psycholinguistics an interdisciplinary research area that uses theoretical descriptions of language taken from linguistics to investigate psychological processes underlying language production, perception, and learning. There is considerable disagreement as to the appropriate characterization of the field and the major problems. Philosophers discussed many of the problems now studied in psycholinguistics before either psychology or linguistics were spawned, but the self-consciously interdisciplinary field combining psychology and linguistics emerged not long after the birth of the two disciplines. (Meringer used the adjective ‘psycholingisch-linguistische’ in an 1895 book.)
Various national traditions of psycholinguistics continued at a steady but fairly low level of activity through the 1920s and declined somewhat during the 1930s and 1940s because of the antimentalist attitudes in both linguistics and psychology. Psycholinguistic researchers in the USSR, mostly inspired by L. S. Vygotsky (Thought and Language, 1934), were more active during this period in spite of official suppression. Numerous quasi-independent sources contributed to the rebirth of psycholinguistics in the 1950s; the most significant was a seminar held at Indiana University during the summer of 1953 that led to the publication of Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems (1954), edited by C. E. Osgood and T. A. Sebeok – a truly interdisciplinary book jointly written by more than a dozen authors. The contributors attempted to analyze and reconcile three disparate approaches: learning theory from psychology, descriptive linguistics, and information theory (which came mainly from engineering). The book had a wide impact and led to many further investigations, but the nature of the field changed rapidly soon after its publication with the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics and the cognitive turn in psychology. The two were not unrelated: Chomsky’s positive contribution, Syntactic Structures, was less broadly influential than his negative review (Language, 1959) of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Against the empiricist-behaviorist view of language understanding and production, in which language is merely the exhibition of a more complex form of behavior, Chomsky argued the avowedly rationalist position that the ability to learn and use language is innate and unique to humans. He emphasized the creative aspect of language, that almost all sentences one hears or produces are novel. One of his premises was the alleged infinity of sentences in natural languages, but a less controversial argument can be given: there are tens of millions of five-word sentences in English, all of which are readily understood by speakers who have never heard them. Chomsky’s work promised the possibility of uncovering a very special characteristic of the human mind. But the promise was qualified by the disclaimer that linguistic theory describes only the competence of the ideal speaker. Many psycholinguists spent countless hours during the 1960s and 1970s seeking the traces of underlying competence beneath the untidy performances of actual speakers. During the 1970s, as Chomsky frequently revised his theories of syntax and semantics in significant ways, and numerous alternative linguistic models were under consideration, psychologists generated a range of productive research problems that are increasingly remote from the Chomskyan beginnings. Contemporary psycholinguistics addresses phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic influences on language processing.
Few clear conclusions of philosophical import have been established. For example, several decades of animal research have shown that other species can use significant portions of human language, but controversy abounds over how central those portions are to language. Studies now clearly indicate the importance of word frequency and coarticulation, the dependency of a hearer’s identification of a sound as a particular phoneme, or of a visual pattern as a particular letter, not only on the physical features of the pattern but on the properties of other patterns not necessarily adjacent. Physically identical patterns may be heard as a d in one context and a t in another. It is also accepted that at least some of the human lignuistic abilities, particularly those involved in reading and speech perception, are relatively isolated from other cognitive processes. Infant studies show that children as young as eight months learn statistically important patterns characteristic of their natural language – suggesting a complex set of mechanisms that are automatic and invisible to us.
See also CHOMSKY, COGNITIVE SCIENCE , GRAMMAR , PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAG. R.E.G.