Episodic organization in discourse and valid measurement in the sciences*

The argument here concerns the episodic organization of discourse and measurement in the sciences. It is developed in two parts. First, empirical effects of episodic organization in discourse processing are demonstrated. The impact on first and second language users is shown by demonstrating loss in comprehension when episodic organization is disrupted. Empirical evidence is also summarized showing that the depth of comprehension of episodic organization is sensitive to relatively minute elements of surface form such as the names of persons and places in the discourse. It can be inferred that the ecological validity of language tests and measures of discourse processing in general is enhanced by respecting episodic organization and reduced by disrupting it. The second part of the argument concerns the deeper question of why episodic organization enhances the ecological validity of language tests and discourse processing measurements in general. Looking into this question from the point of view of Peircean logic, we are led to a surprisingly general inference: that valid measurements of any kind depend on the episodic organization of ordinary experience. WHAT IS EPISODIC ORGANIZATION? The phrase episodic organization calls to mind the sequence of a series of episodes in a story-line as in a film or a novel. From the empirical point of view episodic organization is commonly manifested in the chronological arrangement of narratives and in ordinary reports of event sequences. In the sciences, experiments and reports of experiments are, as we will show, utterly dependent on the episodic organization of experience in general. *Address correspondence to: John W. Oller Jr, Hawthorne Regent’s Professor, Department of Communicative Disorders, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, PO Box 43170, Lafayette, LA 70504-3170, USA. E-mail: [email protected] Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 2007, Volume 14, Numbers 2–3, pp. 127 – 144 DOI: 10.1080/09296170701379336 0929-6174/07/1402–30127$16.0