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
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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