[From: Bruce Nevin (Mon 921221 15:54:55)]
Bill,
Apologies for being such a sketchy presence. Hopefully, things
will lighten up.
Harris (_A Theory of Language and Information_) suggests that
both in language acquisition and in the evolution of language a
relatively small stock of words comes first, then later the
system of shared, socially instituted contrasts, which in turn
support acquisition and control of a larger and more complex
vocabulary and (in the case of acquisition) the distinguishing of
morpheme boundaries in more complex heard utterances (by the
stochastic dependence that we have discussed).
The initial vocabulary is probably mostly monosyllables. It
strikes me that a syllable could be an auditory configuration
perception. The tricky issue is that there must be duration for
auditory perception. From an analytic point of view adopted
*after* acquisition of the contrasts, the duration of a syllable
means sequence or the seeming sequence of the event level. But
if duration (without analysis into sequential components) is
necessary for auditory configuration perception, then no event
level of perception is required to account for it.
Perhaps the same argument could be extended to bisyllabic or even
trisyllabic morphemes (and a fortiori monomorphemic words).
How well does it transfer to other sensory modalities? Is some
duration implicit in other kinds of configuration perceptions?
The issue of configurations of configurations, which still I have
not properly digested, provides a related angle on all of this.
Sorry to be so brief. Got to sprint for the train now.
Be well,
Bruce
bn@bbn.com