History of Psycholinguistics
Early Psycholinguistics
Behaviorism and Verbal Behavior
Later Psycholinguistics
Current Directions
Defined as the science of mental life
Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) as a major figure
Investigate mental events through rigorous procedures.
Important insights into the nature of the mind
Master psycholinguist: grammar, phonology, child language acquisition, etc.
Theory of language production
Word-by-word process
Edmund Huey (1968)
Reading from the perspective of human perceptual abilities
Eye-voice-span
Tachistoscope
Favored the study of objective behavior
Strong commitment to the role of experience in shaping behavior
Behaviorists preferred to speak of "verbal behavior"
Correct language models: children's speech errors were corrected
Accounts of meaning that emphasized associations among words
Noble and McNeely (1957)
Constructed an index of the "meaningfulness" of individual words
Semantic differential
Measuring the associative meanings of words by people's ratings
Linguistics
Tended to emphasize behavioristic tretments of language
Interest in phonology, semantics, and pragmatics.
Tangible progress has been made in applying psycholinguistic research to topics
Psychologists and linguists became interested in talking to one another
David McNeill (1966, 1970)
(Chomsky, 1957, 1959)
He argued that the behaviorists' accounts of language were inadequate
Associative chain theory
Discontinuous constituents
Poverty of stimulus argument
Theory of developmemt based on the concept of Ianguage uniwrsals
Chain of associations
Separate units
Not enough information in children's language
He had a powerful effect on psychological thiking about language.
George Miller
He created a bridge between psychology and linguistics
Longitudinal investigations
More well-rounded field
A strong interest in language production
An interest in the brain mechanisms associated with language
(Just & Carpenter, 1987) Reading
(Bialystok, 2001) Bilingualism
(Tartter, 1998) Language disorders