A History of Psycholinguistics

A History of Psycholinguistics

1. A Historical View

The term ‘psycholinguistics’ suggests that this is a field which depends in some crucial way on the theories and intellectual interchange of both psychology and linguistics.
(i) Wilhelm Wundt (psychologist) and Leonard Bloomfield (linguist, behaviorism): new rigor and
scientific vision to linguistic theory.
(ii) Noam Chomsky (linguist, transformational generative grammar): linguistic theory fueled the
engines of psycholinguistic enterprise.
These two mature disciplines collaborate in meaningful and productive ways to approach the problems of the psychology of language.

2. Four Major Periods (Maclay, 1973)

2.1 Formative Period

The first formal contacts were established at a Social Science Research Council Summer meeting at Cornell in 1951, and a Committee on Linguistics and Psychology was formed.
This period boasted a symmetrical relationship between linguistics and psychology, because both were committed to an operationalist philosophy (behaviorism), which derives theoretical constructs from observable data by using a set of verifiable operations.
Behaviorist methodology came to focus upon rigorous experimental design and statistical analysis of data.

From linguistics:

“… The behaviorist began his own formulation of the problem of psychology by sweeping aside all mediaeval conceptions. He dropped … all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they were subjectively defined. …”

“… The behaviorist asks: Why don’t we make what we can observe the real field of psychology? Let us limit ourselves to things that can be observed, and formulate laws concerning only those things. Now, what can we observe? Well, we can observe behavior-what the organism does or says. And let me make this fundamental point at once: that saying is doing—that is, behaving. Speaking overtly to ourselves (thinking) is just as objective a type of behavior as baseball….”

From psychology:

Psychologists postulated models of stimulus-response relationships that posited internal, and thus unobservable, mediational variables, Osgood and Sebeok (1954) state that “psycholinguistics” deals directly with the processes of encoding and decoding as they relate states of messages to states of communicators.” Linguists took the states of messages as their area of research inquiry, while psychologists took the states of communicators, and by default, the encoding and decoding processes.

2.2 Linguistic Period

The rise of transformational generative grammar in linguistics is followed by its theoretical domination of psycholinguistic research, particularly from 1960 to 1969.

Chomsky (1957) argued that an operationalist philosophy cannot provide adequate grammars of
natural languages. He further argued that a deductive approach is required, and that linguistic theory has as its proper domain the competence of speakers, and not their performance.
In linguistics, this was a shift in paradigm, but in psycholinguistics this was really the introduction of one where there was none:

For psycholinguistics based on what generative grammarians thought to be crucial to an understanding of language, the starting point was the study of competence, with the study of performance a secondary activity.Most psycholinguistic experiments during this period dealt with the understanding and use of sentences, because the sentence played such an important role in defining the data and dimensions of transformational generative grammar.
Psycholinguistic studies in the 1960s tested whether the linguistic formulations embodied in transformational grammar were involved in language comprehension. They tested whether the number and complexity of mental operations performed during processing was a function of the number and complexity of formal transformations seen in the grammatical derivation of that sentence (=Derivational Theory of Complexity).

(1) a. The Seventh Fleet shelled Haiphong. (no transformation)
b. Haiphong was shelled by the Seventh Fleet. (passive)
c. The Seventh Fleet did not shell Haiphong. (negative)
d. Did the Seventh Fleet shell Haiphong? (question)
e. Was Haiphong shelled by the Seventh Fleet? (passive question)
f. Haiphong was not shelled by the Seventh Fleet. (passive negative)
g. Didn’t the Seventh Fleet shell Haiphong? (negative question)
h. Wasn’t Haiphong shelled by the Seventh Fleet? (passive negative question)

Assumption
Transformations are psychologically real.

Hypothesis
Transformationally more complex sentence should be correspondingly harder to process: in particularly, a negative or a passive sentence should take longer to process than its corresponding positive or active sentence.

Results
Passives took longer to process than actives; passive questions took longer; and negative passive questions took longest of all.

Against
When a wider variety of structures were tested, there turned out to be no simple correlation between complexity (as reflected in processing time) and the number of transformations involved in the derivation of the respective sentences.

(2) a. John picked up the box. (no transformation)
b. John picked the box up. (Particle movement)
(3) a. Kennedy was assassinated by someone.
b. Kennedy was assassinated. (PP deletion)
(4) a. The man who was sitting in the corner ordered a drink.
b. The man sitting in the corner ordered a drink. (relative clause deletion)

What is psycholinguitics

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or linguistics of psychology is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines, with neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics being the two most popular.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observation like Darwin and Piaget emphasized when studying their own children).