UC Santa Barbara

Recent usage-based approaches to linguistic theory have claimed that linguistic processing is driven by domain-general cognitive abilities which operate on a rich memory store that retains all the details of every experience with language, extracting patterns from these experiences purely on the basis of regular patterning. It has also been claimed that these mechanisms operate similarly on all levels of linguistic structure and at all stages of the human lifespan. Taken together, these claims imply the hypothesis that any dimension of experience can influence the linguistic knowledge and behavior of any language user. This dissertation tests this hypothesis. A series of experiments were conducted, each consisting of a prime phase and a test phase, using native English-speaking participants. In the prime phase, participants were exposed to combinations of linguistic structures (active and passive voice) and nonlinguistic contextual elements (colors, background music, sounds, or physical environments). The linguistic and nonlinguistic components of the experiences so created bore no semantic relationship to one another, but the pattern of cooccurrence between them was completely regular and reliable, such that, for each experimental participant, a particular syntactic voice always occurred in a particular nonlinguistic context. Participants then performed a picture description task, in which each picture was accompanied by one of the nonlinguistic contexts to which they had previously been exposed. The hypothesis was that, when describing each picture, participants should be more likely to use the syntactic voice which had previously been associated with the nonlinguistic context which accompanied the picture. This hypothesis was not supported by the data. Instead, it was found that the only consistently significant factor influencing the syntactic voice of participants' responses was the syntactic voice of their own previous responses: people were more likely to keep using whatever voice they had already been using. In addition, in every experiment, it was found that the results were most accurately characterized by an extremely simple model using only subject-specific and picture-specific baseline response rates. These results suggest that usage-based theories have been overly optimistic in asserting that regular patterns of experience alone are sufficient to explain linguistic knowledge and behavior. Instead, it is argued that more specific constraints on linguistic processing mechanisms are needed in order to provide a fullfledged, causal account of how people's experiences affect their mental representations of language.