Abstract
Miller’s (1956, The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63(2). 81–97) working memory (WM) capacity of around seven items, plus or minus two, was never found by usage-based linguists to be a recurrent pattern in language. Thus, it has not figured prominently in cognitive models of grammar. Upon reflection, this is somewhat unusual, since WM has been considered a fundamental cognitive domain for information processing in psychology, so one might have reasonably expected properties such as capacity constraints to be reflected in language use and structures derived from use. This paper proposes that Miller’s (1956) number has not been particularly productive in usage-based linguistics because it turns out to have been an overestimate. A revised WM capacity has now superseded it within cognitive science, a “magic number four plus or minus one” (Cowan 2001, The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(1). 87–185). This paper suggests, drawing on evidence from spoken language corpora and multiple languages, that a range of linguistic structures and patterns align with this revised capacity estimate, unlike Miller’s (1956), ranging from phrasal verbs, idioms, n-grams, the lengths of intonation units and some abstract grammatical properties of phrasal categories and clause structure.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr. James Lambert for his assistance with a Perl script for NP extraction. Further, I am grateful to Dr. Mike Scott for some technical advice, and for the immensely valuable input of the anonymous reviewers and editorial team.
References
Aboitiz, Francisco, Ricardo R. García, Conrado Bosman & Enzo Brunetti. 2006. Cortical memory mechanisms and language origins. Brain and Language 98. 40–56.10.1016/j.bandl.2006.01.006Search in Google Scholar
Allen, Shanley & Heike Schröder. 2003. Preferred argument structure in early Inuktitut spontaneous speech data. In John Du Bois, Lorriane Kumpf & William Ashby (eds.), Preferred argument structure: Grammar as architecture for function, 301–338. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/sidag.14.14allSearch in Google Scholar
Arnon, Inbal & Neal Snider. 2010. More than words: Frequency effects for multi-word phrases. Journal of Memory and Language 62. 67–82.10.1016/j.jml.2009.09.005Search in Google Scholar
Baddeley, Alan. 2003. Working memory and language: An overview. Journal of Communication Disorders 36. 189–208.10.1016/S0021-9924(03)00019-4Search in Google Scholar
Baddeley, Alan. 2007. Working memory, thought, and action. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198528012.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Baddeley, Alan, Neil Thomson & Mary Buchanan. 1975. Word length and the structure of short-term memory. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior 14(6). 575–589.10.4324/9781315111261-11Search in Google Scholar
Bannard, Colin & Elena Lieven. 2012. Formulaic language in L1 acquisition. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 32. 3–16.10.1017/S0267190512000062Search in Google Scholar
Bannard, Colin & Danielle Matthews. 2008. Stored word sequences in language learning the effect of familiarity on children’s repetition of four-word combinations. Psychological Science 19. 241–248.10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02075.xSearch in Google Scholar
Bergen, Benjamin. 2012. Louder than words: The new science of how the mind makes meaning. Philadelphia: Basic Books.Search in Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad & Vivian Cortes. 2004. If you look at…: Lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics 25(3). 371–405.10.1093/applin/25.3.371Search in Google Scholar
BNC – The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML edn.). 2007. Distributed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/pSearch in Google Scholar
Bor, Daniel. 2016. Advances in the scientific investigation of consciousness. In Martin Monti & Walter G. Sannita (eds.), Brain function and responsiveness in disorders of consciousness, 13–24. Cham: Springer.10.1007/978-3-319-21425-2_2Search in Google Scholar
Broadbent, Donald. 1975. The magic number seven after fifteen years. In Alan Kennedy & Alan Wilkes (eds.), Studies in long-term memory, 2–18. New York: Wiley.Search in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2006. From usage to grammar: The mind’s response to repetition. Language 82(4). 711–733.10.1353/lan.2006.0186Search in Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan. 2010. Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511750526Search in Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time: The flow and displacement of conscious experience in speaking and writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Search in Google Scholar
Chafe, Wallace & Jane Danielewicz. 1987. Properties of spoken and written language. In Rosalind Horowitz & S. Jay Samuels (eds.), Comprehending oral and written language, 83–113. New York: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar
Clahsen, Harald & Claudia Felser. 2006. Grammatical processing in language learners. Applied Psycholinguistics 27(1). 3–42.10.1017/S0142716406060024Search in Google Scholar
Collins, Peter & Carmella Hollo. 2009. English grammar: An introduction. Chippenham: Palgrave McMillian.10.1007/978-0-230-36576-6Search in Google Scholar
Colston, Herbert. 2008. A new look at common ground: Memory, egocentrism, and joint meaning. In Istvan Kecskes & Jacob Mey (eds.), Intention, common ground and the egocentric speaker-hearer, 151–187. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.Search in Google Scholar
Conklin, Kathy & Norbert Schmitt. 2012. The processing of formulaic language. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 32. 45–61.10.1017/S0267190512000074Search in Google Scholar
Cowan, Nelson. 2001. The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(1). 87–185.10.1017/S0140525X01003922Search in Google Scholar
Cowan, Nelson, Emily Elliott, Scott Saults, Candice Morey, Sam Mattox, Anna Hismjatullina & Andrew Conway. 2005. On the capacity of attention: Its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes. Cognitive Psychology 51(1). 42–100.10.1016/j.cogpsych.2004.12.001Search in Google Scholar
Cowan, Nelson, Candice Morey, Zhijian Chen, Amanda Gilchrist & Scott Saults. 2008. Theory and measurement of working memory capacity limits. Psychology of Learning and Motivation 49. 49–104.10.1016/S0079-7421(08)00002-9Search in Google Scholar
Denison, David. 2004. English historical syntax: Verbal constructions. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Downing, Angela. 2015. English grammar: A university course. London: Routledge.10.4324/9781315750040Search in Google Scholar
Du Bois, John, Wallace Chafe, Charles Meyer, Sandra Thompson & Nii Martey. 2005. Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English, Parts 1–4. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium.Search in Google Scholar
Du Bois, John, Stephan Schuetze-Coburn, Susanna Cumming & Danae Paolino. 1993. Outline of discourse transcription. In Jane Edwards & Martin Lampert (eds.), Talking data: Transcription and coding in discourse research, 45–89. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick. 2001. Memory for language. In Catherine Doughty & Paul Robinson (eds.). Cognition and second language instruction, 33–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781139524780.004Search in Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick & Susan Sinclair. 1996. Working memory in the acquisition of vocabulary and syntax: Putting language in good order. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 49(1). 234–250.10.1080/713755604Search in Google Scholar
Ericcson, K. Anders, William Chase & Steven Faloon. 1980. Acquisition of a memory skill. Science 208. 1181–1182.10.1126/science.7375930Search in Google Scholar
Evans, Nicholas & Stephen C. Levinson. 2009. The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32(5). 429–448.10.1017/S0140525X0999094XSearch in Google Scholar
Evans, Vyvyan. 2014. The language myth: Why language is not an instinct. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9781107358300Search in Google Scholar
Gathercole, Susan & Tracy Alloway. 2008. Working memory and learning: A practical guide for teachers. Sage: London.Search in Google Scholar
Gathercole, Susan, Leanne Brown & Susan Pickering. 2003. Working memory assessments at school entry as longitudinal predictors of national curriculum attainment levels. Educational and Child Psychology 20(3). 109–122.Search in Google Scholar
Gazzaniga, Michael. 2015. Tales from both sides of the brain: A life in neuroscience. New York: HarperCollins.Search in Google Scholar
Gernsbacher, Morton Ann & Talmy Givón (eds.). 1995. Coherence in spontaneous text, Vol. 31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/tsl.31Search in Google Scholar
Gilchrist, Amanda, Nelson Cowan & Moshe Naveh-Benjamin. 2008. Working memory capacity for spoken sentences decreases with adult ageing: Recall of fewer but not smaller chunks in older adults. Memory 16(7). 773–787.10.1080/09658210802261124Search in Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 1984. Prolegomena to discourse-pragmatics. Journal of Pragmatics 8(4). 489–516.10.1016/0378-2166(84)90039-0Search in Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 2002. Bio-linguistics: The Santa Barbara lectures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.113Search in Google Scholar
Givón, Talmy. 2012. The adaptive approach to grammar. In Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis, 27–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Gobet, Fernand & Gary Clarkson. 2004. Chunks in expert memory: Evidence for the magical number four … or is it two? Memory 12(6). 732–747.10.1080/09658210344000530Search in Google Scholar
Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199268511.001.0001Search in Google Scholar
Graff, David & Steven Bird. 2000. Many uses, many annotations for large speech corpora: Switchboard and TDT as case studies. In Maria Gavrilidou, George Carayannis, Stelios Piperidis, Stella Markantonatou & Gregory Steinhauer (eds.), Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, 427–433. Athens: LREC.Search in Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2003. Explaining the ditransitive person-role constraint: A usage-based approach. Constructions 2. 1–71.Search in Google Scholar
Haspelmath, Martin. 2008. Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries. Cognitive Linguistics 19(1). 1–3310.1515/COG.2008.001Search in Google Scholar
Henry, Lucy. 2012. The development of working memory in children. London: SAGE.10.4135/9781446251348Search in Google Scholar
Hills, Peter & Michael Pake. 2016. Cognitive psychology for dummies. Chichester: Wiley.Search in Google Scholar
Hilpert, Martin. 2014. Construction grammar and its application to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Huddleston, Rodeny & Geoffrey Pullum 2002. The Cambridge grammar of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781316423530Search in Google Scholar
Hurford, James. 2007. The origins of meaning: Language in the light of evolution, Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Ibbotson, Paul & Michael Tomasello. 2009. Prototype constructions in early language acquisition. Language and Cognition 1(1). 59–85.10.1515/LANGCOG.2009.004Search in Google Scholar
Jackendoff, Ray. 2003. Précis of foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 26(6). 651–665.10.1017/S0140525X03000153Search in Google Scholar
Kelly, Barbara, Gillian Wigglesworth, Rachel Nordlinger & Joe Blythe. 2014. The acquisition of polysynthetic languages. Language and Linguistics Compass 8(2). 51–64.10.1111/lnc3.12062Search in Google Scholar
Kuhl, Patricia. 2004. Early language acquisition: Cracking the speech code. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 5. 831–843.10.1038/nrn1533Search in Google Scholar
Lakoff, George. 2009. The neural theory of metaphor. In Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of metaphor and thought, 17–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511816802.003Search in Google Scholar
Langacker, Ronald. 2009. Cognitive (construction) grammar. Cognitive Linguistics 20(1). 167–176.10.1515/COGL.2009.010Search in Google Scholar
Levelt, Willem, Ardi Roelofs & Antje Meyer. 1999. A theory of lexical access in speech production. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 22(1). 1–38.10.3115/992628.992631Search in Google Scholar
Liu, Dilin. 2003. The most frequently used spoken American English idioms: A corpus analysis and its implications. Tesol Quarterly 37(4). 671–700.10.2307/3588217Search in Google Scholar
MacWhinney, Brian. 2005. A unified model of language acquisition. In Judith Kroll & Annette De Groot (eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches, 39–67. New York: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Mahlberg, Michaela, Kathy Conklin & Marie-Josée Bisson. 2014. Reading Dickens’s characters: Employing psycholinguistic methods to investigate the cognitive reality of patterns in texts. Language and Literature 23(4). 369–388.10.1177/0963947014543887Search in Google Scholar
Martin, Joel, Howard Johnson, Benoit Farley & Anna Maclachlan. 2003. Aligning and using an English-Inuktitut parallel corpus. In Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 Workshop on Building and using parallel texts: Data driven machine translation and beyond, 115–118. Edmonton: Association for Computational Linguistics.10.3115/1118905.1118925Search in Google Scholar
Martinez, Ron & Norbert Schmitt. 2012. A phrasal expressions List. Applied Linguistics 33(3). 299–320.10.1093/applin/ams010Search in Google Scholar
Miller, George. 1956. The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review 63(2). 81–97.10.1525/9780520318267-011Search in Google Scholar
Oberauer, Klaus. 2005. Control of the contents of working memory – a comparison of two paradigms and two age groups. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 31(4). 714–728.10.1037/0278-7393.31.4.714Search in Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven. 1989. Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Search in Google Scholar
Pothos, Emmanuel. 2007. Theories of artificial grammar learning. Psychological Bulletin 133(2). 227–244.10.1037/0033-2909.133.2.227Search in Google Scholar
Pothos, Emmanuel & Patrick Juola. 2001. Linguistic structure and short term memory. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24(1). 138–139.10.4324/9781410603494-168Search in Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartik, 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.Search in Google Scholar
Robinson-Riegler, Bridget & Gregory Robinson-Riegler. 2008. Cognitive psychology: Applying the science of the mind. London: Pearson.Search in Google Scholar
Sampson, Geoffrey, Abdul Rahman & Alanna Morris. 2000. The Christine corpus (Release 2). Sussex: University of Sussex.Search in Google Scholar
Schmitt, Norbert, Sarah Grandage & Svenja Adolphs. 2004. Are corpus-derived recurrent clusters psycholinguistically valid? In Norbert Schmitt (ed.), Formulaic sequences: Acquisition, processing and use, 127–151. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/lllt.9.08schSearch in Google Scholar
Scott, Mike. 2015. WordSmith Tools (Version 6) [software]. Liverpool.Search in Google Scholar
Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Search in Google Scholar
Siyanova-Chanturia, Anna. 2015. On the ‘holistic’ nature of formulaic language. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 11. 285–301.10.1515/cllt-2014-0016Search in Google Scholar
Slobin, Dan I. (ed). 1985. The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition: Theoretical issue, Vol. 2. New Jersey: Erlbaum.Search in Google Scholar
Sosa, Anna Vogel & James MacFarlane. 2002. Evidence for frequency-based constituents in the mental lexicon: Collocations involving the word of. Brain and Language 83(2). 227–236.10.1016/S0093-934X(02)00032-9Search in Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun & Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of discourse comprehension. New York: Academic Press.Search in Google Scholar
Van Dyke, Julie A. & Clinton L. Johns. 2012. Memory interference as a determinant of language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass 6(4). 193–211.10.1002/lnc3.330Search in Google Scholar
Wray, Alison. 2002. Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511519772Search in Google Scholar
Wray, Alison. 2013. Formulaic language. Language Teaching 46(3). 316–334.10.1016/B0-08-044854-2/04777-5Search in Google Scholar
Wu, Chu-hsia. 1995. On the cultural traits of Chinese idioms. Intercultural Communication Studies 5. 61–82.Search in Google Scholar
Xiao, Richard. 2010. Idioms, word clusters and reformulation markers in translational Chinese. In Richard Xiao (ed.), Proceedings of the international symposium on using corpora in contrastive and translation studies 2010 conference (UCCTS2010). Lancaster: Lancaster University.Search in Google Scholar
© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Usage-based linguistics and the magic number four
- Stopgap subordinators and and but: A non-canonical structure emergent from interactional needs and typological requirements
- Form-meaning correspondences in multiple dimensions: The structure of Hungarian finite clauses
- Levels of metaphor
- Book Reviews
- Heike Behrens and Stefan Pfänder: Experience Counts: Frequency Effects in Language
- Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk: Conceptualizations of Time
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Usage-based linguistics and the magic number four
- Stopgap subordinators and and but: A non-canonical structure emergent from interactional needs and typological requirements
- Form-meaning correspondences in multiple dimensions: The structure of Hungarian finite clauses
- Levels of metaphor
- Book Reviews
- Heike Behrens and Stefan Pfänder: Experience Counts: Frequency Effects in Language
- Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk: Conceptualizations of Time