A History Of Psycholinguistics

How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? This book provides a fascinating personal history of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created the discipline we call psycholinguistics.

How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them?These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries. Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan "cognitive revolution" of the late 1950s/1960s, the history of empirical psycholinguistics actually goes back to the end of the 18th century. This is the first book to comprehensively treat this "pre-Chomskyan" history. It tells the fascinating history of the doctors, pedagogues, linguists and psychologists who created this discipline, looking at how they made their important discoveries about the language regions in the brain, about the high-speed accessing of words in speaking and listening, on the child's invention of syntax, on the disruption of language in aphasic patients and so much more. The book is both a history of ideas as well of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created this discipline. Psycholinguistics has four historical roots, which, by the end of the 19th century, had merged. By then, the discipline, usually called the psychology of language, was established. The first root was comparative linguistics, which raised the issue of the psychological origins of language. The second root was the study of language in the brain, with Franz Gall as the pioneer and the Broca and Wernicke discoveries as major landmarks. The third root was the diary approach to child development, which emerged from Rousseau's Émile. The fourth root was the experimental laboratory approach to speech and language processing, which originated from Franciscus Donders' mental chronometry. Wilhelm Wundt unified these four approaches in his monumental Die Sprache of 1900. These four perspectives of psycholinguistics continued into the 20th century but in quite divergent frameworks. There was German consciousness and thought psychology, Swiss/French and Prague/Viennese structuralism, Russian and American behaviorism, and almost aggressive holism in aphasiology. As well as reviewing all these perspectives, the book looks at the deep disruption of the field during the Third Reich and its optimistic, multidisciplinary re-emergence during the 1950s with the mathematical theory of communication as a major impetus. A tour de force from one of the seminal figures in the field, this book will be essential reading for all linguists, psycholinguists, and psychologists with an interest in language.

How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? This book provides a personal history of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created the discipline we call psycholinguistics.

How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? This book provides a fascinating personal history of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created the discipline we call psycholinguistics.

This textbook is designed to serve as an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics. It is directed at filling the reading needs of courses in departments of linguistics and of psychology, presenting an integrated overview of the ways in which both disciplines have investigated the learning, production, comprehension, storage and recall of natural languages. Also detailed are those research topics that have captured the interests of psycholinguists over the past few decades. Some current topics included are modularity vs interactionism, the role of parsing strategies in sentence comprehension, and accessing the mental lexicon in word recognition. Earlier topics that have attracted considerable energy not so long ago, such as sound symbolism and linguistic relativity, are also investigated in some detail. Psycholinguistics is an enquiry into the psychology of language, but the facts of language are what generate theories about why language is learned, produced and processed the way it is. Thus there is a wide array of examples from the languages of the world, intended to provide a feeling for what the nature and range of human language are like.

The fact that one would contemplate publication of a book such as this indicates both the maturity and the growth of activity that have taken place in the field of psycholinguistics over the past few decades. More over, the fact that psycholinguists and/or scholars of the history of ideas are interested in the history of their subject clearly demonstrates that much has been accomplished, and the time is indeed ripe for the reassess ment of whence we have come. In addition, perhaps this interest in our historical past suggests that psycholinguistics is at a critical stage in its development. There are many scholars who believe that this critical stage manifests itself primarily in a search for a new paradigm. It would seem only reasonable to suggest that when members of a profession are search ing for something new, more than likely they will take time to reflect on the past in the hope that it will facilitate the fulfillment of their quest. This book as such reflects a wide-ranging search for historical roots over a millenium of research in the psychology of language and thought. Furthermore, it also reflects an attempt to open the context by introducing the broader perspectives of the history of ideas and the history of science together with their reassessment of the method of science motivated from within psychology itself.

"[This book] opens a window into the process of psycholinguistics, pulling together classic and cutting-edge research from a number of different areas to provide an engaging and insightful introduction to the study of language processing. Psycholinguistics 101 is sure to hook students with its enthusiasm as it provides a clear introduction to the modern research in this field." Maria Polinsky, PhD Harvard University How is language represented in the brain? How do we understand ambiguous language? How carefully do we really listen to speakers? How is sign language similar to and different from spoken language? How does having expertise in multiple languages work? Answering these questions and more, Psycholinguistics 101 provides an introduction to how language is stored and processed by mind and brain. The study of psycholinguistics incorporates interdisciplinary research from psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, and cognitive science. By understanding the processes that underlie language ability, we can help develop more effective ways to teach languages and understand differences in reading abilities. This book introduces the reader to the basic issues in psycholinguistic research, including its history and the methodologies typically employed in these studies. Key topics discussed include information flow, language representation, and sign language.

Learning About Language is an exciting and ambitious series of introductions to fundamental topics in language, linguistics and related areas. The books are designed for students of linguistics and those who are studying language as part of a wider course. Cognitive Linguistics explores the idea that language reflects our experience of the world. It shows that our ability to use language is closely related to other cognitive abilities such as categorization, perception, memory and attention allocation. Concepts and mental images expressed and evoked by linguistic means are linked by conceptual metaphors and metonymies and merged into more comprehensive cognitive and cultural models, frames or scenarios. It is only against this background that human communication makes sense. After 25 years of intensive research, cognitive-linguistic thinking now holds a firm place both in the wider linguistic and the cognitive-science communities. An Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics carefully explains the central concepts of categoriza­tion, of prototype and gestalt perception, of basic level and conceptual hierarchies, of figure and ground, and of metaphor and metonymy, for which an innovative description is provided. It also brings together issues such as iconicity, lexical change, grammaticalization and language teaching that have profited considerably from being put on a cognitive basis. The second edition of this popular introduction provides a comprehensive and accessible up-to-date overview of Cognitive Linguistics: Clarifies the basic notions supported by new evidence and examples for their application in language learning Discusses major recent developments in the field: the increasing attention paid to metonymies, Construction Grammar, Conceptual Blending and its role in online-processing. Explores links with neighbouring fields like Relevance Theory Uses many diagrams and illustrations to make the theoretical argument more tangible Includes extended exercises Provides substantial updated suggestions for further reading.