Ecological Perspectives on Language

One of the crucial sources of values-realizing psychology is Gibson’s (1966, 1979) ecological theory of perception with its focus on agency and affordances. Perceiving is an activity that depends on an animal’s embodied movement in and through various arrays (e.g., optic, acoustic) that yields information (i.e., invariants revealed through variance), that is sufficiently specific to its sources that the animal can locate food, shelter, potential mates, and the other goods (i.e., values) of its existence. Perceiving and acting are reciprocal: Neither is possible without the other, though neither causes the other to occur. Actions can be exploratory, performatory, or both. Perceiving is not fundamentally conceptual: It is a matter of an animal acting so as to detect affordances, not objects or categories or any other product of thinking. Affordances are the possibilities for the animal’s interacting with its environmental surroundings to realize goods. Cats, for example, do not see windowsills, but see/feel jumping-on and lying-down affordances. They see a field of potential actions, defined with respect to the goods of the ecosystem as a whole and its demands on them. The animal acts as an agent of the ecosystem, realizing affordances through action.

Ecological science is the study of various animals' motivated attempts to realize values. These "efforts after meaning and value" (Reed, 1996) are psychologically basic and often include modifications of the environment. In its focus on meaning and value, ecological science stands in sharp contrast to the mind-body dualism of behaviorism and cognitivism, both of which tend to reduce motivation to one or a few desires or drives. Motivation, though, is diverse and complex. Human efforts after meaning and value are distinctive because they "collectivize motivation” (p. 103), that is, the actions of any given individual have effects on subsequent efforts by others. Over time and across various people, systematic biases emerge in the directions that activities take. This developmental and social biasing leads to humans creating affordances, as well as discovering them.

This biasing process is apparent in the "active structuring of infant environments" (Reed, 1996, p. 126) that is universally observed. Central to the child's surroundings are other people: "The traditional Western view of the infant as first learning about things and then coming to understand people is almost completely backward" (p.128). Caretakers bring children into socially patterned fields of influence where certain activities and affordances are promoted and others not. Children, however, are not passive recipients of guidance by adults; rather, children’s actions increasingly scaffold the activities of caretakers. By nine months, if not sooner, children are babbling, taking a major role in games, resisting the influence of adults, and to some extent setting their own agendas, making known "their disagreements with the course of events" (p. 136).

An ecological approach to language tends to move away from syntactic and semantic idealizations that have dominated cognitive theories of language toward the boundary conditions that make language viable and useful. One direction to be explored is the production and perception of articulatory actions in auditory and visual information from voice, face, and hands (Fowler, 2003; Rosenblum, 2005). The other movement is in a more social direction, toward the physicality of two or more contextually situated bodies conversing with each other (Chambers, Tanenhaus, & Magnuson, 2004; Shockley, Santana, & Fowler, 2003; Verbrugge, 1985). These two seemingly opposite directions—toward the phonological-gestural and toward the social-pragmatic—come together in an understanding of language as a social, situated, embodied activity. Thus, Fowler (2003) makes the critical observation that linguistic laboratory tasks are nearly always done in ways that divorce the production or perception of phonemes from their being embedded within the cooperative social discourse that is their normal environment.

Ecological theory works at moving beyond two metaphors, language as representation and language as a tool. Both metaphors treat language as a means of fixing reality. A representational account treats language as a fixed set of idealized structures and forms; it objectifies language. The language-as-tool metaphor “fixes” in the sense of being an instrument of our will, a means by which we can shape the world to our liking. Linguists have found the first metaphor most tempting, social psychologists the latter. An ecological approach suggests another way: “the creativity of conversation is less about generating new syntactic combinations than jointly acting to create new possibilities that invite responsible action” (Hodges, 2007b, p. 173). With its focus on joint action, an ecological approach also sees language less as a tool of exclusion or manipulation than many pragmatic theorists would have it (e.g., Mey, 1993). The very act of conversing moves us toward sharing, rather than conforming.

Perhaps the ecological psychologist who worked hardest to develop an ecological approach to cognition and language, particularly its social dimensions, was Edward Reed (1995, 1996). More recently Hodges and Fowler have published two special issues of Ecological Psychology, Volume 22, 4, and Volume 23, 3, which explore a variety of perspectives on and contributions to the development of a more ecological approach to linguistic activity and conversing.

Vol. 22, 4
New Affordances for Language: Distributed, Dynamical, and Dialogical Resources
Bert H. Hodges & Carol A. Fowler

Information Flow and Hermeneutic Play in Perception and Dialogue
James Martin & Frederico Fonseca

Multiple Time-scales of Language Dynamics: An Example from Psycholinguistics
Joanna R?czaszek–Leonardi

Embodied, Embedded Language Use
Carol A. Fowler

Language as a social institution: Why phonemes and words do not live in the brain
Robert F. Port

Speech as the perception of affordances
S. F. Worgan & R. K. Moore

Vol. 23, 3
Dynamics and languaging: Toward an ecology of language
Carol A. Fowler & Bert H. Hodges

Grounding language performance in the anticipatory dynamics of the body
Sebastian Wallot & Guy Van Orden

Taking a language stance
Stephen J. Cowley

First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: The distributed language view
Paul J. Thibault