Page 43 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

20 Communication and Evolution of Society

corresponds, supposedly, to the transformational complexity that
can be read off the structural description of linguistic expressions.
I cannot go into the individual research projects and the different
interpretations here. Apparently in psycholinguistics there is a
growing tendency to disavow the original correlation hypothesis;
the mental grammar that underlies the psychologically identifiable
production of language and the corresponding processes of un-
derstanding cannot, in the opinion of Bever, Watt, and others, be
explained in the framework of a competence theory, that is, of
a reconstructively oriented linguistics. I am not very certain how
to judge this controversy; but I would like to suggest two points
of view that have not, so far as I can see, been taken sufficiently
into account in the discussion.
1. How strong do the essentialist assertions of a reconstructive
linguistics regarding the psychic reality of reconstructed systems
of rules have to be? Chomsky’s maturationist assumption—that
gtammatical theory represents exactly the innate dispositions that
enable the child to develop the hypotheses that direct language
acquisition and to process the linguistic data in the envitronment—
seems to me too strong.*’ Within the reconstructivist conceptual
strategy, the more plausible assumption that grammatical theory
represents the linguistic competence of the adult speaker is suffi-
cient. This competence in turn is the result of a learning process
that may—like cognitive development in the sense of Piaget’s
cognitivist approach—follow a rationally reconstructible pattern.**
As Bever suggests, even this thesis can be weakened to allow
for the limitations placed on the acquisition and application of
gtammatical-rule knowledge by nonlinguistic perceptual mecha-
nisms or nonlinguistic epistemic systems in general, without sur-
rendering the categorial framework of a competence theory.
2. It is not clear to me to what extent the psycholinguistic
critique of the admittedly essentialist implications of Chomsky’s
competence theory originates in a confusion of research para-
digms. This could be adequately discussed only if there were
clarity about the way in which competence theories can be tested
and falsified. I have the impression that psycholinguistic investi-
gations proceed empirical-analytically and neglect a limine the
distinction between competence and performance.*