued storage and retrieval, depend on episodic memory. Nevertheless, the presumption that free association activates exclusively semantic memory cannot account for a basic opposition in recent theories of word associations, that between “syntagmatic” and “paradigmatic” responses. Paradigmatic associations are those in which stimulus and response belong to the same form class: noun-noun, verb-verb, adjective-adjective and so on. Syntagmatic responses fail to preserve the stimulus’s form class and produce associations like noun-verb or adjective-noun. The primary and secondary responses to high in the Kent-Rosanoff (1910), Russell-Jenkins (1954) and Entwisle (1966) norms for adults exemplify the critical characteristics of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses in general. In all three, the paradigmatic adjective low was the primary response, emitted by as many as 65% of the subjects. This is consistent with adults’ paradigmatic tendency, their marked preference for responses from the same form class as the stimulus. Moreover, the crossexperimental consistency of low illustrates the commonality often correlated with paradigmatic associations. The contrasts are striking when we look at secondary responses to high in the three sets of norms, mount&, school and FZOO~Z. All are nouns and consequently form syntagmatic responses to the adjective high. None is emitted by more than 16% of the subjects. Each survey elicited a different secondary response, yet all three complete a leftright sequence from normal speech: high-mountain, high-school, and high-noon. This last characteristic of syntagmatic responses originally suggested the possible value of applying the episodic-semantic distinction to word associations. “Semantic memory does not register perceptible properties of
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
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inputs, but rather cognitive referents of input signals.” (Tulving, 1972: 386) Applied to words, this means that semantic memory registers the signified rather than the signifier, to use Saussure’s (1916) classic division of the linguistic sign into its perceptual form and the mental concept it conveys. When Tulving defined as episodic that memory of words which depends on “temporal co-occurrence with other words”, he was referring to artificial laboratory situations which lead subjects to associate lexical items presented together, regardless of their pre-experimental connections. But natural utterances also create a temporal co-occurrence of signifiers. Associations like high-mountain or high-school could be the effect of subjects reacting to various representations of high as a signified, “physically elevated” or “intellectually advanced”, and providing another word from the same semantic complex, mountain or school. But they could also be purely echoic repetitions of two words often perceived together. High-noon is certainly the effect of the perceived co-occurrence which is among the defining traits of episodic memory. High signifies “exactly” only when it is linked with noon. We cannot say “high 12 o’clock”. The semantic content of the stimulus thus exists only after subjects have combined it with the response in the syntagm high-noon. This kind of idiomatic association argues that other syntagmatic responses may also be the result of episodic memory. Early explanations of word associations stressed the importance of contiguity in utterances, of perceived co-occurrences, in creating the bond between stimulus and response. As many recent authors have argued, however, subjects’ general paradigmatic tendency constitutes an insuperable objection to this model. English grammar is such that words of the same form class are contiguous far less often than words of different form classes. The classic theory of word associations thus cogently explains only syntagmatic associations, yet adult word-association norms consistently display paradigmatic dominance. McNeil1 (1966) and H. Clark (1970) are representative of the recent commentators who emphasize the objection to an association-by-contiguity model posed by paradigmatic associations. They explain the link between stimulus and response by deep-structure connections independent of perceptible phenomena: “...‘association theory’ cannot account for language comprehension and production; language, the critics say, should not be thought of as a consequence of built-up associations; rather, word associations should be thought of as a consequence of linguistic competence.” (H. Clark, 1970: 272) The paper containing that quotation is further typical of linguistically based theories of word associations in that it relies heavily on the concept of a mental dictionary structured by minimal units of significance below the level of the word, the semantic features hypothesis. This hypothesis econo
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mically and persuasively explains paradigmatic responses to verbal stimuli, which generally obey what Clark calls a simplicity-of-production rule: “Perform the least change on the lowest feature, with the restriction that the result must correspond to an English word” (H. Clark, 1970: 284). What Carrol, Kjeldergaard and Carton ( 1962) designated as opposite-evoking stimuli exemplify how this rule operates. Man-womun, for instance, is a highly frequent association because the response changes the last feature of the stimulus [+male] , while preserving all others, such as [+humanl and [ +adult] . Non-antonymous associations derive from more complex operations like addition or deletion of features, necessary when the least change on the lowest feature does not have a lexical realization. The more featural changes required, the more diverse response patterns become. Featural theories readily account for mature subjects’ paradigmatic tendency. In the lexical hierarchy, form-class markers are very high. Since the rule is to change the lowest feature, responses will naturally preserve the stimulus’s form class. Then why do syntagmatic responses occur at all? While Clark is aware of the importance of that question, his discussion of syntagmatics is a major flaw in an elegant paper. He explains them by a complete-the-idiom rule which involves an extremely loose definition of “idiom”. If white-housr and ncetlle urzd thread, two of Clark’s examples, are idiomatic, so are most common sequences in normal speech. Moreover, even if we grant Clark’s use of “idiom”, the theoretical dilemma remains. The idiom-completion rule, which depends on contiguity in surface structure, is not assimilable under the simplicity-of-production rule, which depends on congruence in deep structure. To put it another way, the simplicity-of-production rule depends on the immediate cognitive reference characteristic of semantic memory; the idiom-completion rule relies on the autobiographically experienced cooccurrence which identifies episodic memory. The need to confront syntagmatic responses appears more imperious when we recall that the paradigmatic tendency is developmentally a late acquisition. Young children display a marked syntagmatic tendency. (Brown and Berko, 1960; Ervin, 1961) Given the importance contemporary linguistics attaches to children’s early linguistic ability, this distinction between children and adult norms is of great interest. Tulving identified semantic memory as that “necessary for the use of language”. (1972: 386) The generally valid assertion that abstract featural relationships determine adult associations confirms that statement. But children, who also use lankwage, respond to verbal stimuli in a different way. And their syntagmatic associations are fully as suggestive of episodic memory as adults’ paradigmatic associations are of semantic memory.
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
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Although the increase with maturity of paradigmatic responses - the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift (S-P shift) - has long been recognized (Woodrow and Lowell, 1916), the most complete study of age-related changes is Entwisle’s comparatively recent Word Associations in Young Children (1966). After administering 96 stimuli to 1,240 subjects in kindergarten, grades one, three and five, and college, Entwisle presented her massive data in both analyzed and raw form. Her analysis concentrates on the thorough description of the S-P shift provided by her survey, a description she justifiably designated as her “primary finding”. (Entwisle, 1966: 120). By showing that the S-P shift was correlated with I.Q. as well as with age, Entwisle’s study gave further reason for assuming that the paradigmatic tendency reveals something significant about language ability in general. But what? Since syntagmatic responses fail to preserve form class categories, it would seem that the S-P shift reflects increasing sensitivity to syntactic properties. Yet McNeil1 (1966) was correct to protest that this explanation makes no sense in light of what we know about children’s ability to generate grammatical utterances. Whereas normal children are speaking correctly, and thus displaying great sensitivity to form-class distinction, by the age of four, the S-P shift is most dramatic between the ages of six and eight. Variations in syntactic capacities are therefore inherently unable to explain the differences between children and adult norms, and the paradigmatic-syntagmatic opposition can by definition describe nothing except syntactic variations. That argues for another taxonomy, such as that provided by the episodic-semantic distinction. The place to test the adequacy of Tulving’s categories is readily available in Entwisle’s raw data, 409 pages of computer printouts containing every response emitted by 1,040 children to 96 stimuli. Because of the mass of these data, the following discussion will of necessity depend on representative examples. Before choosing them, however, the first group in Entwisle’s appendices, kindergarten associations to add, can serve as a random illustration of why the syntagmatic-paradigmatic distinction is inadequate to deal with what is exciting about children’s norms. The most striking fact about the words add elicits from five-year-olds is that they include only one (0.5%) instances of subtract; 185 (66.1%) of Entwisle’s third-grade subjects, only three years older, responded to add with subtract. For kindergarteners, subtract is statistically no more firmly associated with add than any of 115 other idiosyncratic responses of extraordinary diversity. Add-subtract is of course paradigmatic, and its huge increase is certainly related to older subjects’ greater mastery of the stimulus. But the correlation between paradigmatics and control is not valid for younger subjects. Kinder-
garten syntagmatics to add include numbers, two plus two and fifty; their paradigmatics include sing, guess and walk. Since the first group incontestably indicates more meaningful storage of the stimulus, it is difficult to discern what the S-P distinction is supposed to reveal when applied to immature responses. In Entwisle’s alphabetical listing, the first kindergarten response to add is a cup of water, which completes a common cooking instruction plausibly heard by a young child helping mother in the kitchen. Elicited from only one subject, that response can nevertheless be combined with the associations formed by nineteen other subjects which evoke an identical cooking context: j7our, milk, water, cook, dinner, cake, cookies, someone is cooking. The clustering principle is apparent, but it cannot be described in terms of syntagmatics and paradigmatics. In response to add, the syntagmatic flour and the paradigmatic cook belong together in a way that the two nouns flour and numbers or the two verbs cook and sing do not. If we ccntinue down Entwisle’s alphabetical listing, after add-a cup of water comes add-a horse. Although without theoretical importance, that association deserves comment because it exemplifies the risks of a tendency apparent in many commentators, that of classifying as starkly meaningless children’s responses which are in fact perfectly logical. In isolation, adda horse is nonsense, a pair formed by a child who was not listening to the interviewer. But it becomes quite reasonable when related to the other responses from the same age group. Five other kindergarteners respond to add with Mister Ed, Ed the horse or horse without the article. “Mister Ed” was the name of a talking horse in a television program popular at the time of Entwisle’s survey. The confusion between add and Ed is clear. This identifiable breakdown illustrates how easily systematic associations can appear incoherent. The principal contention of this paper is that, despite their diversity, the 30,000 different responses to 96 stimuli in Entwisle’s appendices are a highly structured demonstration of the principles ordering immature lexical memory. In order to apprehend those principles, we must avoid what Nelson (1973) calls the “adult-dimension fallacy”, make allowances for tangential groups created by confusions like add-Ed, and assess the central groupings which remain on their own terms rather than by concepts developed from adult norms. For the most important point is that young children’s responses display the kinds of clusters just discussed not in addition to but instead of those structuring adult associations. A crucial thesis in current theories of word associations is that the stimulus effects immediate cognitive input into semantic memory, whose systemic organization leads to a semantically related respo.nse. While adult norms strongly support that thesis, immature
Word associations and the deveIopment
of lexical memory
63
norms do not. Quite the contrary; the cooking cluster in response to add is typical in that the stimulus seems to have been stored as a predicate of the sort of situation from which Tulving took the term episodic memory, an autobiographical episode during which it appeared as a focal element. Entwisle’s appendices display consistent grouping around such episodes, a system of contextual bonds far more pervasive than that attributable to semantic similarity or contrast. Recalling external situation of utterance appears to precede the most elementary assignment of internal content. Restricting episodic clusters to those formed in kindergarten norms, happen elicits 24 responses beginning with what and a long list of situationally associated suggestions of the catastrophes which would make children hear accident, and we all fall down, bruise, cry, the question “What happened?“: cut, cut yourself, damn, fall, fell down, fell off her bike, get mud throwned in my face, hurt, hurt knee, something bad, something terrible, we get hurt. Once elicits upon (a time), the sources of that phrase - story, book - and extensive fragments of the language the phrase introduces: three bears, he was a tailor, there was a bunny rabbit, run out into the forest, there was a birdie up high. Cold evokes not only related meteorological terms but also utterances heard when the weather is appropriately described by them, bundle up, don’t go outside, and then you get your coat on. Although representative, these sets obviously exhaust neither Entwisle’s stimuli nor the episodic clusters formed in association to the stimuli mentioned. In order to illustrate fully the grouping principles of kindergarten associations, we must look at one set of responses in detail. Examine, a stimulus which Entwisle was the first to use in a word-association survey, manageably demonstrates the importance of episodic memory, and the corresponding nullity of semantic memory, in young subjects’ reactions to certain words. “Manageably” is a key word in the previous sentence. While responses to all Entwisle’s stimuli form clear episodic groupings, high-frequency words elicit many different clusters. Given the diversity of human experience, this is of course to be expected; children could originally store a common word as the focal element of any number of autobiographical experiences. On the other hand, low-frequency stimuli, which by definition appear in relatively fewer situations, should also elicit a smaller number of clusters. Responses to the low-frequency stimulus examine confirm that this is the case. Despite its relative rarity, exumirze elicits associations which exemplify the global distinctions between mature and immature norms. The 200 kindergarten subjects gave 159 different responses to this single word; their primary and secondary responses, both syntagmatic, together account for only 11.5% of the total. The primary and secondary adult responses, both
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Table
I.
Stimulus
Episodic and semantic responses to different Appendices C and D) Response
eyes (combined)
stimuli (From
1
3 NC%)
1966:
S
K NC%)
NC%)
23(11 S)
46(16.4)
49(17.S)
27C9.7)
7C2.S)
Sl(18.2)
120(42.9)
3(1.1)
examine
doctor,
examine
look (at), check (up), test (combined)
l(0.S)
dark
moon, star(s), (go to) bed,
23(11 .S)
25C8.9)
(go to)sleep
Entwisle,
NC%)
3(1.1)
(combined)
dark
night
27(13.S)
25C8.9)
31(11.1)
dark
light
25(12.S)
85(30.4)
185(66.0)
28ClO.O)
9C3.2)
O(G)
OC -)
7(2.5)
S(1.8)
180(64.3)
long
lawn/mower)
lO(S.S)
long
grass
16(8.0)
long
short
9C4.S)
S6(20.0)
177C63.2)
164C58.S)
wild
all names of individual animals: bear, lion etc. combined
82(41.0)
88(31.4)
45C16.1)
29ClO.4)
wild
animal(s)
47C23.5)
48C17.2)
48Cl7.2)
40(14.3)
wild
tame
l(0.S)
8C2.9)
44Cl5.7)
81(28.9)
clean
house
29ClO.4)
15(5.4)
clean
dirty
7C3.5)
29ClO.4)
134C47.9)
give
(a) present(s)
24Cl2.0)
18C6.4)
4(1.4)
S(l.7)
give
take
2(1 .O)
6C2.1)
S6t20.0)
99C35.4)
listcrz listen
to (...) hear
44C22.0) 12C6.0)
39(13.9) 33C11.8)
8C2.9) 84(33.0)
sometimes
I (...)
33(16.5)
22(7.9)
sometimes
always
lB(9.0)
O( )
1 l(3.9)
6C2.1)
X1.7) 122(43.6)
4(1.4) 123(43.9)
3Cl.l)
l(O.3)
64(22.9)
S5Cl9.7)
paradigmatic, constitute 41% of their total. The semantic explanation is perfectly adequate to the two most common adult responses, test and look. It is inapplicable to kindergarten responses, which include not a single instance of test or look. If young subjects react to the stimulus’s cognitive content, it is curious that common words with featural connections to examine - look at, check or check up in addition to test and look ~ appear only in isolated cases until third grade. Younger children’s associations to examine do not support the assumption that they have stored it as the vehicle of precise signification. Yet their associations manifest a distinct autobiographical memory of the stimulus. The primary kindergarten response is doctor, given as a single word
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
by 18 subjects. Ifwe accept the connective principle implicit in that perception of the stimulus in a medical environment, the 159 responses lose their diversity. Four subjects mention doctor in word response. An additional 24 emit terms from an extensive lexicon: x-rays, stethoscope, abrasion, pill, blood pressure, sick, hospital, hurt, something’s the matter, needle, 14 mention portions of children’s anatomy
shot, nurse,
dentist,
65
response, different a multimedical checkup, operate:
likely to be examined by a doctor, while 18 give noun and pronoun designations of candidates for medical examination. This grouping accounts for over a third of kindergarten responses. If probable cases like glasses, bed or the medicinal brand name Vicks are included, the percentage increases to around half. In no sense is this set fortuitous. Many of the medical responses are elicited only by examine. None of the 95 other stimuli produces a comparable medical cluster. The connective bonds are obvious, and they are obviously episodic. Associations like examine-doctor uses when you ‘re sick demonstrate that subjects with neither syntactic nor semantic control of the stimulus recalled the circumstances where they had perceived it. Kindergarten responses include sophisticated words - stethoscope, abrasion, blood pressure - implausibly part of a five-year-old’s active vocabulary. Their link to the stimulus is almost certainly analogous to that artificially created between nonsense words presented in the same situations during experiments on episodic memory. Early associations to examine thus depend not on semantic content but on episodic experience, either shared situational environments (examineneedle) or syntactic juxtaposition (examine-blood pressure). The strongest associations are consequently formed between words combined in both situational and linguistic memories, as is exemplified by the primary ‘and secondary kindergarten responses to examine.. doctor and eyes. Sentences such as “We’d better have the doctor examine your eyes” are far more readily imaginable than utterances combining examine with comparably focal words from children’s experience of a medical environment. As Table I shows, doctor and eyes accordingly dominate kindergarten responses and furthermore increase in frequency until third grade, when semantic associations definitively replace episodic responses. Responses to dark illustrate more clearly the refining out of purely situational associations. Pairs likedark-moon ordark-star, inexplicable by the connective structure of semantic memory, are situationally formed. In the same circumstances where they perceive dark, subjects also perceive moon, stars, go to bed, go to sleep. However, none of these responses is likely to be in linguistic contiguity with dark, whereas dark-night is quite common. Associations depending on physical context alone decline drastically by third grade.
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Responses to long show an analogous shift within the episodic period as well as the much more dramatic shift from episodic to semantic. Grass is the primary kindergarten response to long. Luwn and lawn mower are also perceived in the situation which combines long and grass, but only grass is often syntagmatically contiguous as well. Lawn and Zawn mower, along with other intriguing situational responses like what you cut down and Mr. Smith’s lawn, disappear entirely by third grade. All stimulus-response pairs in Table I display the same chronological development. Remembering perceived contiguities appears to precede mature storage by featural congruence and contrast. Responding by feature change (wild-tame, clean-dirty, give-take), feature deletion (listen-hear) or feature intensification (sometimes-always) predominates only after contextual associations which suggest episodic retrieval. Although perfectly suited to describe the structures of word associations emitted by subjects at both ends of the developmental scale, the episodicsemantic distinction is less helpful in conceptualizing the intermediate period. If we restrict the definition of syntagmatic associations to those responses which form an acceptable English syntagm with the simulus, the developmental sequence can be considered as having three stages: episodicsyntagmatic-semantic. As discussed earlier, syntagmatic responses properly secalled are highly problematic because either semantic or episodic storage could produce them. Uncritical memory of a word’s co-occurrence with other words can lead to meaningful sequences even if the subject does not control the meaning created. For example, any English speaker who has heard the word “hermetically” is likely to associate it with “sealed” irrespective of the degree to which he or she controls “hermetically” as a signified. Dark-night could result from either the associative mechanisms which produce durk-moon or those producing dark-light. While it is self-evident that semantic memory can produce grammatical sequences, it is sometimes not recognized that well-formed utterances can emerge from episodic memory as well. Yet many syntagmata in Entwisle’s appendices are like the kindergarten pair exambze-blood pressure in that it seems legitimate to conclude that subjects are echoing rather than generating their response. For example, the first six stimuli elicit from kindergarteners associations like these: add-some bricks to a house; ulwuj!s-obey the law; u/low-me to introduce myself; because-J’ou ‘re not supposed to; bee-rnJ> Valentine; begin-to work the tractor. It is likely that such associations depend on reaction to the stimulus as a verbal unit which co-occurs with other units, not on reaction to a lexical vehicle for abstract cognitive content. The recognition that episodic memory can produce associations identical to those caused by semantic responding has the advantage of explaining
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
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patterns which appear not to follow the general development of lexical memory. Young subjects’ responses display in general such low commonality that primary responses can have less than a 5% frequency. Only three of Entwisle’s 96 stimuli - gallop, salt and table - elicited their respective primaries from more than 30% of kindergarten subjects. Associations to salt and table are: K salt-pepper 74(37%) :24(44.3%) T59(56.8%) L5(44.5%) A&l~*.o%) table-chair 65(32.5%) 101(36%) 145(51.9%) 141(50.4%) 131(65.5%) If we avoid the adult-dimension fallacy and think of salt-pepper and tablechair not as we apprehend them but as deriving from episodic memories, the early development of adult patterns is fully comprehensible. They are unusually frequent because linguistic and situational contiguity establish the same link. In the physical world, salt is usually perceived with pepper, tables with chairs. In speech, “salt and pepper” and “table and chairs” are set sequences in a frozen order. It is of course less than desirable to assume that identical associations have different causes in children and adults. But the alternative is to suppose that precocious mature storage of salt and table is what leads children to associate to them in an adult manner. Since no inherent characteristics such as frequency, syntactic properties or semantic content, distinguish these words from many of Entwisle’s other stimuli, it becomes reasonable to assume that the unusual commonality in children’s associations to them is the effect of their plausibly unusual co-occurrence. Gallop elicits associations wholly inexplicable by standard categories. gallop-horse
;2(46%)
f24(44.5%)
:9(28.2%)
5 76(27.1%)
Adult 100(50%)
A word’s frequency of occurrence is broadly correlated with children’s control of it, and it consequently seems logical to expect that immature norms would display the commonality characteristic of adult associations in response to a high-frequency stimulus. But more kindergarteners gave the primary response to the low-frequency gallop than the combined total of all those who gave the primary kindergarten response to the seven highfrequency verbs add, begin, carry, give, move, run, tell. If we join with horse variants like horsey and multi-word responses like oy1 a horse, then the primary five-year-old association to gallop attains a frequency of 70% and bears comparison with those adult associations which have the highest commonality ratings. Such unique consistency demands explanation. The episodic-semantic hypothesis can furnish it. “Gallop” is subject to a peculiarly rigid selection restriction. Although it technically takes any
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quadruped as agent of the action it designates, for most English speakers including professional linguists: cf., Leech (1974: 1455 146) - galloping is performed only by horses. The preponderance of memories of verbal cooccurrence would consequently link gallop and horse. Situational memories are analogous. “Gallop” is perceived apart from “horse” almost exclusively in circumstances including a horse or some representation of it, in a picture, or, as the kindergarten pair gaZZop-stick horse suggests, in imagination. The unique frequency of the primary kindergarten response does not exhaust the unusual quality of associations to gallop. As is evident in the figures above, changes with age in response to that stimulus indicate an aborted S-P shift. The normal decline in syntagmatic associations occurs between first and third grade, when gallop-horse goes from 44% to 28%. But between fifth grade and college, the frequency ofgallup-horse nearly doubles. Adult subjects respond in a way more similar to five than to ten-year-olds. Although Entwisle’s survey revealed a decline in paradigmatics to several stimuli between fifth grade and college, gallop is unique in displaying a regression to kindergarten norms, an S-P-S shift. The typical paradigmatic pairs gallop-trot and gallop-run, attributable to semantic memory, increase dramatically over the developmental period when gallop-horse declines. No kindergarten subjects gave gallop-trot, 46%1 responded with lmw; 2 1.4% of fifth-grade subjects gave gallop-trot, only 27.1% gallop-horse. Mature responses reverse that trend. Gallop-horse increases to 50% and gallop-trot dwindles to 12%. Gallop has been discussed at length because the patterns it elicits show subjects in the middle range of development emitting purely semantic responses even though adult associations indicate that memory of permissible co-occurrences provides efficient storage. This striking exception to the standard pattern of progressive developmental increases in adult primaries suggests that the episodic-semantic shift is a global phenomenon which affects all words in the mental lexicon. Furthermore, the near identity of the figures for gallop-horse in kindergarten and adult subjects is a further reason why it is plausible to postulate different associative mechanisms to explain superficially identical responses. Judging from the figures for subjects in intermediate stages, developmental changes in the storage of gallop appear as important as those in the storage of stimuli whose response patterns conform more straightforwardly to the general shift. We can at least speculate that gallop elicits horse from young children because of episodically remembered co-occurrences and from adults because of semantic assignment of selection restriction. The special interest of the syntagmatic pair gallop-horse illustrates the major shortcoming to the syntagmatic-paradigmatic distinction in describing
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
69
changes with age in word associations: because the terms of classification can designate nothing but syntactic properties, they are inherently unable to represent much that is of interest about immature norms. To divide children’s responses according to whether they preserve the stimulus’s form class can be as tedious and uninformative as dividing them by the number of letters they contain. Young children’s first significant reactions to a verbal stimulus suggest either an autobiographical episode during which the word was perceived as a focal element (the cooking cluster elicited by add, the medical cluster by examine, the catastrophe cluster by happen) or perceived syntactic juxtaposition whose sense may not be fully grasped. This clearly episodic stage rapidly declines, to be followed by syntagmatic responses in the strict sense (dark-night, wild-animals, clean-house), which are in turn normally supplanted by the featurally, instead of situationally or syntactically, linked associations characteristic of mature norms. The few patterns which diverge from this development, like responses to salt, table and gallop, are comprehensible as the effect of episodic memory. They are inexplicable within the parameters imposed by S-P terminology.
Conclusion The primary conceptual gain when we consider children’s word associations in light of Tulving’s category of episodic memory is the discovery of order where there appeared to be none. The number of irrelevant or playful responses given by young subjects is far smaller than commonly believed. The crucial opposition between mature and immature norms is not that between structure and chaos but that between different sorts of structure. Whereas adult’s responses are grouped primarily by semantic memory of words’ internal content, children’s responses display mainly episodic memories of external context. Both Chomsky (1965) and Saussure (1916) distinguish between abstract linguistic structure (“langue” for Saussure, “competence” for Chomsky) and concrete linguisticutterances (“parole” and “performance” respectively). Lungue is homogeneous, parole heterogeneous; competence is context-free, performance context-sensitive, “the actual use of language in concrete situa1965: 4) It is remarkable how aptly the traits which tions”. (Chomsky, distinguish kzngue (competence) from parole (performance) also define the differences between mature and immature word-association norms. Children’s heterogeneous responses are acutely context-sensitive; adults’ homogeneous patterns are semantic and hence context-free. While autobiographically experienced performances link stimulus and response in
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Sandy Petrey
young subjects’ norms, older subjects associate so as to suggest the systematic relationships which define competence. The affinities among the episodic-semantic, competence-performance and Zangue-parole distinctions point out the major theoretical implication of developmental changes in word associations. If it is valid to assume that free responses to verbal stimuli manifest subjects’ systems of lexical storage, then the episodic-semantic shift leads to the hypothesis that linguistic maturation involves a major reorganization of the mental lexicon during which memories of paroZe decline in importance and sensitivity to langue develops. This hypothesis of course directly contradicts the assumption that children have an innate predisposition to organize knowledge according to the categories which inform adult linguistic competence, an assumption apparent in McNeil1 (1970), E. Clark (1973), and others. On the other hand, it is quite compatible with other recent work, such as that of Nelson (1974) and Bloom (1973), who insist on the function of a child’s dynamic interaction with a particular environment in early formation of word meaning. Young subjects’ associations strongly suggest the kind of contextual apprehension of words and concepts which Bloom and Nelson emphasize. This compatibility between the episodic structure of immature word associations and cognitive-development models of language acquisition leaves a crucial question unanswered, however: by what process can episodic memories of words in context lead to the abstract semantic organization of mature lexical storage? Transformational grammarians have persuasively argued that no amount of exposure to linguistic performance can explain language’s “creative” component, humans’ ability to produce and understand sentences never uttered before. The classic example is Chomsky’s (1959) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, a sentence immediately recognizable as grammatical even though it obviously expresses no independently formed concept nor evokes any conceivable context. The argument that autobiographical experience of performance cannot account for creative competence also challenges the hypothesis that children’s episodic storage somehow reorganizes itself into the semantic structure of adult lexical memory. The dilemma is pointedly clear. If the structure of language is always present, then the theoretical problem of where it comes from is solved ~~ more accurately, no such problem can arise. But if subjects of all ages control language in the samic way, why do mature and immature free word associations consistently organize themselves in difyerent ways? Tulving’s categories do not resolve this dilemma, but they do contribute significantly to posing it with clarity. As Tulving (1972) insisted, the episodic-semantic
Word associations and the development
of lexical memory
71
distinction is pretheoretical rather than theoretical, taxonomic rather than explanatory. As a taxonomy, the episodic and semantic systems comprehensively define the differences between mature and immature responses in word association surveys. The explanation of why those differences exist and of how one system becomes another are topics for future inquiry. References L. (1973) One Word af a Time, The Hague, Mouton. R. and Berko, J. (1960) “Word associations and the acquisition of grammar”, child Dev., 31, l-14. Carroll, J., Kjeldergaard, I’. and Carton, A. (1962) “Number of opposites vs. number of primaries as a response measure in free association tests”, J. verb. Learn. verb. Beh., 1, l-13. Chomsky, N. (1959) “Review” of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, Lang., 35, 26-58. Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects ofthe Theory ofSyntax. Cambridge, MIT Press. Clark, E. (1973) “What’s in a word?” m . Moore, T. (ed.) Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Lnnguage. New York, Academic Press. Clark, H. (1970) ‘Word Associations and linguistic theory”, in Lyons, J. (ed.) New Horizons in Linguistics. London, Penguin. Entwisle, D. (1966) Word Associations in Young Children. Baltimore, Hopkins Press. Ervin, S. (1961) “Changes with age in the verbal determinants of word association”, Amer. J. Psych., 74, 361-372. Kent, G. and Rosanoff, A. (1910) “A Study of association in insanity”. Amer. J. Insanity. 67. Leech, G. (1974) Semantics. London, Penguin. McNeill, D. (1966) “A Study of word associations”, J. verb. Learn. verb. Beh., 5, 548-557. McNeill, D. (1970) The Acquisition of Language. New York, Harper and Row. Nelson, K. (1973) Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk. Mono. Sot. Res. Child Dev., 38 (l-2). Nelson, K. (1974) “Concept, Word and Sentence” Psych. Rev., 81, 267-285. Reiff, R. and Scheerer, M. (1959) Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression. New York, International Universities Press. Russell, W. and Jenkins, J. (1954) The Complete Minnesota Norms. ONR Technical Report No. 11, August, 1954. de Saussure, 1:. (1916) Cours de Linguistique GPn&rale. Lausanne, Payot. Tulving, E. (1972) “Episodic and Semantic Memory”, in Tulving and Donaldson (eds.) The Orgunization ofMemory. New York, Academic Press, pp. 381404. Tulving, E. and Thomson, D. (1973) “Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory”, Psych. Rev., 80 (S), 359-380. Woodrow, H. and Lowell, I:. (1916) “Children’s association frequency tests”, Psych. Mono., 22, l-l 10. Bloom, Brown,
RPsumP La distinction faite par Endel Tulving entrc la m&moire “6pisodique” ct la mkmoirc “stmantique” permet d’interprkter le changement a,ux r6ponses d’associations verbales en fonction de l’ige de faGon plus comprkhensible et plus rentable que ne le font les clarifications syntaxiques utilisees habituellement. Le d&eloppement se traduit essentiellement par un passage de I’Cpisodiquc au sdmantique. Les jeuncs enfants associent d’abord avec les contextes perGus du stimulus, les sujets plus ages associent au contenu semantique abstrait de ce stimulus.
Word associations
- Printed
in the Netherlands
and the development
of lexical memory
SANDY PETREY State University
of New York at Stony Brook
Abstract Endel Tulving’s distinction between “episodic” and “semantic” memory defines changes with age in word association norms in a more informative and more comprehensive manner than the syntactic classifications normally used. The principal development as subjects mature is an episodic-semantic shift. Young children associate primarily to the stimulus’s perceived contexts, older subjects to its abstract semantic content. Endel Tulving’s binary opposition between “episodic” and “semantic” memory has proven its utility by precisely defining methodological and theoretical distinctions in several areas of cognitive psychology. This paper will test the value of that opposition in considering a restricted set of linguistic data to which it has not yet been applied, the well-documented differences between children’s and adults’ word-association norms. Usually described by different syntactic characteristics, changes with age in responses to verbal stimuli are in fact more comprehensively defined by the distinctions between the episodic and semantic storage-retrieval systems. Although the paper entitled “Episodic and Semantic Memory” is Tulving’s (1972) most thorough discussion of the subject, his subsequent work includes more succinct and accessible summaries: . ..episodic memory is concerned with storage and retrieval of temporally dated, specially located, and personally experienced events or episodes, and temporal-spatial relationships among such events... Semantic memory is the system concerned with storage and utilization of knowledge about words and concepts, their properties, and interrelations. Thus, episodic information about a word refers to information about the event of which the word is the focal element, or one of the focal elements, while semantic information about a word is entirely independent of the word’s occurrence in a particular situation or its temporal co-occurrence with some other words. (Tulving and Thomson, 1973: 354)
58
Sandy Petrey
Two points in that passage will be crucial to this paper. (1) Despite the normal use of “semantic”, Tulving’s semantic memory is not synonymous with “information about lexical items”. As the last sentence specifies, we store and retrieve both semantic and episodic information about words. (2) The two kinds of contexts, linguistic and non-linguistic, correspond to two sorts of episodic information about words. Episodic knowledge includes both memory of a word’s co-occurrence with other words (its verbal context) and of the event of which it is a focal element (its situational context). Both contexts are “personally experienced” or, using a term Tulving takes from Reiff and Scheerer (1959), “autobiographical”. Semantic memory has no autobiographical component. Tulving himself considers word associations a pure example of inquiry into semantic memory (Tulving, 1972: 402). It is true that word-association norms reveal far more about semantic memory than the results of experiments on verbal learning which, because they involve cued storage and retrieval, depend on episodic memory. Nevertheless, the presumption that free association activates exclusively semantic memory cannot account for a basic opposition in recent theories of word associations, that between “syntagmatic” and “paradigmatic” responses. Paradigmatic associations are those in which stimulus and response belong to the same form class: noun-noun, verb-verb, adjective-adjective and so on. Syntagmatic responses fail to preserve the stimulus’s form class and produce associations like noun-verb or adjective-noun. The primary and secondary responses to high in the Kent-Rosanoff (1910), Russell-Jenkins (1954) and Entwisle (1966) norms for adults exemplify the critical characteristics of paradigmatic and syntagmatic responses in general. In all three, the paradigmatic adjective low was the primary response, emitted by as many as 65% of the subjects. This is consistent with adults’ paradigmatic tendency, their marked preference for responses from the same form class as the stimulus. Moreover, the crossexperimental consistency of low illustrates the commonality often correlated with paradigmatic associations. The contrasts are striking when we look at secondary responses to high in the three sets of norms, mount&, school and FZOO~Z. All are nouns and consequently form syntagmatic responses to the adjective high. None is emitted by more than 16% of the subjects. Each survey elicited a different secondary response, yet all three complete a leftright sequence from normal speech: high-mountain, high-school, and high-noon. This last characteristic of syntagmatic responses originally suggested the possible value of applying the episodic-semantic distinction to word associations. “Semantic memory does not register perceptible properties of
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
59
inputs, but rather cognitive referents of input signals.” (Tulving, 1972: 386) Applied to words, this means that semantic memory registers the signified rather than the signifier, to use Saussure’s (1916) classic division of the linguistic sign into its perceptual form and the mental concept it conveys. When Tulving defined as episodic that memory of words which depends on “temporal co-occurrence with other words”, he was referring to artificial laboratory situations which lead subjects to associate lexical items presented together, regardless of their pre-experimental connections. But natural utterances also create a temporal co-occurrence of signifiers. Associations like high-mountain or high-school could be the effect of subjects reacting to various representations of high as a signified, “physically elevated” or “intellectually advanced”, and providing another word from the same semantic complex, mountain or school. But they could also be purely echoic repetitions of two words often perceived together. High-noon is certainly the effect of the perceived co-occurrence which is among the defining traits of episodic memory. High signifies “exactly” only when it is linked with noon. We cannot say “high 12 o’clock”. The semantic content of the stimulus thus exists only after subjects have combined it with the response in the syntagm high-noon. This kind of idiomatic association argues that other syntagmatic responses may also be the result of episodic memory. Early explanations of word associations stressed the importance of contiguity in utterances, of perceived co-occurrences, in creating the bond between stimulus and response. As many recent authors have argued, however, subjects’ general paradigmatic tendency constitutes an insuperable objection to this model. English grammar is such that words of the same form class are contiguous far less often than words of different form classes. The classic theory of word associations thus cogently explains only syntagmatic associations, yet adult word-association norms consistently display paradigmatic dominance. McNeil1 (1966) and H. Clark (1970) are representative of the recent commentators who emphasize the objection to an association-by-contiguity model posed by paradigmatic associations. They explain the link between stimulus and response by deep-structure connections independent of perceptible phenomena: “...‘association theory’ cannot account for language comprehension and production; language, the critics say, should not be thought of as a consequence of built-up associations; rather, word associations should be thought of as a consequence of linguistic competence.” (H. Clark, 1970: 272) The paper containing that quotation is further typical of linguistically based theories of word associations in that it relies heavily on the concept of a mental dictionary structured by minimal units of significance below the level of the word, the semantic features hypothesis. This hypothesis econo
60
Sandy Petrey
mically and persuasively explains paradigmatic responses to verbal stimuli, which generally obey what Clark calls a simplicity-of-production rule: “Perform the least change on the lowest feature, with the restriction that the result must correspond to an English word” (H. Clark, 1970: 284). What Carrol, Kjeldergaard and Carton ( 1962) designated as opposite-evoking stimuli exemplify how this rule operates. Man-womun, for instance, is a highly frequent association because the response changes the last feature of the stimulus [+male] , while preserving all others, such as [+humanl and [ +adult] . Non-antonymous associations derive from more complex operations like addition or deletion of features, necessary when the least change on the lowest feature does not have a lexical realization. The more featural changes required, the more diverse response patterns become. Featural theories readily account for mature subjects’ paradigmatic tendency. In the lexical hierarchy, form-class markers are very high. Since the rule is to change the lowest feature, responses will naturally preserve the stimulus’s form class. Then why do syntagmatic responses occur at all? While Clark is aware of the importance of that question, his discussion of syntagmatics is a major flaw in an elegant paper. He explains them by a complete-the-idiom rule which involves an extremely loose definition of “idiom”. If white-housr and ncetlle urzd thread, two of Clark’s examples, are idiomatic, so are most common sequences in normal speech. Moreover, even if we grant Clark’s use of “idiom”, the theoretical dilemma remains. The idiom-completion rule, which depends on contiguity in surface structure, is not assimilable under the simplicity-of-production rule, which depends on congruence in deep structure. To put it another way, the simplicity-of-production rule depends on the immediate cognitive reference characteristic of semantic memory; the idiom-completion rule relies on the autobiographically experienced cooccurrence which identifies episodic memory. The need to confront syntagmatic responses appears more imperious when we recall that the paradigmatic tendency is developmentally a late acquisition. Young children display a marked syntagmatic tendency. (Brown and Berko, 1960; Ervin, 1961) Given the importance contemporary linguistics attaches to children’s early linguistic ability, this distinction between children and adult norms is of great interest. Tulving identified semantic memory as that “necessary for the use of language”. (1972: 386) The generally valid assertion that abstract featural relationships determine adult associations confirms that statement. But children, who also use lankwage, respond to verbal stimuli in a different way. And their syntagmatic associations are fully as suggestive of episodic memory as adults’ paradigmatic associations are of semantic memory.
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
61
Although the increase with maturity of paradigmatic responses - the syntagmatic-paradigmatic shift (S-P shift) - has long been recognized (Woodrow and Lowell, 1916), the most complete study of age-related changes is Entwisle’s comparatively recent Word Associations in Young Children (1966). After administering 96 stimuli to 1,240 subjects in kindergarten, grades one, three and five, and college, Entwisle presented her massive data in both analyzed and raw form. Her analysis concentrates on the thorough description of the S-P shift provided by her survey, a description she justifiably designated as her “primary finding”. (Entwisle, 1966: 120). By showing that the S-P shift was correlated with I.Q. as well as with age, Entwisle’s study gave further reason for assuming that the paradigmatic tendency reveals something significant about language ability in general. But what? Since syntagmatic responses fail to preserve form class categories, it would seem that the S-P shift reflects increasing sensitivity to syntactic properties. Yet McNeil1 (1966) was correct to protest that this explanation makes no sense in light of what we know about children’s ability to generate grammatical utterances. Whereas normal children are speaking correctly, and thus displaying great sensitivity to form-class distinction, by the age of four, the S-P shift is most dramatic between the ages of six and eight. Variations in syntactic capacities are therefore inherently unable to explain the differences between children and adult norms, and the paradigmatic-syntagmatic opposition can by definition describe nothing except syntactic variations. That argues for another taxonomy, such as that provided by the episodic-semantic distinction. The place to test the adequacy of Tulving’s categories is readily available in Entwisle’s raw data, 409 pages of computer printouts containing every response emitted by 1,040 children to 96 stimuli. Because of the mass of these data, the following discussion will of necessity depend on representative examples. Before choosing them, however, the first group in Entwisle’s appendices, kindergarten associations to add, can serve as a random illustration of why the syntagmatic-paradigmatic distinction is inadequate to deal with what is exciting about children’s norms. The most striking fact about the words add elicits from five-year-olds is that they include only one (0.5%) instances of subtract; 185 (66.1%) of Entwisle’s third-grade subjects, only three years older, responded to add with subtract. For kindergarteners, subtract is statistically no more firmly associated with add than any of 115 other idiosyncratic responses of extraordinary diversity. Add-subtract is of course paradigmatic, and its huge increase is certainly related to older subjects’ greater mastery of the stimulus. But the correlation between paradigmatics and control is not valid for younger subjects. Kinder-
garten syntagmatics to add include numbers, two plus two and fifty; their paradigmatics include sing, guess and walk. Since the first group incontestably indicates more meaningful storage of the stimulus, it is difficult to discern what the S-P distinction is supposed to reveal when applied to immature responses. In Entwisle’s alphabetical listing, the first kindergarten response to add is a cup of water, which completes a common cooking instruction plausibly heard by a young child helping mother in the kitchen. Elicited from only one subject, that response can nevertheless be combined with the associations formed by nineteen other subjects which evoke an identical cooking context: j7our, milk, water, cook, dinner, cake, cookies, someone is cooking. The clustering principle is apparent, but it cannot be described in terms of syntagmatics and paradigmatics. In response to add, the syntagmatic flour and the paradigmatic cook belong together in a way that the two nouns flour and numbers or the two verbs cook and sing do not. If we ccntinue down Entwisle’s alphabetical listing, after add-a cup of water comes add-a horse. Although without theoretical importance, that association deserves comment because it exemplifies the risks of a tendency apparent in many commentators, that of classifying as starkly meaningless children’s responses which are in fact perfectly logical. In isolation, adda horse is nonsense, a pair formed by a child who was not listening to the interviewer. But it becomes quite reasonable when related to the other responses from the same age group. Five other kindergarteners respond to add with Mister Ed, Ed the horse or horse without the article. “Mister Ed” was the name of a talking horse in a television program popular at the time of Entwisle’s survey. The confusion between add and Ed is clear. This identifiable breakdown illustrates how easily systematic associations can appear incoherent. The principal contention of this paper is that, despite their diversity, the 30,000 different responses to 96 stimuli in Entwisle’s appendices are a highly structured demonstration of the principles ordering immature lexical memory. In order to apprehend those principles, we must avoid what Nelson (1973) calls the “adult-dimension fallacy”, make allowances for tangential groups created by confusions like add-Ed, and assess the central groupings which remain on their own terms rather than by concepts developed from adult norms. For the most important point is that young children’s responses display the kinds of clusters just discussed not in addition to but instead of those structuring adult associations. A crucial thesis in current theories of word associations is that the stimulus effects immediate cognitive input into semantic memory, whose systemic organization leads to a semantically related respo.nse. While adult norms strongly support that thesis, immature
Word associations and the deveIopment
of lexical memory
63
norms do not. Quite the contrary; the cooking cluster in response to add is typical in that the stimulus seems to have been stored as a predicate of the sort of situation from which Tulving took the term episodic memory, an autobiographical episode during which it appeared as a focal element. Entwisle’s appendices display consistent grouping around such episodes, a system of contextual bonds far more pervasive than that attributable to semantic similarity or contrast. Recalling external situation of utterance appears to precede the most elementary assignment of internal content. Restricting episodic clusters to those formed in kindergarten norms, happen elicits 24 responses beginning with what and a long list of situationally associated suggestions of the catastrophes which would make children hear accident, and we all fall down, bruise, cry, the question “What happened?“: cut, cut yourself, damn, fall, fell down, fell off her bike, get mud throwned in my face, hurt, hurt knee, something bad, something terrible, we get hurt. Once elicits upon (a time), the sources of that phrase - story, book - and extensive fragments of the language the phrase introduces: three bears, he was a tailor, there was a bunny rabbit, run out into the forest, there was a birdie up high. Cold evokes not only related meteorological terms but also utterances heard when the weather is appropriately described by them, bundle up, don’t go outside, and then you get your coat on. Although representative, these sets obviously exhaust neither Entwisle’s stimuli nor the episodic clusters formed in association to the stimuli mentioned. In order to illustrate fully the grouping principles of kindergarten associations, we must look at one set of responses in detail. Examine, a stimulus which Entwisle was the first to use in a word-association survey, manageably demonstrates the importance of episodic memory, and the corresponding nullity of semantic memory, in young subjects’ reactions to certain words. “Manageably” is a key word in the previous sentence. While responses to all Entwisle’s stimuli form clear episodic groupings, high-frequency words elicit many different clusters. Given the diversity of human experience, this is of course to be expected; children could originally store a common word as the focal element of any number of autobiographical experiences. On the other hand, low-frequency stimuli, which by definition appear in relatively fewer situations, should also elicit a smaller number of clusters. Responses to the low-frequency stimulus examine confirm that this is the case. Despite its relative rarity, exumirze elicits associations which exemplify the global distinctions between mature and immature norms. The 200 kindergarten subjects gave 159 different responses to this single word; their primary and secondary responses, both syntagmatic, together account for only 11.5% of the total. The primary and secondary adult responses, both
64
Sandy Petrey
Table
I.
Stimulus
Episodic and semantic responses to different Appendices C and D) Response
eyes (combined)
stimuli (From
1
3 NC%)
1966:
S
K NC%)
NC%)
23(11 S)
46(16.4)
49(17.S)
27C9.7)
7C2.S)
Sl(18.2)
120(42.9)
3(1.1)
examine
doctor,
examine
look (at), check (up), test (combined)
l(0.S)
dark
moon, star(s), (go to) bed,
23(11 .S)
25C8.9)
(go to)sleep
Entwisle,
NC%)
3(1.1)
(combined)
dark
night
27(13.S)
25C8.9)
31(11.1)
dark
light
25(12.S)
85(30.4)
185(66.0)
28ClO.O)
9C3.2)
O(G)
OC -)
7(2.5)
S(1.8)
180(64.3)
long
lawn/mower)
lO(S.S)
long
grass
16(8.0)
long
short
9C4.S)
S6(20.0)
177C63.2)
164C58.S)
wild
all names of individual animals: bear, lion etc. combined
82(41.0)
88(31.4)
45C16.1)
29ClO.4)
wild
animal(s)
47C23.5)
48C17.2)
48Cl7.2)
40(14.3)
wild
tame
l(0.S)
8C2.9)
44Cl5.7)
81(28.9)
clean
house
29ClO.4)
15(5.4)
clean
dirty
7C3.5)
29ClO.4)
134C47.9)
give
(a) present(s)
24Cl2.0)
18C6.4)
4(1.4)
S(l.7)
give
take
2(1 .O)
6C2.1)
S6t20.0)
99C35.4)
listcrz listen
to (...) hear
44C22.0) 12C6.0)
39(13.9) 33C11.8)
8C2.9) 84(33.0)
sometimes
I (...)
33(16.5)
22(7.9)
sometimes
always
lB(9.0)
O( )
1 l(3.9)
6C2.1)
X1.7) 122(43.6)
4(1.4) 123(43.9)
3Cl.l)
l(O.3)
64(22.9)
S5Cl9.7)
paradigmatic, constitute 41% of their total. The semantic explanation is perfectly adequate to the two most common adult responses, test and look. It is inapplicable to kindergarten responses, which include not a single instance of test or look. If young subjects react to the stimulus’s cognitive content, it is curious that common words with featural connections to examine - look at, check or check up in addition to test and look ~ appear only in isolated cases until third grade. Younger children’s associations to examine do not support the assumption that they have stored it as the vehicle of precise signification. Yet their associations manifest a distinct autobiographical memory of the stimulus. The primary kindergarten response is doctor, given as a single word
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
by 18 subjects. Ifwe accept the connective principle implicit in that perception of the stimulus in a medical environment, the 159 responses lose their diversity. Four subjects mention doctor in word response. An additional 24 emit terms from an extensive lexicon: x-rays, stethoscope, abrasion, pill, blood pressure, sick, hospital, hurt, something’s the matter, needle, 14 mention portions of children’s anatomy
shot, nurse,
dentist,
65
response, different a multimedical checkup, operate:
likely to be examined by a doctor, while 18 give noun and pronoun designations of candidates for medical examination. This grouping accounts for over a third of kindergarten responses. If probable cases like glasses, bed or the medicinal brand name Vicks are included, the percentage increases to around half. In no sense is this set fortuitous. Many of the medical responses are elicited only by examine. None of the 95 other stimuli produces a comparable medical cluster. The connective bonds are obvious, and they are obviously episodic. Associations like examine-doctor uses when you ‘re sick demonstrate that subjects with neither syntactic nor semantic control of the stimulus recalled the circumstances where they had perceived it. Kindergarten responses include sophisticated words - stethoscope, abrasion, blood pressure - implausibly part of a five-year-old’s active vocabulary. Their link to the stimulus is almost certainly analogous to that artificially created between nonsense words presented in the same situations during experiments on episodic memory. Early associations to examine thus depend not on semantic content but on episodic experience, either shared situational environments (examineneedle) or syntactic juxtaposition (examine-blood pressure). The strongest associations are consequently formed between words combined in both situational and linguistic memories, as is exemplified by the primary ‘and secondary kindergarten responses to examine.. doctor and eyes. Sentences such as “We’d better have the doctor examine your eyes” are far more readily imaginable than utterances combining examine with comparably focal words from children’s experience of a medical environment. As Table I shows, doctor and eyes accordingly dominate kindergarten responses and furthermore increase in frequency until third grade, when semantic associations definitively replace episodic responses. Responses to dark illustrate more clearly the refining out of purely situational associations. Pairs likedark-moon ordark-star, inexplicable by the connective structure of semantic memory, are situationally formed. In the same circumstances where they perceive dark, subjects also perceive moon, stars, go to bed, go to sleep. However, none of these responses is likely to be in linguistic contiguity with dark, whereas dark-night is quite common. Associations depending on physical context alone decline drastically by third grade.
66
Sandy Petrey
Responses to long show an analogous shift within the episodic period as well as the much more dramatic shift from episodic to semantic. Grass is the primary kindergarten response to long. Luwn and lawn mower are also perceived in the situation which combines long and grass, but only grass is often syntagmatically contiguous as well. Lawn and Zawn mower, along with other intriguing situational responses like what you cut down and Mr. Smith’s lawn, disappear entirely by third grade. All stimulus-response pairs in Table I display the same chronological development. Remembering perceived contiguities appears to precede mature storage by featural congruence and contrast. Responding by feature change (wild-tame, clean-dirty, give-take), feature deletion (listen-hear) or feature intensification (sometimes-always) predominates only after contextual associations which suggest episodic retrieval. Although perfectly suited to describe the structures of word associations emitted by subjects at both ends of the developmental scale, the episodicsemantic distinction is less helpful in conceptualizing the intermediate period. If we restrict the definition of syntagmatic associations to those responses which form an acceptable English syntagm with the simulus, the developmental sequence can be considered as having three stages: episodicsyntagmatic-semantic. As discussed earlier, syntagmatic responses properly secalled are highly problematic because either semantic or episodic storage could produce them. Uncritical memory of a word’s co-occurrence with other words can lead to meaningful sequences even if the subject does not control the meaning created. For example, any English speaker who has heard the word “hermetically” is likely to associate it with “sealed” irrespective of the degree to which he or she controls “hermetically” as a signified. Dark-night could result from either the associative mechanisms which produce durk-moon or those producing dark-light. While it is self-evident that semantic memory can produce grammatical sequences, it is sometimes not recognized that well-formed utterances can emerge from episodic memory as well. Yet many syntagmata in Entwisle’s appendices are like the kindergarten pair exambze-blood pressure in that it seems legitimate to conclude that subjects are echoing rather than generating their response. For example, the first six stimuli elicit from kindergarteners associations like these: add-some bricks to a house; ulwuj!s-obey the law; u/low-me to introduce myself; because-J’ou ‘re not supposed to; bee-rnJ> Valentine; begin-to work the tractor. It is likely that such associations depend on reaction to the stimulus as a verbal unit which co-occurs with other units, not on reaction to a lexical vehicle for abstract cognitive content. The recognition that episodic memory can produce associations identical to those caused by semantic responding has the advantage of explaining
Word associations and the development of lexical memory
67
patterns which appear not to follow the general development of lexical memory. Young subjects’ responses display in general such low commonality that primary responses can have less than a 5% frequency. Only three of Entwisle’s 96 stimuli - gallop, salt and table - elicited their respective primaries from more than 30% of kindergarten subjects. Associations to salt and table are: K salt-pepper 74(37%) :24(44.3%) T59(56.8%) L5(44.5%) A&l~*.o%) table-chair 65(32.5%) 101(36%) 145(51.9%) 141(50.4%) 131(65.5%) If we avoid the adult-dimension fallacy and think of salt-pepper and tablechair not as we apprehend them but as deriving from episodic memories, the early development of adult patterns is fully comprehensible. They are unusually frequent because linguistic and situational contiguity establish the same link. In the physical world, salt is usually perceived with pepper, tables with chairs. In speech, “salt and pepper” and “table and chairs” are set sequences in a frozen order. It is of course less than desirable to assume that identical associations have different causes in children and adults. But the alternative is to suppose that precocious mature storage of salt and table is what leads children to associate to them in an adult manner. Since no inherent characteristics such as frequency, syntactic properties or semantic content, distinguish these words from many of Entwisle’s other stimuli, it becomes reasonable to assume that the unusual commonality in children’s associations to them is the effect of their plausibly unusual co-occurrence. Gallop elicits associations wholly inexplicable by standard categories. gallop-horse
;2(46%)
f24(44.5%)
:9(28.2%)
5 76(27.1%)
Adult 100(50%)
A word’s frequency of occurrence is broadly correlated with children’s control of it, and it consequently seems logical to expect that immature norms would display the commonality characteristic of adult associations in response to a high-frequency stimulus. But more kindergarteners gave the primary response to the low-frequency gallop than the combined total of all those who gave the primary kindergarten response to the seven highfrequency verbs add, begin, carry, give, move, run, tell. If we join with horse variants like horsey and multi-word responses like oy1 a horse, then the primary five-year-old association to gallop attains a frequency of 70% and bears comparison with those adult associations which have the highest commonality ratings. Such unique consistency demands explanation. The episodic-semantic hypothesis can furnish it. “Gallop” is subject to a peculiarly rigid selection restriction. Although it technically takes any
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quadruped as agent of the action it designates, for most English speakers including professional linguists: cf., Leech (1974: 1455 146) - galloping is performed only by horses. The preponderance of memories of verbal cooccurrence would consequently link gallop and horse. Situational memories are analogous. “Gallop” is perceived apart from “horse” almost exclusively in circumstances including a horse or some representation of it, in a picture, or, as the kindergarten pair gaZZop-stick horse suggests, in imagination. The unique frequency of the primary kindergarten response does not exhaust the unusual quality of associations to gallop. As is evident in the figures above, changes with age in response to that stimulus indicate an aborted S-P shift. The normal decline in syntagmatic associations occurs between first and third grade, when gallop-horse goes from 44% to 28%. But between fifth grade and college, the frequency ofgallup-horse nearly doubles. Adult subjects respond in a way more similar to five than to ten-year-olds. Although Entwisle’s survey revealed a decline in paradigmatics to several stimuli between fifth grade and college, gallop is unique in displaying a regression to kindergarten norms, an S-P-S shift. The typical paradigmatic pairs gallop-trot and gallop-run, attributable to semantic memory, increase dramatically over the developmental period when gallop-horse declines. No kindergarten subjects gave gallop-trot, 46%1 responded with lmw; 2 1.4% of fifth-grade subjects gave gallop-trot, only 27.1% gallop-horse. Mature responses reverse that trend. Gallop-horse increases to 50% and gallop-trot dwindles to 12%. Gallop has been discussed at length because the patterns it elicits show subjects in the middle range of development emitting purely semantic responses even though adult associations indicate that memory of permissible co-occurrences provides efficient storage. This striking exception to the standard pattern of progressive developmental increases in adult primaries suggests that the episodic-semantic shift is a global phenomenon which affects all words in the mental lexicon. Furthermore, the near identity of the figures for gallop-horse in kindergarten and adult subjects is a further reason why it is plausible to postulate different associative mechanisms to explain superficially identical responses. Judging from the figures for subjects in intermediate stages, developmental changes in the storage of gallop appear as important as those in the storage of stimuli whose response patterns conform more straightforwardly to the general shift. We can at least speculate that gallop elicits horse from young children because of episodically remembered co-occurrences and from adults because of semantic assignment of selection restriction. The special interest of the syntagmatic pair gallop-horse illustrates the major shortcoming to the syntagmatic-paradigmatic distinction in describing
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changes with age in word associations: because the terms of classification can designate nothing but syntactic properties, they are inherently unable to represent much that is of interest about immature norms. To divide children’s responses according to whether they preserve the stimulus’s form class can be as tedious and uninformative as dividing them by the number of letters they contain. Young children’s first significant reactions to a verbal stimulus suggest either an autobiographical episode during which the word was perceived as a focal element (the cooking cluster elicited by add, the medical cluster by examine, the catastrophe cluster by happen) or perceived syntactic juxtaposition whose sense may not be fully grasped. This clearly episodic stage rapidly declines, to be followed by syntagmatic responses in the strict sense (dark-night, wild-animals, clean-house), which are in turn normally supplanted by the featurally, instead of situationally or syntactically, linked associations characteristic of mature norms. The few patterns which diverge from this development, like responses to salt, table and gallop, are comprehensible as the effect of episodic memory. They are inexplicable within the parameters imposed by S-P terminology.
Conclusion The primary conceptual gain when we consider children’s word associations in light of Tulving’s category of episodic memory is the discovery of order where there appeared to be none. The number of irrelevant or playful responses given by young subjects is far smaller than commonly believed. The crucial opposition between mature and immature norms is not that between structure and chaos but that between different sorts of structure. Whereas adult’s responses are grouped primarily by semantic memory of words’ internal content, children’s responses display mainly episodic memories of external context. Both Chomsky (1965) and Saussure (1916) distinguish between abstract linguistic structure (“langue” for Saussure, “competence” for Chomsky) and concrete linguisticutterances (“parole” and “performance” respectively). Lungue is homogeneous, parole heterogeneous; competence is context-free, performance context-sensitive, “the actual use of language in concrete situa1965: 4) It is remarkable how aptly the traits which tions”. (Chomsky, distinguish kzngue (competence) from parole (performance) also define the differences between mature and immature word-association norms. Children’s heterogeneous responses are acutely context-sensitive; adults’ homogeneous patterns are semantic and hence context-free. While autobiographically experienced performances link stimulus and response in
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young subjects’ norms, older subjects associate so as to suggest the systematic relationships which define competence. The affinities among the episodic-semantic, competence-performance and Zangue-parole distinctions point out the major theoretical implication of developmental changes in word associations. If it is valid to assume that free responses to verbal stimuli manifest subjects’ systems of lexical storage, then the episodic-semantic shift leads to the hypothesis that linguistic maturation involves a major reorganization of the mental lexicon during which memories of paroZe decline in importance and sensitivity to langue develops. This hypothesis of course directly contradicts the assumption that children have an innate predisposition to organize knowledge according to the categories which inform adult linguistic competence, an assumption apparent in McNeil1 (1970), E. Clark (1973), and others. On the other hand, it is quite compatible with other recent work, such as that of Nelson (1974) and Bloom (1973), who insist on the function of a child’s dynamic interaction with a particular environment in early formation of word meaning. Young subjects’ associations strongly suggest the kind of contextual apprehension of words and concepts which Bloom and Nelson emphasize. This compatibility between the episodic structure of immature word associations and cognitive-development models of language acquisition leaves a crucial question unanswered, however: by what process can episodic memories of words in context lead to the abstract semantic organization of mature lexical storage? Transformational grammarians have persuasively argued that no amount of exposure to linguistic performance can explain language’s “creative” component, humans’ ability to produce and understand sentences never uttered before. The classic example is Chomsky’s (1959) Colorless green ideas sleep furiously, a sentence immediately recognizable as grammatical even though it obviously expresses no independently formed concept nor evokes any conceivable context. The argument that autobiographical experience of performance cannot account for creative competence also challenges the hypothesis that children’s episodic storage somehow reorganizes itself into the semantic structure of adult lexical memory. The dilemma is pointedly clear. If the structure of language is always present, then the theoretical problem of where it comes from is solved ~~ more accurately, no such problem can arise. But if subjects of all ages control language in the samic way, why do mature and immature free word associations consistently organize themselves in difyerent ways? Tulving’s categories do not resolve this dilemma, but they do contribute significantly to posing it with clarity. As Tulving (1972) insisted, the episodic-semantic
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distinction is pretheoretical rather than theoretical, taxonomic rather than explanatory. As a taxonomy, the episodic and semantic systems comprehensively define the differences between mature and immature responses in word association surveys. The explanation of why those differences exist and of how one system becomes another are topics for future inquiry. References L. (1973) One Word af a Time, The Hague, Mouton. R. and Berko, J. (1960) “Word associations and the acquisition of grammar”, child Dev., 31, l-14. Carroll, J., Kjeldergaard, I’. and Carton, A. (1962) “Number of opposites vs. number of primaries as a response measure in free association tests”, J. verb. Learn. verb. Beh., 1, l-13. Chomsky, N. (1959) “Review” of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, Lang., 35, 26-58. Chomsky, N. (1965) Aspects ofthe Theory ofSyntax. Cambridge, MIT Press. Clark, E. (1973) “What’s in a word?” m . Moore, T. (ed.) Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Lnnguage. New York, Academic Press. Clark, H. (1970) ‘Word Associations and linguistic theory”, in Lyons, J. (ed.) New Horizons in Linguistics. London, Penguin. Entwisle, D. (1966) Word Associations in Young Children. Baltimore, Hopkins Press. Ervin, S. (1961) “Changes with age in the verbal determinants of word association”, Amer. J. Psych., 74, 361-372. Kent, G. and Rosanoff, A. (1910) “A Study of association in insanity”. Amer. J. Insanity. 67. Leech, G. (1974) Semantics. London, Penguin. McNeill, D. (1966) “A Study of word associations”, J. verb. Learn. verb. Beh., 5, 548-557. McNeill, D. (1970) The Acquisition of Language. New York, Harper and Row. Nelson, K. (1973) Structure and Strategy in Learning to Talk. Mono. Sot. Res. Child Dev., 38 (l-2). Nelson, K. (1974) “Concept, Word and Sentence” Psych. Rev., 81, 267-285. Reiff, R. and Scheerer, M. (1959) Memory and Hypnotic Age Regression. New York, International Universities Press. Russell, W. and Jenkins, J. (1954) The Complete Minnesota Norms. ONR Technical Report No. 11, August, 1954. de Saussure, 1:. (1916) Cours de Linguistique GPn&rale. Lausanne, Payot. Tulving, E. (1972) “Episodic and Semantic Memory”, in Tulving and Donaldson (eds.) The Orgunization ofMemory. New York, Academic Press, pp. 381404. Tulving, E. and Thomson, D. (1973) “Encoding specificity and retrieval processes in episodic memory”, Psych. Rev., 80 (S), 359-380. Woodrow, H. and Lowell, I:. (1916) “Children’s association frequency tests”, Psych. Mono., 22, l-l 10. Bloom, Brown,
RPsumP La distinction faite par Endel Tulving entrc la m&moire “6pisodique” ct la mkmoirc “stmantique” permet d’interprkter le changement a,ux r6ponses d’associations verbales en fonction de l’ige de faGon plus comprkhensible et plus rentable que ne le font les clarifications syntaxiques utilisees habituellement. Le d&eloppement se traduit essentiellement par un passage de I’Cpisodiquc au sdmantique. Les jeuncs enfants associent d’abord avec les contextes perGus du stimulus, les sujets plus ages associent au contenu semantique abstrait de ce stimulus.