Haskins Publications

Number	547
Year	1985
Drawer	9
Entry Date	11/18/1999
Authors	Mattingly, I. G., & Liberman, A.
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Publication	The Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 8:1, 24-26.
url	http://www.haskins.yale.edu/Reprints/HL0547.pdf
Abstract	[Introduction] Having long found reason to believe that speech is special, we have, naturally enough, been surprised at the firmness with which others have asserted the contrary- that speech is just like everything else, or, what comes to the same thing, that everything is special, too. Apparently, our claim has run counter to some deeply held conviction about the nature of mind. One of Fodor’s achievements is that he makes this conviction explicit. On the orthodox view, as Fodor sees it, mental activities are “horizontally” organized; arguments for the specialness of speech and language fit better with the assumption that they are vertical. Of the many observations provoked by Fodor’s lucid analysis of these opposing views, we can here offer only two. The first has to do with the relations among vertically organized input systems; the second, with the relations between input systems and output systems.
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