Victoria Fromkin (May 16, 1923 – January 19, 2000) was an American
linguistLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
who taught at UCLA. Dr. Fromkin studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors and applied this to study how language is organized in the mind.
Dr. Fromkin was born in Passaic, New Jersey as Victoria Alexandra Landish on May 16, 1923. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1944.
Victoria Fromkin (May 16, 1923 – January 19, 2000) was an American
linguistLinguistics is the scientific study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of meaning...
who taught at UCLA. Dr. Fromkin studied slips of the tongue, mishearing, and other speech errors and applied this to study how language is organized in the mind.
Biography
Dr. Fromkin was born in Passaic, New Jersey as Victoria Alexandra Landish on May 16, 1923. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1944. She later met Jack Fromkin and they were married in 1948. They went on to have a son, Mark, who died in a car accident at the age of 16.
Dr. Fromkin decided to head back to school to study linguistics while in her late 30’s. She enrolled at UCLA as a master’s student. She received her master’s in 1963 and then went on to earn her Ph.D in 1965.
That same year, Dr. Fromkin joined the faculty of the linguistics department at UCLA. Dr. Fromkin earned many achievements in her lifetime. Her line of research mainly dealt with speech errors and slips of the tongue. She collected more than 12,000 examples of slips of the tongue.
From 1971 to 1975, Fromkin was part of a team of linguistic researchers studying the speech of the "
feral childA feral child is a human child who has lived isolated from human contact from a very young age, and has no experience of human care, loving or social behavior, and, crucially, of human language...
" known as
GenieGenie is the pseudonym for a feral child who spent nearly all of the first thirteen years of her life locked inside a bedroom strapped to a potty chair. She was a victim of one of the most severe cases of social isolation in American history...
. Genie had spent the first 13 years of her life in severe isolation, and Fromkin and her associates hoped that her case would illuminate the process of
language acquisitionLanguage acquisition is the study of the processes through which humans acquire language. By itself, language acquisition refers to first language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language, whereas second language acquisition deals with acquisition of additional...
after the critical period. However, the study ended after rancorous disputes over Genie's care, and the loss of funding from the
National Institute of Mental HealthThe National Institute of Mental Health is part of the federal government of the United States and the largest research organization in the world specializing in mental illness. It is one of the 27 component organizations of the National Institutes of Health , which is in turn part of the U.S....
. Fromkin published several papers about Genie's linguistic development.
In 1974, Fromkin was commissioned by the producers of the children's television series
Land of the LostLand of the Lost is a children's television series created and produced by Sid and Marty Krofft. During its original run, it was broadcast on the NBC television network. It has since become a cult classic and is now available on DVD. It was shot in Los Angeles, California...
to create a language for a species of primitive cavemen/primates called the Pakuni. Fromkin developed a 300-word vocabulary and syntax for the series, and "translated" scripts into her created Pakuni language for the series' first two seasons.
She became the first woman in the University of California system to be Vice Chancellor of Graduate Programs. She held this position from 1980 to 1989. She also earned the title of President of the
Linguistic Society of AmericaThe Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...
. Dr. Fromkin was also chairwoman of the board of governors of the Academy of Aphasia. Fromkin was awarded the UCLA Harvey L. Eby Award.
Dr. Victoria Fromkin died at the age of 76 on January 19, 2000 from colon cancer.
Research
Dr. Fromkin contributed to the area of linguistics known as speech errors. Dr. Fromkin created a speech error database that is actually called "Fromkin’s Speech Error Database." The data were collected for several years at UCLA and is still being collected to this day.
Dr. Fromkin recorded nine different types of speech errors. The following are examples of each:
- Lexical:
- Target Utterance: A fifty-pound bag of dog food
- Error Utterance: A fifty-pound dog of bag food.
- Morphological:
- Target Utterance: A cameraman who wants to make a report about the horserace.
- Error Utterance: A cameraman who WANT to er make a reportage about the horserace who WANTS to make a reportage about the horse race.
- Morphosyntactic:
- Target Utterance: We began to collect a lot of data to determine what they may mean.
- Error Utterance: We began to collect a lot of data to determine what they may MEANT.
- Phonological:
- Target Utterance: A bread bun
- Error Utterance: A BRUN
- Phonological/lexical:
- Target Utterance: 280 days as compared to
- Error Utterance: 280 days as composed to
- Phonologic/Morphologic:
- Target Utterance: DISTINGUISHED TEACHING award
- Error Utterance: DISTEACHING TINGWER award
- Phrasal:
- Target Utterance: and then they start painting/need t'start painting
- Error Utterance: …and then they START NEED T'…need t'start painting.
- Syntactic:
- Target Utterance: a university that celebrated its 50th anniversary a couple of years ago
- Error Utterance: a university that IS celebratING its 50th anniversary a couple of years ago
- Tip-of-the-Tongue:
- Target Utterance: Cherokee
- Error Utterance: it starts with a "j"
Dr. Fromkin theorized that slips of the tongue can occur at many levels including syntactic, phrasal, lexical or semantic, morphological, phonological. She also believed that slips of the tongue could occur as many different process procedures. The different forms were:
- Addition: Someone wants to say, "bomb scare" but instead says, "bomb square."
- Deletion: Someone wants to say, "I hope you use the same brush every day" but instead says, "I hope you use the rush every day."
- Exchange: Wanting to say, "can you sign on the line" but instead says, "cas you nign on the line?"
- Substitution: Someone wants to say, "a vote for the guarneri quartet came in" but instead says, "a vote for the guarneri quartAte cAme in."
The research of Dr. Fromkin helps support the argument that language processing is not modular. The argument for modularity claims that language is localized, domain-specific, mandatory, fast, and encapsulated. Her research on slips of the tongue have demonstrated that when people make slips of the tongue it usually happens on the same level, indicating that each level has a distinct place in the persons brain. Phonemes switch with phonemes, stems with stems, and morphemes switch with other morphemes.
Critiques
Critics of Fromkin have discussed the possibility of experimenter bias during the collection of the thousands of speech errors. The speech errors were collected by observation which could indeed lead to experimenter bias or human error.
Many different scholars have contributed research to the field of modularity. Some support the view that language processing is modular, while others support the view that language processing is not modular. The research of Dr. Fromkin helped support the hypothesis that language is modular. However, many scholars have argued that even though speech errors do occur people are still able to understand one another. This indicates that language is not modular.