Damian's observation about people reading French reminds me of Tim Light's report
of a poet in Hong Kong who wrote poetry in Cantonese, but couldn't actually read it
while looking at the written characters, since he had been schooled to read the characters
in Mandarin, and the visual input blocked his access to the Cantonese pronunciation.
The French had been schooled to read in Standard French, and probably subliminally
edited out the intrusive qu'. Since they had been conditioned to read only in Standard
French, it would have been difficult to force themselves to try to process the sentences
in a different grammar. This suggests different storage areas for the two varieties.
Rudy
Rudy Troike
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona USA
On Ron's point about the difference between what we think we do and what we do do, and related points: yes, and of course the problem is even muddier when issues of 'standard' / 'correct' language are mixed in, as you say! We've been talking about English, but I had an experience of this with French that made me change (or at least be tighter about) my experimental protocol.
I was investigating a morphosyntactic variable where changing a form from 'standard' to 'regional' involved only adding a word, nothing else - as in
STANDARD
1) C'est la maison oł habite Mme Toquet.
REGIONAL (I did it for the Regional French of Normandy, but others have similar variation)
1') C'est la maison oł qu'habite Mme Toquet.
TRANSLATION
"It's the house where (that) Mme Toquet lives."
In other words, the variable was the complementiser, which could either be a single _wh_-word, as in the standard variety, or a double complementiser, involving the same _wh_-word but followed by _que_ 'that'. Earlier stages of English permitted the same double complementisers.
I was asking informants to rate sentences for standardness: they had five with single and five with double complementisers. I had some surprising early results, where people whom I would have expected to see the difference were rating the two types of sentence the same - and then I read some research by Kolers (1970) which showed that people aren't necessarily conscious of seeing all the words in a line or on a page, even if they are reading it. They seem to be taking in and processing enough information from the page to get the desired meaning, or at least a sensible meaning. At the start of my data-collection, I was not asking informants to read my sentences out loud, and so I had no way of checking that they were actually conscious of the word _que_ in the non-standard sentences. Once I realised that there was a problem, I soon started getting people to read the sentences out loud! (Which had the added benefit of providing more auditory data.)
In fact, it seems likely that at least some informants might not have been conscious of the _que_ in the non-standard sentences, since they would have been much more used to reading _standard_ French, which would have single (_que_-less) complementisers in the relevant type of sentence. I reasoned that they therefore perceived the shape of a complementiser structure, and did not need to be conscious of every word in it in order to extract the desired meaning. Indeed, when I did start getting people to read the sentences, for some it took a few tries before they actually read the non-standard sentences with all the words in them, as written.
It's never as simple as you think!
Damien
--
Damien Hall
Newcastle University (UK)
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