History of Psycholinguistics (Paper)

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

A.    Backgrounf of Study

Psycholinguistics is a branch of study which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. It is concerned with the relationship between the human mind and the language as it examines the processes that occur in brain while producing and perceiving both written and spoken discourse. What is more, it is interested in the ways of storing lexical items and syntactic rules in mind, as well as the processes of memory involved in perception and interpretation of texts. Also, the processes of speaking and listening are analyzed, along with language acquisition and language disorders.

Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s as a result of Chomskyan revolution. The ideas presented by Chomsky became so important that they quickly gained a lot of publicity and had a big impact on a large number of contemporary views on language. Consequently also psycholinguists started investigating such matters as the processing of deep and surface structure of sentences. In the early years of development of psycholinguistics special experiments were designed in order to examine if the focus of processing is the deep syntactic structure. On the basis of transformation of sentences it was initially discovered that the ease of processing was connected with syntactic complexity. However, later on it became clear that not only syntactic complexity adds to the difficulty of processing, but also semantic factors have a strong influence on it.

CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION

A.    An Historical Overview

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. There have been two major periods in which psycholinguistic interests have flourished, once around the turn of the century, primarily in Europe, and once in the 1950s and 1960s, primarily in America (Blumenthal 1987, Reber 1987). Blumenthal (1970, 1974) has painted Leipzig's Wilhelm Wundt as the influential "master psycholinguist" during that first period, one who was prepared to demonstrate that language could be explained on the basis of psychological principles. It was a period when linguistics was prepared to exchange its older, Romanticist evaluation of language on cultural and aesthetic principles, for a more modern, 'scientific' approach to language. Wilhelm Wundt, and the new psychology, offered this with the rigor and enthusiasm that only a new scien­tific discipline can offer. Many younger linguists were keen to import this new rigor and scientific vision to linguistic theory and research, and for a time psychological concerns were directly reflected in the emerging field of linguistics. For example, all linguists know Leonard Bloomfield as the prototypical structuralist, often quoting his 1933 book as the classic text of the structuralist period in linguistics. But his little-known first book of 1914 pays careful homage to Wundtian psychology. Faced by the decline in the power of German intellectual life after the devastating first war and an equally weakened Wundtian cognitive psychology, his later book parallels the aspirations of the powerfully emerging behaviorism, but psychological theory no longer guides linguistic theory (see Kess 1983).

Curiously, there was to be another period of intellectual unity, equally fertile, equally enthusiastic, and equally brief (see Reber 1987, and McCauley 1987). This was the period after the 1960s, when lin­guistic theory fueled the engines of psycholinguistic enterprise. Specifi­cally, this was the type of linguistics founded on the theoretical pattern of transformational generative grammar, as proposed by Noam Chom­sky. But this unity of purpose also faded after several decades of experimentation based on Chomskyan theory, leaving us now with a more balanced, and certainly a more eclectic view of what psycholin­guistic theory should pursue in attempting to offer explanations for natural language. We will only pay attention to the history of psycholinguistics since that second period in the 1950s. The major reason for doing this is because this recent history reflects the changing roles of linguistics and psychology vis-a-vis one another in the contemporary discipline of psycholinguistics. It also represents a time when these two mature disciplines collaborate in meaningful and productive ways to approach the problems of the psychology of language.

B.     The Four Major Periods

Updating Maclay's useful (1973) classification of developmental steps in modern psycholinguistics, we can trace the field's progression in four major periods.

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