5. Language Comprehension

Comprehension relates to what people do when they listen to speech, when they understand, store and remember it. Prideaux (1985) has defined language comprehension as a dynamic active process, not a passive act, in which the hearer is engaged as he/she constructs a systematic representation in his/her mind. It is this process that enables the hearer to compute and capture the meaning. In language processing, the two communicative participants are required: a speaker and a hearer. This means processes of language are all deeply attached together in a chain from production to perception and then to comprehension. In such a chain, the hearer is always engaged in many processes with complexity of mind. He first takes as input the speech he hears from the speaker, plus other linguistic and extralinguistic information, and then analyzes the same as decoded in terms of the fact, constructs the most likely interpretation for the linguistic signal being processed. Generally, to decode and to understand messages from the speaker, the hearer has to perform multi-level analyses on the incoming speech. The factors which help the hearer in efficiently analyzing the speech signal can be examined in five stages corresponding to the five linguistic levels. These stages are interdependent, with the higher level stages often influencing the decisions about the lower ones.

According to J. F. Kess (1992: 38), the first stage of auditory level is based directly on the physical input, and is “the initial point at which we take in the raw speech signal, with its acoustic attributes of frequency, intensity, and time span.” The phonetic stage, further “reflects what we decide to call the sound, based on various types of phonological knowledge.” At the phonological stage, the hearer first undertakes a phonological analysis by constructing an appropriate phonological segmentation of the incoming signal. In other words, he must categorize the sounds that he hears into one of the many classes of sounds that exist in his language. The process is extremely complex for two major reasons: the environmental context which often interferes with the speech signal (such as noise or other auditory signals); and the variability of the speech signal itself. There is no one-toone correspondence between the characteristics of the acoustic stimulus and the speech sound one hears. Several factors such as the voice of the speaker, the rate at which the speaker is producing speech and the phonetic context can influence or distort the acoustic signal and it’s processing by the hearer. He can get confused owing to the phonetic similarity; other acoustic cues may contribute to his confusion; homophony as in grate/ great; hole/whole; flower/flour or right/write can often cause him confusion. In some case, further information may essentially be needed before deciding interpretation. Patterns of sound and gesture are initially used by human languages to convey information along with an emotional content if needed as an integral part of communication. Not only they make symbols for communication, but also function within a set of rules, known as grammar which along with complex symbol sets enables the humans to achieve precision and efficiency in communication.

Apart from phonological analysis of the incoming speech, the hearer has to further carry out a grammatical analysis of the input on both morphological (word-building) and syntactic (sentence-building) levels. On the morphological level, he has to make sense to distinguish between the affixes of a word and its base or root. Within affixes, he needs to recognize various marks attached to the root word of derivational and inflectional morphemes. It is because these two kinds of morphemes form words in different ways. Derivational morphemes form new words either by changing the meaning of the base to which they are attached, for example, happy → unhappy or possible → impossible or by changing the word-class that a base belongs to, such as the addition of–ly to the adjective happy produces the adverb happily or of–ness produces the noun happiness. Inflectional morphemes, on the contrary, do not change referential or cognitive meaning. It also does not alter the word-class of the base to which it attached. An inflectional affix, if added, is only able to modify the form of a word so that it can fit into a particular syntactic slot. The–s suffix in English merely signals agreement in person, number and gender, for example book → books or cat → cats, and so on.

The syntactic level is more complex. The first step in the process of understanding a sentence is to assign elements of its surface structure to linguistic categories within that sentence. Although steps in the process of comprehension are not real-time steps and may even overlap as has been supported by researches hitherto done in language processing, there is an amount of certainty that the hearer has to pass through many subprocesses in order to compute and capture meaning of a speech signal received from the speaker. It has been proposed that several strategies, both language-specific and universal, may operate heuristics to enable or disable language processing including comprehension. Let us look at two examples offered by Kess (1992) as in (1) and (2). The hearer must process to reflect the fact that John in the first sentence is the logical subject of both eager and please whereas in the second sentence, there is an unspecified NP subject of easy, while John is the object NP of please.

(1) John is eager to please.
(2) John is easy to please.

At this stage, the hearer also sometimes faces syntactically ambiguous sentences like (3), (4), and (5). (3) might mean that John bought the flower to give to Mary, or that John bought a flower as a favor for Mary who intended to give it to another person. Such an ambiguity, no doubt, comes from the word for. (4) could be understood as (our) relatives who visit us can be fun, or the action of visiting relatives can (make us) have fun.

Similarly, (5) might mean that the police killed the robber who was carrying a gun, or the police used a gun to kill the robber:

(3) John bought the flower for Mary.
(4) Visiting relatives can be fun.
(5) The police killed the robber with a gun.

Another famous example in parsing strategies is mentioned by Bever (1970) when he first proposed the ‘perceptual strategies’.

(6) The horse raced past the barn fell.

In common English, this would be regarded as a grammatical sentence with a reduced relative clause (the horse (which was) raced past the barn) that is misparsed because the past participle tends to be misanalyzed as a simple past tense of a main verb. This fools the hearer into wanting to make the sentences end at barn. Such a sentence is known as ‘garden path sentence’. In a garden path sentence, the hearer interprets the sentence in a particular way only to find out near the end that he misinterpreted it. The subjective impression is that of being led down a garden path until discovering at the end that he took the wrong path and have to retrace his efforts.

In general, owing to processing constraints, people tend to commence analyzing sentence structure as soon as they see or hear the first words. This has been accounted as such initial words active syntactic processing strategies often used to organize the words into a phrase make. These strategies sometimes lead to errors and subsequent reanalyses of syntactic structure thus causing obviously evident difficulties in comprehension.

In the process of comprehension, which is active and dynamic, the hearer has to also assign the appropriate semantic case roles to the various participants and events in the sentence. In a major linguistic theory known as the Government and Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981), the information as to the semantic relationship between verbs and their arguments is referred to in terms of thematic roles (θ-roles) as in (7). At the semantic level, the hearer is considered to identify the θ-roles played by various words in the sentence. He has to recognize that although the girl, the ant and a gun all are NPs, they all differ in as much they respectively comprise the agent, patient, and instrument in their semantic case roles. In such an analysis of incoming sentence, the hearer can get a basis for determining the literal meaning of the sentence.

(7) The girl killed the ant with a gun.

But many more sentences used by people in their day to day communication are not meant to be taken literally. It implies that all signs do not necessarily designate things in the world, nor can all signs be associated with truth values. Rules of meaning, though, are sometimes disclosed in how speech is used in a speech event. Suppose when a person hears someone say as in (8):

(8) Can you open the door?

then he knows that it is not a question of his ability, but really a polite request of even a command directing him to do the needful to open the door. Such sentences often maintain a difference between the meaning of a sentence and the meaning that a speaker is conveying with the sentence. In such a case, the hearer either processes the intent of the speaker underlying the speech act or uses the communicative context to understand the sentence. This is a rich area in the study of language that brings both semantic and pragmatic factors into play which along with other factors such as background information, attitude, knowledge base, and so on, assume significance in language processing. The semantic knowledge presupposes ‘implicature’ and ‘speech act’.

The term ‘implicature’ was first introduced into the philosophy of language by H. P. Grice in his William James lectures in 1967/8. This term is normally used in philosophical semantics to refer to the truth -functional relation of material implication and the notion is founded on a distinction between what is actually said and what is implied (but not entailed) in saying what is said (see Lyons 1977). Grice (1975) pointed out that the hearer or reader seeks to draw from the utterance (X) that what the speaker or writer said depend not only on the content of that sentence X but also on: (i) the fact that the speaker/writer uttered X, and (ii) the fact that the speaker/writer did not utter any of the other sentences that he might have uttered instead. Grice (1975) also introduced an interesting example, suppose that a teacher is asked to write a letter of recommendation for a student of his who is applying for a teaching position in linguistics. He writes: “Mr. A was always on time for classes and in his papers he always displayed excellent penmanship.” The reader of this letter could conclude that he regarded Mr. A as incompetent to teach linguistics. In other words, the proposition that Mr. A is incompetent is part of the meaning of this sentence of which the letter consists. Thus, implicature of the above sentence can be “Mr. A is not good at serious academic pursuits.” Grice made a distinction between two kinds of implicature: conventional and conversational. While a conventional implicature depends upon something additional to what is truth–conditional in the normal (i.e., conventional) meaning of words, a conversational implicature derives from a set of more general conditions which determine the proper conduct of conversation. The difference between them, though, is not always precise in particular cases. Grice mention a couple of sentences in (9) and (10) where the hearer without more ado considers John’s drinking as a factor in his accident. But his drinking might have been unrelated to the accident, he might, although intoxicated, have been driving safely when another driver ran a red light. It also could be the case that John has been only a passenger in the car or he might have been drinking soft drinks.

All of these possibilities would be given little or no consideration by most comprehenders primarily as the hearer is led, by the convention of relation, to assume that there is a relationship between the evens in the two sentences.

(9) John was in an accident.
(10) He had been drinking.

It, therefore, can be argued that the conventions collectively represent some shared assumptions about how man communicates to another member of the language community. Such conventions guide his comprehension. The term implicature, however, is not often used in this sense. But it is preferred to be used without qualification in the narrower sense of the second kind, conversational implicature, which derives from a set of more general conditions. The conditions from which such implicatures derive are formulated by Grice (1975) as maxim, grouped under the four headings of quality, quantity, relation and manner. The first, the maxim of quality, emphasizes on the true contribution: that are one does not say what he believes to be false, and does not say that for which he lacks adequate evidence. The maxim of quantity, on the other hand, states that one makes his contribution as informative as required; that is not more or less informative than what is required. In the maxim of relation, the third maxim, one makes his contributions relevant to the purpose at hand. The maxim of manner lays emphasis on perspicuous and specifically states: (i) avoid obscurity of expression; (ii) avoid ambiguity; (iii) be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity); and (iv) be orderly. All of these maxims thus relate in a fairly obvious way to the more general purpose of promoting the efficient communication of propositional information. Besides, these maxims there are basic assumptions, not rules, and they can be broken. This means that they are inapplicable in the analysis of utterances whose function is something other than that of augmenting the addressee’s store of propositional knowledge.

Language, except descriptive function, also serves as an instrument for the transmission of other kinds of information; that is, non-descriptive information, which may roughly be characterized as expressive and social. Such utterances do not seem to be communicative of much information but, instead, serve as an action. Such function of language was termed by the Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin (1962) as speech act. This term is also known notably in the title of an influential book by the American philosopher John R. Searle (1969). One of the most attractive features of the theory of speech acts is that it gives explicit recognition to the social or interpersonal dimension of language-behaviour and provides a general framework, for the discussion of the syntactic and semantic distinctions (Lyons 1977). In further development of his theory of speech act, Austin (1962) drew three facets of a speech act as locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.

A locutionary act as postulated by Austin is an act of saying something that makes a certain sense or reference in a language; that is, follows the rules of pronunciation and grammar. For example, a person says “I have more money than I know what to do with” then reporting of the locutionary force is that first he said he has more money than he knows what to do with, and second, he said something in a very affected English accent (rich and arrogant).

An illocutionary act, however, is an act performed in saying something such as making a statement or promise, issuing a command or request, asking a question, and so on. Austin (1962) has been primarily concerned with the uses to which language can be put in society and his theory thus is founded in language use.

In fact, the term speech acts, as often used, refer to this meaning of illocutionary acts as showed in the Austin’s examples:

(11) He indicated that he was willing to pay off John’s car loan.
(12) He offered to pay off John’s car loan (side-effect) by product.

Some important characteristics of illocutionary acts are examined here. First, virtually every type of illocutionary act corresponds to a performative verb; that is, a verb which can be used as an explicit indication that one is performing. The sentence (13) is an act of this type.

(13) I order you to shine my shoes.

Another feature of illocutionary acts is that in uttering a sentence, one sometimes performs more than one illocutionary act, with different parts of the sentence involved in each of the acts as in (14):

(14) I order you to shine these shoes, and I warn you that if you don’t obey that order immediately, you will be court-martialed.

The third feature is that sentences have no overt performative verb are often ambiguous with regard to the illocutionary act they are used to perform. In general, the term illocutionary force provides an alternative way of speaking about illocutionary acts.

Another kind of speech act is perlocutionary act. This is an act performed by means of saying something: the speaker, by speaking, does something to someone else such as anger, console, or persuade someone, and so on, these acts are concerned with what follows an utterance. In (15), for example, the hearer infers easily that the person ‘he’ did something wrong with John’s father:

(15) He offended John’s father

In short, speech act theory explains how the social function of an utterance is an important part of its meaning. So, in order to compute meaning understanding the speech act force, or illocutionary force in Austin’s terms, of an utterance needs to involve the hearer’s linguistic knowledge marked with both background cultural knowledge and knowledge of the immediate local context. Such linguistic making of speech act force is in itself complex due to the markers that may have other roles to perform in the grammar. Moreover, even if an identification of sentence types by the hearer has been accomplished, the correlation between these and speech acts is not a steady one as the inference and conversational principles play a role in the hearer’s recognition of a speech act (see Lyons 1977, Carroll 1994; Saeed 1997).

It can be logically argued that language comprehension is a dynamic active process that engages the hearer in language processing and impels him in a state of the complexity of mind. It enables him to always engage in different analyses of the incoming speech at various levels of language processing. For this very reason, analysis of the process of speech comprehension has always remained a major theme in psycholinguistics.