History of Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics

An Analysis of the History and Development of Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics has been defined as the study of language and the mind; as the term implies, it is a subject that links both psychology and linguistics (Aitchinson 1). While their methods and underlying philosophies may differ, the common goal of all psycholinguists is to identify the structures and processes that provide humans with the ability to speak and understand language (Aitchinson 1). To this end, this paper provides a definition of psycholinguistics and describes the first steps taken in its development and the significant discoveries made in subsequent stages, to the present day. A summary of the research and important findings will be provided in the conclusion.

Review and Discussion

Background and Overview.

Although different sources credit different researchers with its development, all signs point to Noam Chomsky as one of the early proponents of psycholinguistics as it is applied today. In his book, The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory, Harley (2001), reports that the history of psycholinguistics is a relatively recent one. "Although it is often traced to a conference held in... 1951, the approach was certainly used before then.... If we place the infancy of modern psycholinguistics sometime around the American linguist Noam Chomsky's (1959) review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior, its adolescence would correspond to the period in the early and mid-1960s when psycholinguists tried to relate language processing to transformational grammar" (12). Likewise, Mckoon and Ratcliff (1998) point out that, "Psycholinguistics as we know it today began about 35 years ago. Since then, subfields have coalesced, each formulating its own favorite questions about language processing, and many things have been learned in the course of attempts to answer these questions. But it is a fair summary to say that most of what has been learned does not address the central issue of how readers come to experience narrative worlds" (25).

By definition, psycholinguistics is the study of psychological aspects of language; as the term applies to empirical applications, it involves investigating such concepts such as the perceptual strategies used in language acquisition, short-term and long-term memory, as well as speech perception that are based on linguistic models (Psycholinguistics 2). Likewise, Harley (2001) notes that, "As its name implies, psycholinguistics has its roots in the two disciplines of psychology and linguistics, and particularly in Chomsky's approach to linguistics. Linguistics is the study of language itself, the rules that describe it, and our knowledge about the rules of language" (12). According to Aitchinson (1998), "Psycholinguists are not necessarily interested in language interaction between people. They are trying above all to probe into what is happening within the individual" (1). The majority of the research on psycholinguistics to date has concerned language acquisition by children based on their innate ability to learn languages more quickly and with greater ease than an adult attempting to learn a second language, but other areas of research has emerged in recent years using psycholinguistic techniques as well and these are discussed further below.

Development of Psycholinguistics.

In their essay, "Language Comprehension: Sentence and Discourse Processing," Carpenter, Just, and Miyake (1995) report that, "Language has been the venue in which several key questions about cognition have been asked. Language was also one of the main battlefields in which the cognitivist perspective, as represented by Chomsky, gained ascendancy over the behaviorist view, represented by Skinner" (91). Based on research by Noam Chomsky and others, the primary objective of the psycholinguistic studies to date has been to identify how young learners come to know the grammatical processes that underlie the speech they hear. Early on, Chomsky reviewed B.F. Skinner's approach to explaining how children acquired language by experimenting with rats in boxes but disagreed with both his methods as well as his understanding of language itself: "Chomsky makes two major criticisms of Skinner's work. Firstly, the behavior of rats in boxes is irrelevant to human language. Secondly, Skinner fundamentally misunderstands the nature of language. Chomsky points out that the simple and well-defined sequence of events observed in the boxes of rats is just not applicable to language. And the terminology used in the rat experiments cannot be re-applied to human language without becoming hopelessly vague" (Aitchinson 9).

By sharp contrast, Chomsky suggested that children learn how to speak by hearing normal language - including speech that "broke the rules," in their everyday lives. Furthermore, in his review of Skinner's book, Verbal Behavior, Chomsky (1959) identified a number of significant flaws in Skinner's frame notion. According to Steinberg (1982):

One failing of Skinner's theory is that it does not distinguish grammaticality from ungrammaticality in sentences which have the same frames. Consider, for example, The bird the girl bought chirped, * John Marsha bought chirped, and *The shoe the triangle elapsed dined. While all strings are identical in terms of the key response frame of N-N-V-V, only the first is an English sentence. Such judgments can be made independently of environmental context by any speaker of the language. (9)

Interestingly, Harley (2001) reports that Chomsky's review of Skinner's book was an unusual situation in which the book review itself came to be more influential than the book that it reviewed. "Chomsky showed that behaviorism was incapable of dealing with natural language. He argued that a new type of linguistic theory called transformational grammar provided both an account of the underlying structure of language and also of people's knowledge of their language" (12).

According to Harley (2001), the primary data used by many psycholinguists today are the innate intuitions people have concerning what is and is not an acceptable sentence and how these decisions are reached without conscious thought. For instance, this author reports that most people automatically recognize when a string of words is acceptable and if it is ungrammatical is composition (Harley 12). Likewise, Miller (1999) points out that, "A person who knows a word knows much more than its meaning and pronunciation. The contexts in which a word can be used to express a particular meaning are a critical component of word knowledge. The ability to exploit context in order to determine meaning and resolve potential ambiguities is not a uniquely linguistic ability, but it is dramatically illustrated in the ease with which native speakers are able to identify the intended meanings of common polysemous words" (1).

The primary concerns of early researchers into psycholinguistics, though, were different from many today. In fact, another field of psycholinguistics has emerged in recent years that concerns the processing and comprehension of speech (Psycholinguistics 2). The growing body of evidence in this psycholinguistic field indicates that passive sentences require longer to process than their active counterparts because an extra grammatical rule was necessary to produce the passive sentence; nevertheless, much of this research remains controversial and inconclusive, and psycholinguists have been increasingly turning their attention to other functionally related and socially oriented models of language structure (Psycholinguistics 3).

In their book, Experimental Psycholinguistics: An Introduction, Danks and Glucksberg (1975) report that the central focus of this aspect of psycholinguistics concerns determining how speech is produced and understood in the context of everyday communication. In this regard, the authors note that every act of communication involves at least four discrete components:

Something to be communicated, such as an idea or a thought;

speaker's intention to transmit that idea or thought to someone else; message in the form of speech which represents that idea or thought; and; listener who intends to comprehend the message and who interprets that message.

Each of the foregoing components involves complex mental processes, but none of them is completely understood yet; however, researchers have gained some understanding of the major processes involved in communicative acts, and some concept of the general properties of natural human languages (Danks & Glucksberg 1). Research over the past two decades or so using Chomsky's concepts has made some real progress in gaining additional insights into how people acquire language, and some consistent themes have emerged concerning how psycholinguistics can be used to better understand the learning processes involved; however, more research is needed to determine how these processes operate in different cultural as well as linguistic settings.

According to Bates, Devescovi and Wulfeck (2001), "The purpose of psycholinguistic research is to uncover universal processes that govern the development, use, and breakdown of language. However, to the extent that research in a given subfield of psycholinguistics is dominated by English, we cannot distinguish between universal mechanisms and English-specific facts" (369). Therefore, some psycholinguistic researchers have investigated how language is acquired by second language learners. For instance, Grenfell and Harris (1999) report that, "Language is acquired, not learned. Grammar can operate to monitor accuracy, though the conditions for effective use of this are so constrained that it is likely to be a hindrance rather than an aid to learning. In this model, learning a second language is very much like learning a first language. It follows that it helps if the learner is not affectively inhibited; much as a baby learns without self-consciousness" (19). Likewise, Grenfell and Harris report that some studies have suggested that language is acquired through a universal natural order wherein language acquisition follows an identifiable sequence in the stages through which learners pass to achieve competence.

According to Levy and Schaeffer (2003), though, "It is a truism of research in developmental psycholinguistics that children's behavior looks quite different in different languages. Of course, it is expected that different developing languages will exhibit properties that are different simply because the languages themselves differ. But the errors look different too" (36). These authors emphasize that this general problem in the field has been the source of concern for some time now and the issue of why children make different types of errors in different languages remains unclear as well. For instance, Levy and Schaeffer ask, "Why should children subject to universal principles make a different kind of error, even when the error is not simply the missetting of a parameter?" (36). In fact, Bates and her colleagues (2001) assert that psycholinguistic universals do exist and play an important role in language acquisition, depending on the individual setting:

Languages such as English, Italian, and Chinese draw on the same mental/neural machinery. They do not 'live' in different parts of the brain, and children do not differ in the mechanisms required to learn each one. However, languages can differ (sometimes quite dramatically) in the way this mental/neural substrate is taxed or configured, making differential use of the same basic mechanisms for perceptual processing, encoding and retrieval, working memory, and planning. It is of course well-known that languages can vary qualitatively, in the presence/absence of specific linguistic features (e.g. Chinese has lexical tone, Russian has nominal case markers, English has neither). In addition, languages can vary quantitatively, in the challenge posed by equivalent structures (lexical, phonological, grammatical) for learning and/or real-time use. (Bates et al. 369)