Passage:
In the early twentieth century, American linguistic anthropology underwent a paradigm shift with Edward Sapir’s formulation of the psychological reality of the phoneme. Prior to Sapir’s 1925 paper, physical phoneticians viewed speech sound variations strictly as continuous physical phenomena measurable by acoustic instruments. Sapir argued instead that native speakers possess unconscious cognitive patterns—mental idealizations of sound units—that override physical acoustic variations. To demonstrate this, Sapir cited instances where native speakers insisted two acoustically distinct sounds were identical, or conversely, perceived an acoustic silence as a distinct structural element based on grammatical symmetry.
While Nikolai Trubetzkoy and the Prague School of Structuralism simultaneously developed phonological theories in Europe, their methodology differed fundamentally from Sapir’s ethnographic approach. European structuralists focused on abstract functional oppositions within a formal linguistic system, treating language as an autonomous structural matrix independent of the speaker’s mental state. Sapir, deeply influenced by Gestalt psychology, insisted that linguistic structures could not be analyzed in isolation from individual cognitive processing and cultural context.
Subsequent mid-century Bloomfieldian behaviorists rejected Sapir’s mentalistic framework, favoring strict distributional analysis of observable acoustic data and dismissing internal speaker intuition as unscientific. It was not until the generative revolution of the late 1950s that linguistics formally readopted Sapir’s premise that linguistic models must account for internal cognitive structures. Nevertheless, contemporary historians of linguistics note that early generative theorists rarely credited Sapir's ethnographic field methods, preferring formal mathematical derivations over qualitative native-speaker interviews.
According to the passage, all of the following are true regarding Edward Sapir's linguistic theories or their historical reception EXCEPT:
- ANative speakers' perceptions of speech sounds can be shaped by internal grammatical symmetry rather than acoustic input alone.
- BEuropean structuralists of the Prague School analyzed linguistic systems as autonomous matrices separate from speaker psychology.
- Physical phoneticians prior to 1925 incorporated principles of Gestalt psychology into their measurements of acoustic phenomena.Cevap
- DBloomfieldian behaviorists rejected Sapir's framework due to its reliance on internal mentalistic states and speaker intuition.
- EMid-century generative theorists accepted Sapir's core premise regarding internal cognitive structures while largely ignoring his qualitative field methods.