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Chapter 1: Origins and History of Psycholinguistics
I. Aims
In this chapter, we will trace the origins and history of Psycholinguistics,
we will define its object of study and relationship with other disciplines, and we
will reflect on the importance of Psycholinguistics for EFL Teachers.
II. Development
Psycholinguistics is a hybrid discipline created out of the psychologist´s
interest in language and the linguist´s interest in psychology. In brief, it is a
discipline created from the integration of two major disciplines, Psychology and
Linguistics.
1951 – Conference sponsored by the Social Science Research Council
that brought together several leading psychologists and linguists.
There are two main fields:
1) Experimental Psycholinguistics – focus: language production and
language comprehension
Main questions: How people produce language?
How people comprehend language?
2) Developmental Psycholinguistics – focus: language acquisition
Main questions: How language is acquired during development?
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Until quite recently, Psycholinguists were psychologists influenced in
varying degrees by linguistics. There is a disagreement about the relationship
between language and cognition:
1) Psycholinguists working within the linguistic autonomy framework assume
that the linguistic system makes contact with other cognitive systems at
the level of output and input, but its rules and representations are distinct
from those systems; the structure of language can be examined
independently from how that structure is used for communication;
sentence-level syntactic structures forms the core of the linguistic system.
2) Psycholinguists working within the cognitivist framework assume that
language processing and language acquisition can best be understood
within the same framework as other cognitive processes; they do not draw
a sharp boundary between explanations of language use and language
structure.
1950s – Psycholinguistics was born rooted within the behaviorist tradition; the
idea that frequent associations between stimuli and responses (association
based learned theory) would explain the structure of language as well as the
processes of language acquisition, language production, and language
comprehension. Language was researched and viewed as “verbal behavior.”
Still in this decade the theory of Chomsky about the nature of linguistic
knowledge strongly impacted the research in the field (mentalist approach to
cognition). Chomsky argued that behaviorist learning theories did not provide
adequate explanations of language acquisition by the child. The linguistic input to
which the child was exposed was too impoverished; thus, the child must begin
the acquisition process with some innate linguistic knowledge that constrains a
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set of candidate grammars. These claims provided the basis for the development
of research on the field of developmental psycholinguistics. This research
emphasized the distinction between surface structure and deep structure.
This new trend is referred in the bibliography as “modern psycholinguistics.” At
the same time cognitive psychologists such as Miller and Broadbent and
computer scientists such as Newell and Simon developed an information
processing approach to cognition.
1960s – George Miller began to develop studies of sentence memory and
to explore the hypothesis that the language comprehension system directly
incorporates the transformational grammar, that is, the syntactic structure was
used during language comprehension processes.
1970s – Psycholinguists largely abandoned their ties with linguistic theory
(transformational grammar) and begun to focus on cognitive psychology, that is,
on cognitive basis for language acquisition, language production, and language
comprehension. Studies of sentence-level mechanisms and representations
were considered unexciting, given the constructive nature of comprehension. In
the early 1970s, W. Marslen-Wilson conducted a series of experiments that
highlighted the rapid real-time nature of language comprehension. In this decade,
there studies also investigated the role of pragmatic information in the process of
interpretation. In the middle 1970s the comprehension of stories and texts
emerged as an important research topic and a number of propositional models
for the representation of sentences and texts were developed.
1980s - Psycholinguistics began to be influenced by computational approach
within artificial intelligence, particularly from work on language understanding and
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knowledge representation. Experimental studies on syntactic processing were
stimulated.
There was an increased interest in how the different components of the
comprehension and production system communicate during processing. There
was a growing consensus that cognitive processes could be divided into two
classes: “strategic” or “controlled” processes that are flexible but slow and
“automatic processes” that are mandatory and rapid.
There was also a great focus on language acquisition research, more
specifically on mechanisms by which children construct and modify their
language. There was also reemergence of interest in the role of linguistic
structure in language behavior. Besides, there was more interaction between
researchers in cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy of mind,
and linguists that greatly influenced the research in the field.
1990s – 2000s – A number of studies in several areas have been
developed. These studies focus on diverse topics and most of them integrate
several areas, such as language and cognition; speech comprehension and
production; reading and writing, language acquisition and language learning;
bilingualism and multilingualism; translation; linguistic transfer; nonverbal
components in communication; language disorders and speech pathologies;
phonoaudiology; language and education; analysis of literary texts; mass media;
and artificial intelligence. The relationship between language and cognition
continues to be explored and it continues to be one of the main topics of
research. There is also a trend to explore possible applications of research
conducted in the field. Therefore, the expression “Applied Psycholinguistics”
started to be used more frequently than the single expression “Psycholinguistics.”
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III. Summary
In this chapter, we learned that Psycholinguistics is a branch of study
which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. This science
emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s as a result of Chomsky ideas of language,
and language acquisition. We studied the development of this science in the
years 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, and 2000.
IV. References
Tanenhaus, Michael K. “Psycholinguistics: an overview” in Newmeyer, F.
Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988, 1-37.
8th International Congress of ISAPL: 3rd Circular, ISAPL, 2007.
V. Questions and Activities
1. Clarify the following statement:
Psycholinguistics is a hybrid discipline which combines the
disciplines of psychology and linguistics. The major concerns of
psycholinguistics are the psychological processes involved in
encoding or speaking, in decoding or comprehending, and in
acquiring language.
2. On the basis of your previous knowledge, describe, in detail, our linguistic
knowledge, that is, what we really know when we know a language.
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3. “There is a fundamental disagreement about the relationship between
language and cognition that divides psycholinguists along disciplinary
boundaries.”
- Explain this disagreement.
4. Do some library or internet research and explain the concept of cognition.
5. Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study emerged in the late 1950s
and 1960s as a result of Chomskyan revolution.
a) What were the ideas presented by Chomsky that had a big impact
on the views of language and shaped this science?
b) Google the Journal of Psycholinguistics Research. Browse it and
indentify current topics of research in language acquisition,
language production, and language comprehension.
c) Discuss possible applications of Psycholinguistics to EFL teaching
in Mozambique.
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