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This book studies language behaviour in the larger context of modelling or ganismic behaviour more generally. It starts out from the basic premise that what is characteristic of organismic behaviour is that an organism uses its behavioural acts to accomplish something in its interactions with the world in which it finds itself. These two features, that an organism has a behav ioural repertoire and that it deploys specific behavioural acts from its repertoire in an intentional way, define the agentive nature of an organism. The study of organismic behaviour, then, must primarily concern itself with this agentive aspect of an organism and determine what structures and proces ses underlie these intentional organismic acts. We should be able to say what primitive structures and what primitive processes put together in what ways can give rise to the kinds of behavioural acts an organism engages in. Any explanation of behaviour that we formulate in terms of underlying structures and processes must be testable and must be consonant with the observed pheno menological aspects of such behaviour.
List of contents
1 A Framework for Modelling Behaviour.- 1.1 Preliminary Remarks.- 1.2 The Nature of Scientific Activity.- 1.3 Explanations in the Physical and the Behavioural Sciences.- 1.4 The Need for a New Experimental Framework.- 2 The Mediating Role of Language Behaviour.- 2.1 Human and Animal Communication Systems.- 2.2 Organism as a Behavioural System.- 2.3 Language Behaviour as a Second-Signalling System.- 3 Teaching Language Behaviour to Chimpanzees.- 3.1 Principal Objectives of the Review.- 3.2 The Washoe Project.- 3.3 The Sarah Project.- 3.4 The Lana Project.- 3.5 General Comments on the Chimpanzee Language Learning Experiments.- 4 Language Behaviour Schemata and Tokens in English.- 4.1 Language and Behavioural Pragmatics.- 4.2 Schemata for Descriptions.- 4.3 Schemata for Commands.- 4.4 Schemata for Controls.- 4.5 Concluding Comments.- 5 Implications of the Model for Child Language Acquisition.- 5.1 Scope of the Chapter.- 5.2 The Language Acquisition Phenomena.- 5.3 Developmental Stages in Language Acquisition.- 5.4 The Language Acquisition Process.- 5.5 Linguistics and Language Behaviour.- 6 Computer Simulation of Language Behaviour.- 6.1 Relevance of Computer Simulation to Theory Construction.- 6.2 Interpretation Assignment in Grammar-Based Models.- 6.3 PLAS, a Paradigmatic Language Acquisition System.- 6.4 Modelling Conversational Language Behaviour.- 6.5 Concluding Remarks.- Appendix A Listing of Schemata in Helen's Speech.- Appendix B Listing of Tokens in Helen's Speech.- Appendix C PLAS: An Illustration of Its Performance.- References.- Author Index.
