Early Experimental Studies

Abstract

This chapter reviews experimental studies into knowledge of language that were carried out to decide between Hockett’s (1955) and Chomsky’s (1957) models. Many of these experiments were carried out in the 1950s and 1960s. Subsequent research has focused largely on mechanisms of sentence processing, rather than on the knowledge underlying such mechanisms (see Mitchell, 1994). The experiments reviewed here therefore represent the most sustained attempt to find out what form knowledge of language takes in the individual human brain. The experiments show that language users are sensitive to the statistical regularities of language. Evidence for knowledge of phrase structure rules is inconclusive. However, there were experiments which did show that individuals can be taught to use recursive rules. I will argue that this last finding is deeply problematic for both experience-based and rule-based models.