Four major periods are associated with psycholinguistics.

One of the first uses of the term "psycholinguistics" occurred in 1954 after a meeting of the Social Science Research Council in which a Committee on Linguistics and Psychology was formed. Behaviorists in psychology wanted to turn away from subjective concepts such as perception, desire and emotion, and study phenomena that could be observed. Behavior could be observed and speaking was considered as equivalent to behavior.

The first overview of psycholinguistics appeared in the 1960 Annual Review of Psychology. The overview notes, however, the lack of "helmsmanship" in the field and a preoccupation largely with traditional psychological endeavors (cited in Kess, 1992, p. 16).

Linguistic Period

Noam Chomsky introduced a new and unifying paradigm in the form of transformational generative grammar. Understanding grammar was seen as key to understanding language, and the sentence emerged as the prime area of focus in this new quest to understand grammar. Because transformational generative grammar tried to posit a set of grammatical rules, or "transformations" that would be universally applicable to all languages, interest developed in language acquisition as well. With impetus from Chomsky’s work, researchers argued that the capacity for language acquisition is species-specific and is a genetically determined attribute of humans and humans alone (Kess, 1992, p. 19).

A richer inter-disciplinary commitment in psycholinguistics began to unfold during this period, with participation from child development specialists and philosophers of language, in addition to psychologists and linguists.

The major premise of the cognitive approach is that language depends on human cognition. Representatives of the cognitive approach rejected the centrality and independence of grammar, arguing that cognitive principles govern the acquisition of linguistic structures. Thus, linguistic theory no longer played a dominant role in psycholinguistic theory and practice.

During this period, psycholinguistics is in a state of transition and no single prevailing school of thought prevails in the discipline. Psycholinguistics is now involved in a larger, interdisciplinary field of inquiry, namely the nature of knowledge, the structure of mental representations, and how these are used in mental processes like reasoning and decision-making (Kess, 1992, p 27).

During this period, computers are used as models of language processing functions--human minds use natural language and computers use programmatic languages to manipulate symbols and make decisions on the basis of stored and inferred knowledge (Kess, 1992, p. 24). But the limits of computers to model natural language are being increasingly recognized. As Devlin (1997) says:

Why do we say the things we do, and what makes us understand things said to us the way we do? No one theory can answer these questions. A complete answer, if such were posible, would involve a psychological study, a sociological study, a logical study, a linguistic study, a moral/philosophical study, a historical study, a biological study, and who knows what other kinds of study." (p. 267)

 

 

 

References

Devlin, K. (1997). Goodbye, Descartes: the end of logic and the search for a new cosmology of the mind. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Kess, J.F. (1992). Psycholinguistics: psychology, linguistics, and the study of natural language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.