Alan Bale - Phonology : a formal introduction

Perhaps you have no idea what the words pangolin and maypop mean. However, if we told you that both words are nounsthe first is a kind of animal (also called a scaly anteater) and the second a kind of flower (also called a purple passionflower) you would have no problem creating plural forms for each word. In writing, you would probably guess pangolins and maypops. One noteworthy fact about these words is that the plural markers, written as -s in both forms, sound different. If you say pangolins, you will notice that the sound at the end of the word sounds like the beginning of zinc, whereas if you say maypops, the sound at the end of the word sounds like the beginning of sink. This distinction is an example of a phonological fact about your language. In this book we take the position that the study of such facts, the study of phonology, is a branch of cognitive science that ultimately can serve as a form of theoretical neuroscience.

This suggestion, that phonology is relevant to theoretical neuroscience, might strike you as outrageous. However, once we consider that you had to use your mind to come up with the plural forms for those previously unknown words, and that the mind is somehow closely related to the brain, our apparently controversial characterization of phonology becomes a platitude: our linguistic behavior, like all of our behavior, is highly dependent on our mind/brain and thus ultimately has to be compatible with the correct theory of our brains.

This is not to say we will be talking about neurotransmitters or networks of cells in this book. We wish we could; we wish phonology were at a stage where we could link our phonological knowledge to neurological states. Unfortunately it is not. No one has identified correspondences between linguistic sounds and neurological patterns. No one yet understands the correlations between a specific set of neurons firing and the representation of syllables, stress patterns, or tone, and it is not even clear that this is the right kind of correlation to look for. The study of the relationship between activity in the brain and language, or in fact any other kind of cognition, is in its infancy. However, our ambitious goal in this book is to introduce you to phonology as a useful step toward a future unification of cognitive science and neuroscience. As Gallistel and King (2009, p. vii) put it, The truths the cognitive scientists know about information processing, when integrated into neuroscience, will transform our understanding of how the brain works.

Prior to figuring out how the brain works at the (sub-)neurological level, we must first understand what the brain does: What kind of information does it store and process, and what kind of operations does it perform on this information? Our focus will be on the information structures that are storedthe representationsand the operations that are performedthe rulesin the domain of phonology.

As phonologists interested in unifying our field with other branches of cognitive science, our job is to formulate theories using terms and concepts that are accessible to specialists in fields like psychology and neuroscience. With this in mind, we have attempted to build phonological theories out of a general logical and mathematical toolbox containing functions, sets, set operations, and variables. Theories built with these tools can be easily translated to precise algorithms. Precise algorithms, in turn, should ultimately make it easier to associate neurological states and activity with phonological cognition.

It is important to note that pursuing phonological theory in this way opens the door to making connections between phonological processes and other kinds of cognition. Once we state our phonological patterns in such general terms, neuroscientists can try to figure out how functions, sets, set operations, and variables can be implemented in biological systems more generally. This basic mathematical toolbox can describe a variety of cognitive behavior, from higher level concept formation to insect navigation systems. This generality could mean that studying the neurology of a wasp making her way home might tell us something about what goes on in your brain when you say