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the S-R theorist, 'we risk arriving at the
conviction that human speech is an impossibility'.
     
     
The solution of the paradox becomes apparent when we revert from spoken
to written language. When we read, we do not perceive the shape of one
letter at a time (as in the screen-experiment just mentioned), but the
patterns of one or several words at a time; the individual letters are
perceived integrated into larger units. Similarly, when listening, we
do not perceive separate phonemes in a serial order; perception combines
them into higher units of approximately syllabic size. The speech sounds
unite into patterns as musical sounds unite into melodies. But unlike
the three-dimensional patterns perceived by the eye, speech and music
form patterns in the single dimension of time -- which seems mysterious
and baffling. We shall see, however, that the recognition of patterns
in time is no more -- and no less -- baffling than the recognition of
patterns in space, because the brain constantly transforms temporal
sequences into spatial patterns and vice versa (page 81). If you look at
a gramophone record through a magnifying glass, you only see a single,
wavy spiral curve, which, however, contains in coded form the infinitely
complex patterns produced by an orchestra of fifty instruments performing
a symphony.The airwaves which it sets in motion form, like the curve on the groove,
a sequence with a single variable function -- the variation of pressure
on the eardrum. But a single variable in time is sufficient to convey the
most complex messages -- the Ninth Symphony or the Ancient Mariner --
provided there is a human brain to decode it, to retrieve the patterns
hidden in the linear sequences of pressure waves. This is done by a
series of operations, the nature of which is as yet little understood, but
which can be represented as a multi-levelled hierarchy of processes. It
has three main sub-divisions: the phonological, syntactic and semantic.
     
     
     
'What Did You Say?'
     
     
We may regard as the first step in decoding the spoken message -- the
first step up the hierarchic tree -- the integration by the listener
of phonemes into morphemes. Phonemes are just sounds; morphemes are the
simplest meaningful units of language (short words, prefixes, suffixes,
etc.); they form the next higher level of the hierarchy. Phonemes do
not qualify as elementary units of language, first because they come in
much too fast to be individually discriminated and recognised, but also
for a second important reason: they are ambiguous. One and the same
consonant sounds different, depending on the vowel which follows it,
and vice versa, different consonants sometimes sound the same in front
of the same vowel. Whether you hear 'big' or 'pig', 'map' or 'nap',
depends, as the Haskins Laboratory experiments show [4], largely on the context . Thus the S-R chain theory breaks down even on the lowest level
of speech, because the phonemic stimuli vary with the context, and can
only be identified in the context. But as we move upward to higher levels
of the hierarchy we again meet the same phenomenon: the 'response' to a
syllable (its interpretation) depends on the word in which it occurs;
and individual words occupy the same subordinate position relative to
the sentence as phonemes relative to words. Their interpretation depends
on the context, and must be referred to the next higher level in the
hierarchy.The late K. S. Lashley -- a Behaviourist turned renegade --
has given an amusing illustration of this:
     
Words stand in relation to the sentence as letters do to the word;
    the words themselves have no intrinsic temporal 'valence'. The word
    'right', for example, is noun, adjective, adverb, and verb, and
    has four spellings and at least ten meanings. In such a sentence as
    'the mill-wright on my right thinks it right that some conventional
    rite should symbolise the right of every man to write as he pleases',
    word arrangement is obviously not due to any