Frequency effects in language processing

Nick C. Ellis.

There is a lot more to the perception of language than meets the eye or ear. A percept is a complex state of consciousness in which antecedent sensation is supplemented by consequent ideas that are closely combined to it by association. The cerebral conditions of the perception of things are thus the paths of association irradiating from them. If a certain sensation is strongly associating itself with the attributes of a certain thing, that thing is almost sure to be perceived when we get that sensation. Where the sensation is associated with more than one reality, however, unconscious processes weigh the odds, and we perceive the most probable thing: “all brain-processes are such as give rise to what we may call FIGURED consciousness” (James, 1890, p. 82, emphasis in original). Accurate and fluent language perception, then, rests on the comprehender having acquired the appropriately weighted range of associations for each element of the language input.

Psycholinguistic and cognitive linguistic theories of language acquisition hold that all linguistic units are abstracted from language use. In these usage based perspectives, the acquisition of grammar is the piecemeal learning of many thousands of constructions and the frequency-biased abstraction of regularities within them. Language learning is the associative learning of representations that reflect the probabilities of occurrence of form-function mapping. Frequency is thus a key determinant of acquisition because “rules” of language, at all levels of analysis (from phonology, through syntax, to discourse), are structural regularities that emerge from learners’ lifetime analysis of the distributional characteristics of the language input. Learners have to figure language out.

(Available: www-personal.umich.edu/~ncellis/NickEllis/Publications_files.)