A (typical?) linguistic research question: Are we humans or demons?

By Johannes Kizach

This is actually a serious question discussed among the people interested in language processing. The researchers who believe we are ‘demons’ claim that we understand much more than we are consciously aware of when we process language (that is, when we hear and comprehend sentences). They claim that we know how often each word has been spoken in the present discourse, how frequent each word is in the language in general, which words usually appear together with each word; furthermore, they claim, we keep track of the animacy, specificity, and cognitive entrenchment of each word, and on top of this, we have elaborate mental representations of all the sentences we hear. To be able to do all of these things in real-time while listening to someone talking is a formidable task, a super-human task. In other words: we must be super-human, we must be demons.

On the other hand, the researchers who believe we are just humans (and I believe we are just that), have a little less faith in the vastness of our mental capabilities. Maybe we don’t actually always understand everything we hear, and it does seem to be impractical to remember the frequency of all words we ever hear. Why should we, really? So the non-demon suggestion is, basically, that we have a few rules of thumb, a few heuristics that we use to understand what we hear. Sometimes the rules fail us and we misunderstand or get confused. But, basically, we have a quite efficient processing system built on a few general, automatic principles that allow us to reliably comprehend almost everything we hear. At least partially comprehend everything we hear.

Try to answer this question:

How many of each type of animal did Moses take on the ark?

If you are like most people, your answer will probably be “two”. If you were a demon, though, you would not have been so foolish, since you would have understood immediately that the sentence is silly. Moses never had a boat (he didn’t need one, remember?) – It was Noah who saved the animals (including us). When people are presented with sentences like these, most of them show non-demon comprehension skills, which support the human theory.

How about this one:

Where should the authorities bury the survivors after the plane crash?

To decide which theories are on the right track – e.g. the demon-theory or the human-theory – linguists carry out psycho- and neurolinguistic experiments. The tricky thing is to design the experiments so that the behavior of the participants can help decide between the different theories. This was achieved nicely with the Moses-question, as we have just seen – the behavior of the participant (i.e. you) could be human-like or demon-like and thus support either one theory or the other.

In my research, I design and conduct experiments in order to decide how the human language processor works. I am interested, generally, in phenomena that can help to demonstrate our non-demon nature, and specifically, in word order phenomena, that can help decide which rules of thumb people use when they process sentences.