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Dynamics and Languaging:

Toward an Ecology of Language

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DOI: 10.1080/10407413.2011.591254

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Ecological Psychology, 23:147–156, 2011
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1040-7413 print/1532-6969 online
DOI: 10.1080/10407413.2011.591254

Dynamics and Languaging:

Toward an Ecology of Language

Carol A. Fowler
Department of Psychology
University of Connecticut
Haskins Laboratories

Bert H. Hodges
Department of Psychology
Gordon College and University of Connecticut

We introduce the second of 2 special issues of Ecological Psychology that present

papers from a conference, “Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter)action,”
held at Gordon College in June 2009. The articles in this issue situate the study
of language use in two kinds of context that are central to an understanding of
“languaging” activities in the social settings in which they occur. The first is the
context of dynamical systems theory. Wallot and Van Orden show how a dynamical
systems approach can illuminate language use as the intentional and creative
activity that it is. Cowley and Thibault illustrate the distributed language approach.
Cowley follows Gibson (1979/1986) in comparing language understanding to
picture perception. Thibault illustrates the wholly embedded nature of language
use in an evocative example of 2 boys offering a description of aliens they have
learned about in a story. All of the contributors emphasize language as embodied
social action deeply embedded in the social contexts of talking. The articles in this
issue and its predecessor, Ecological Psychology 22(4), offer valuable insights for
development of an ecological theory of language use.

Correspondence should be addressed to Carol A. Fowler, Psychology Department, University of

Connecticut, Box 1020, Storrs, CT 06269. E-mail: carol.fowler@uconn.edu

147
148 FOWLER AND HODGES

Gibson claims that the information available to perceptual systems of different

species is specific to environmental events and therefore it is not arbitrary: : : :
Dialogically coordinated utterance activity between individuals in talk is an ex-
tension of this fundamental principle, not something that is completely different.
(Thibault, this issue, p. 220)

MAKING ROOM FOR CREATIVITY

The academic study of linguistics and psycholinguistics can foster “functional

fixedness” (Duncker, 1945), habits of thinking about language and its uses that
are very difficult to evade. Yet those habits may be limited in what they have to
offer to an ecological understanding of language as a dynamic, social, interper-
sonal activity. The articles in this special issue provide helpful and provocative
pushes out of familiar attractor basins and toward an ecological approach to
the study of language. This destabilization of our usual ways of approaching
language likely reflects a crucial characteristic of some complex systems that
contributors Wallot and Van Orden identify as frustration, a state that makes
“room for creativity” in those systems (Wallot & Van Orden, this issue, p. 158).
This special issue of Ecological Psychology follows an earlier one, 22(4), in
presenting papers that emerged from a conference held at Gordon College in
June 2009, “Grounding Language in Perception and (Inter)action.” The meeting
was sponsored by the Distributed Language Group (DLG), a group of scholars
developing perspectives on language that are meant to challenge traditional ones
in which languages are seen as static, symbolic codes transmitted from speakers
to listeners. Conference attendees and contributors mainly represented three
interlocking groups of theorists, including members of the DLG, ecological
psychologists, and dynamical systems theorists. Papers in both special issues
represent ideas and research from each of these perspectives.
In the present issue, the article by Wallot and Van Orden represents both
ecological psychology and dynamical systems approaches; those by Cowley
and Thibault primarily represent the DLG, but they also make ample use of
ecological and dynamical perspectives. Compatible ideas and theoretical com-
mitments cross cut all three papers. Together, the contributions provide valuable
guidance to theorists and researchers interested in developing fresh perspectives
on language and a more comprehensive account of the dynamics of humans
speaking and listening together.
The field of ecological psychology is particularly well positioned to take on
the study of language use as a central activity of human living. In the few decades
since its emergence as a theoretical approach, the attention of most ecological
theorists has been on the foundational skills of perceiving and acting, skills
required for the very survival of animals in their niches. These decades have
 DYNAMICS AND LANGUAGING 149

seen an important advance in our understanding of perceiving and acting that has
been achieved by embedding their investigation in the context of a dynamical
systems approach (e.g., Kelso, 1995; Kugler & Turvey, 1987; Warren, 2006). In
this same time period, theorists have recognized the importance for an ecological
psychology of investigating systems that encompass more than one human
perceiver–actor (e.g., Baron & Hodges, 2007; Marsh, Johnston, Richardson,
Schmidt, 2009; Marsh, Richardson, Baron, & Schmidt, 2006; McArthur &
Baron, 1983) in activities in which they coordinate with one another and with
their environment in the service of joint intentions. These are the very kinds of
activities in which speaking and listening are likely to be integral parts.
Since the beginnings of the ecological approach (especially, Gibson,
1979/1986), some ecologists have ventured into the domain of language.
Best (1995) and Fowler (1986, 1996) have proposed that speech, like other
ecological events, can be directly perceived (Gibson, 1966; Kelley, 1986). Other
investigators have explored language as a “coordination device” (Clark, 1996) in
which people talking entrain in various ways with their own actions or with those
of interlocutors (e.g., Giles, Coupland, & Coupland, 1991; Shockley, Santana,
& Fowler, 2003; Treffner & Peter, 2002) and in which nonverbal aspects of
speaking and listening (e.g., manual gestures) affect linguistic interpretation
(Treffner, Peter, & Kleidon, 2008). As Cowley notes in his contribution to this
issue, Gibson (e.g., 1979/1986) himself wrote a little about language, usually
focusing on utterances as instances of indirect (mediated) perception, more or
less like picture perception. Other theorists have addressed, in a preliminary
way, how utterances can serve to convey meaning to listeners (e.g., Verbrugge’s
1985 idea of utterances as catalysts). Finally, Reed (e.g., 1996) and others (e.g.,
Zukow-Goldring, 1997) have addressed language learning and its development
from an ecological perspective.
Despite its advantageous positioning to study language as a meaningful,
values-realizing activity that plays a fundamental role in human life, ecological
researchers have not yet tackled language in a comprehensive way or addressed
many of the very difficult issues that arise in such an effort (Hodges, 2009; Reed,
1996). The three articles in this special issue take bold steps toward doing so.

CRITICAL STATES

In their contribution, Wallot and Van Orden extend to language use the per-
spective on perceivers–actors as dynamical systems. As they note, Tuller and
colleagues (e.g., Tuller, Case, Ding, & Kelso, 1994; Tuller, Jantzen, & Jirsa,
2008) have pioneered this effort in their investigations of phonetic perception.
However, Wallot and Van Orden take a more global perspective. They suggest
that a dynamical systems approach offers ways to address such fundamental
150 FOWLER AND HODGES

issues for understanding language (and for other kinds of perceiving and acting)
as intentions, novelty in action, and control, and it offers analytical tools for
revealing the character of the systems engaging in language use.
Those systems tend to be “interaction dominant,” consisting of multiple inter-
acting components at multiple spatial-temporal scales (cf. Raczaszek-Leonardi,
˛
2010; Thibault, 2004a). The interactions are both competitive and cooperative in
character so that the evolving states of systems are never uniformly harmonious
or, alternatively, pervasively chaotic. Instead, systems are persistently poised near
critical states or “tipping points” at which particulars of current circumstances
(“contingencies”) lead to one outcome or another in the service of intentions.
This character of complex dynamical systems underlies the novelty, but the
constrained or relevant novelty, of behavior, including activities such as talking,
listening, writing, and reading.
The dynamical systems approach to language use has, so far, been applied
in experimental research to tractable paradigms in which intentions are highly
constrained and in which control parameters that move the systems through
their state spaces are easy to recognize and manipulate. Wallot and Van Orden
describe the work of Tuller and colleagues (e.g., 1994, 2008) on perception of
say or stay as an acoustic parameter is varied in a systematic way, and their own
work on such simple tasks as reading words. This work is important in exposing
the value of this approach both for understanding aspects of language use and,
in particular, for revealing its very unspecial nature.
Ultimately, however, ecological researchers want to extend the focus of re-
search to utterances that exploit the full expressive power of language and to
the interpersonal events within which utterances accomplish more than the ful-
fillment of the highly constrained intentions of experimenters studying phonetic
perception or word naming. The contributions in this special issue help to move
the focus of attention in these directions.

CONSTRAINED EMERGENT INTERACTION,

NOT RULE FOLLOWING

It is deeply entrenched in the thinking of most language researchers and lan-

guage theorists that there is an object, “language,” that consists of forms and
phonotactic and syntactic constraints on how the forms can compose utterances.
Speakers encode the meanings they intend to convey into structured sequences
of language forms and then, by talking, transmit them to listeners who decode
them to recover the encoded meanings. It is highly disconcerting to have these
entrenched understandings challenged. But it is also thrilling, in the way that
genuinely new, even revolutionary, ideas can be to have them challenged. How
can anyone write sincerely, “No inner lexicon or grammar is required because,
 DYNAMICS AND LANGUAGING 151

like meanings, wordings arise during coordinated activity” (Cowley, this issue,
p. 192).1
As surprising as Cowley’s claim is, Thibault and Wallot and Van Orden appear
to agree. As Thibault (this issue) puts it,
Verbal patterns are not pregiven formats or already constituted lexicogrammatical
units that agents only have to retrieve from a stored system of options: : : : Wordings
are possibilities for (inter)action. They are “virtual multiplicities” (De Landa, 2002,
p. 156) that are indeterminate yet progressively individuated through symmetry-
breaking cascades in actualized occasions of linguistically mediated social inter-
action. (p. 238)

Compatibly, Wallot and Van Orden question traditional theories in which regu-
larities in language, such as syntactically determined word orders, are identified
with mental structures that are encoded into spoken utterances and accessed by
listeners decoding the speech they hear.
Cowley and Thibault provide case study evidence from naturally occurring
speech of the rapid attunement of prosodic dynamics across speakers and the
ways in which this attunement yields much of the meaning of what is happening
(rather than emerging from syntactic and semantic analysis of word forms alone).
The evidence suggests to them that comprehension emerges from dynamics, “a
continuous anticipatory flow” in which “perpetual coordination is essential” so
that speakers and hearers are “always making room for creativity” (Wallot &
Van Orden, this issue, pp. 157–158). Relatedly, Wallot and Van Orden (this
issue) conclude that “the irreducible unit of psycholinguistic analysis becomes
the perception–action cycle” (p. 169). Thibault and Cowley make clear that such
cycles are dialogical, involving multiple persons across time rather than being
confined to a single body or a single intention.
Both Cowley and Thibault distinguish first- and second-order language. First-
order language or languaging is fundamentally coordinated, public action: “First-
order languaging is a whole-body sense-making activity that enables persons to
engage with each other in forms of coaction and to integrate themselves with
and to take part in social activities that may be performed either solo or together
with other agents” (Thibault, this issue, p. 215). As Thibault’s extended example
of two boys describing some aliens who have come to Earth makes clear, the
sense-making activity includes, but is not by any means limited to, vocal tract
actions. It also includes coordinated bodily action. The boys “lock into and
exploit each other’s body dynamics : : : in order to create something that could
not have been created by either boy acting alone” (p. 225). Sense making is

1 Wordings are the verbal patterns that listeners come to be aware of that have historical-cultural

significance, patterns that would not have the intended significance if the speaker was speaking to
someone with a different cultural history.
152 FOWLER AND HODGES

a dialogical process that creates meaning rather than simply recoding language
forms into novel sequences.
Second-order language refers to “lexicogrammatical patterns,” which function
as “attractors : : : that guide and constrain first-order languaging. They are
stabilized cultural patterns on longer, slower, cultural time scales” that grow
out of the “interactional needs and motives” of a population of speakers-hearers
(Thibault, this issue, pp. 216–217). These lexical and grammatical patterns are
what traditional linguistics treats as language per se rather than the dynamics
Cowley and Thibault want to emphasize. Thibault and Cowley propose that these
social-cultural patterns do have a crucial role to play in serving as constraints
on the many degrees of freedom of vocal tract gesturing in languaging, yielding
less unruly dynamics (Tabor, 2009). From the view of traditional linguistics, this
constraint process is often characterized as biologically encoded and is generally
characterized as rule governed. The point of all three articles is that something
more social, ecological, and dynamical is going on in linguistic activity that is
not captured in these rule-following models.

THE SEARCH FOR MEANING

An issue central to language is how utterances can mean something to inter-

locutors. An ecological approach to language should be in a particularly good
position to address such issues because it takes language to be grounded in
perception and action, which are themselves grounded in environment-organism
mutuality (Raczaszek-Leonardi,
˛ 2010). However, this issue has not proved easy
for ecological theorists and has not attracted the attention it deserves. Partly,
the difficulty reflects the limited attention that ecologists have devoted to social
dimensions of perception and action (Hodges & Fowler, 2010), although this
has begun to be addressed, as noted earlier.
To address how utterances can be meaningful for interlocutors, Cowley ex-
plores and extends Gibson’s (e.g., 1979/1986, 1954/1982) comparison of lan-
guage understanding to picture perception. Perceiving both pictures and utter-
ances involves discrepant forms of awareness. In the case of a picture, we
can focus on its surface properties, but, alternatively, we can perceive what
is depicted. Likewise, in respect to languaging, we can perceive vocal tract
actions as audible patterns, but, at the same time, we can take a language
stance and perceive the historically derived significance.2 Gibson (1954/1982)

2 That is, an utterance, for example, “Let’s do lunch,” provides information to an interlocutor

not only about the vocal gestures of the speaker producing them but also, in the historical context
of languaging in which the interlocutor is embedded, about an affordance, in the example, an
opportunity to do lunch.
 DYNAMICS AND LANGUAGING 153

proposed that seeing a picture is more like ordinary perceiving than is listening
to a verbal description, and Cowley suggests that speech might be more like
producing or perceiving an “artistic” (i.e., intentional) picture than a “realistic”
(i.e., conventional) one. It may seem as though Cowley is moving toward some
free-flowing, constructivist account of meaning making, but that is not the case.
Integrating insights from various sources—Gibson (1979/1986), Dennett (1969,
1991a, 1991b), Wittgenstein (1958), Peirce (1940), Fowler (2010), Steels and
Belpaeme, (2005), among others—he lays out a bold vision that has coordination
as its central motif but with an emphasis on its being distributed, not only across
mind and body as articulated in Wallot and Van Orden but also across bodies,
histories, and nonlocal constraints. His story of distributed dynamics is very
close to the one Wallot and Van Orden tell, but its challenge may be more
unsettling, if anything, than theirs.
It is essential to the understanding of first-order languaging to recognize
that wordings do not constitute, by themselves, the communicative behaviors of
language users. Natural language use is like this, as Thibault’s example of two
boys describing aliens illustrates. It is deeply embedded in the larger context of
interpersonal interactions. It is also embedded in a larger physical ecology. As
Cowley (this issue) puts it,

[This] article is concerned with showing how our shared world can stand in
for a language faculty. No inner lexicon or grammar is required because, like
meanings, wordings arise during coordinated activity: : : : Although determinate
(inner) meanings could (in principle) anchor phonological types, the contrary is
suggested here. (pp. 192–193)

Whereas Cowley’s phrasing pushes back against familiar models of cognition

and language, Thibault’s (this issue) way of framing the relation of dynamics,
wordings, and meaning pushes forward in a way that could hardly be more
ecological in its tone:

The dynamics of first-order languaging and their evolution are attracted to a

culturally distributed set of topological invariants: : : : Languaging is a distributed,
nonlocal organization of process on a diversity of timescales. It is one manifestation
of the property of nonlocality that is exhibited by all living systems: : : : Languaging
agents, like all living systems, are anticipatory systems. (pp. 217–218)

He goes on to provide what might serve as a summary description of the

collective argument of this special issue.

The study of language as disembodied formal abstracta fails to reveal the in-
tentionally and affectively modulated character of its dynamics, along with the
essentially nonarbitrary ways in which languaging behavior is a flexible adaptation
154 FOWLER AND HODGES

to the ecosocial environments with which it is coupled (Thibault 2004a, 2004b).

Second-order language is no less real than the dynamical properties of first-order
languaging, though it exists on a different spaciotemporal scale as a set of virtual
patterns—a structured space or contrast set of cultural possibilities that defines and
constrains the sociocognitive interactive capacities and tendencies of a population
of agents. (p. 219)

Thus, information made available through talk is not arbitrary. As a consequence,

“we now confront exclusively ecological questions about language performances
: : : asked with respect to the relation between task and participant : : : [which]
turns the research program of psycholinguistics into a program that confronts
direct perception and perception-action measurement” (Wallot & Van Orden,
this issue, p. 179).

UNDERSTANDING AND UNRESOLVED TENSIONS

In the final sentence of their paper, Wallot and Van Orden (this issue) suggest
that in listening and speaking we seek understanding: “Language performance
is the product of interaction-dominant dynamics, which anticipate the future as
embodied propensities to speak or listen with understanding” (p. 180). But what
is understanding? The distinguished social theorist Charles Taylor has proposed
that “the great challenge of this century, both for politics and for social science,
is that of understanding of the other” (Taylor, 2011, p. 24). Understanding an
other, an interlocutor, is not equivalent to knowing him or her as we might know
an inanimate object. If the end of knowing is explanatory adequacy and ability
to control, then the end of understanding is to be able to function together and
through listening to the other have one’s individual intentions “undone, refuted
: : : [or] needing to be reconstituted” (Taylor, 2011, p. 26). Understanding is
quite distinct from objectifying the other, determining what the other can say so
there can be no surprises. To converse with the other is to be constantly open
to being surprised.
What is said in this special issue may be surprising. We hope so. The
challenge of real conversations is that our ways of thinking and doing are
interrupted by others whose views and ways are different from our own. Perhaps,
though, these surprises can help us see ourselves better, including what we are
doing as we interact with others, especially in our conversing. Will we find, as
Thibault (this issue) suggests, an “equilibrium” and a “harmony” in doing so
(p. 239), or will we find the frustration of which Wallot and Van Orden speak?
We suspect the answer is frustration, but we remind ourselves that frustration is
another name for the ongoing balance between collapsing into chaos or into the
rigidity of functional fixedness.
 DYNAMICS AND LANGUAGING 155

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Preparation of the article was supported by Grant HD-001994 to Haskins Labora-

tories and by National Science Foundation Grant BCS-0843219 to Bert Hodges.
We thank all those who participated in the Distributed Language Group
conference at Gordon College and especially the contributors to this special
issue.

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