1

The Development and Methods of Psycholinguistics

1, We can define psycholinguistics as

the experimental study of the psychological processes
through which a human subject acquires and implements the system of a natural language.

2, The birth and evolution of psycholinguistics

Earlier psychologists were interested in the activity of language in its relationship to human thought,
and before them, it drew the attention of philosophers, as they were trying to determine
the constraints and distortions which language imposes on thought.
Although the work of these psychologists and philosophers produced a very useful body of work,
however, it failed to constitute a truly scientific discipline.
It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that the conditions for such a study started to emerge.

3, Linguistic structuralism
In the nineteenth century, grammarians and philologists were mainly interested in language development and interrelationship
and mainly adopted a historical, comparative perspective.
4, Moreover, the explanations which they provide for linguistic phenomena are generally extrinsic in nature,
being of psychological, sociological or physiological order.
5, It was Saussure (whose Course in General Linguistics, held in Geneva from 1906 onwards, was to be published, after his death, In
1916)
who first established explicitly the principles on which Modern linguistics was to be founded.
6, He introduced the distinction between language and speech (langue and parole), on the one hand,
and on the other, between the diachronic (historical) approach and the synchronic approach.
7, according to Saussure, Language is a system of signs or double-sided units.
Each sign associates a signifier (a ’sound image) and a signified (a ’concept’).
8, However, the elements of the system are defined only in terms of their interrelationships.
A sign acquires its value only through its difference from the other signs in the language
(which makes it possible to understand its arbitrary nature).

9, This structuralist conception of language was later taken up by the Prague Literary Circle (Trubetzkoy, Jakobson),
which laid the foundations of phonology.
10, Saussure’s structuralism does not rule out recourse to mental representations (’sound image’, ’concept’).
11, Bloomfield’s distributionalism, though founded on ideas very similar to those of Saussure,
such as the definition of language (code) as a synchronic system,
and the primacy of relationships over elements,
yet vehimently refutes any mentalism.
12, According to this school of thought, it must be possible to analyze and describe the structure of a language without knowing
anything about its meaning or conditions of use, without reference to the subjects who speak it, to their intentions or their thoughts.
13, In the distributional method, a linguist first tries to identify the different levels of units (phonemes, morphemes, etc.
which constitute a given corpus),
and then of determining the way in which they can be associated with one another,
through a study of the environments in which each element may occur (its distribution).
14, Later developments in linguistics called into question the structuralist thinking.
However, it played an important role in the implementation of a precise methodology
and the establishment of linguistics as an autonomous science.

1, Scientific psychology
At the same time as linguistics was defining its object of study, by getting rid of psychologism,
psychology was tilting more and more towards becoming the science of behaviour
in place of the science of the ’facts of consciousness’.
2, Watson defined psychology as the study of stimulus-response (S-R) relationships,
and restricted it to the study of something which can be observed, while disregarding introspection altogether.

3, The scientific approach is clearly reductionist, or too simple,

Watson’s behaviourism no doubt contained an implicit - but effective - guiding idea:
namely, that scientific knowledge of man is possible only if he is reduced, as far as possible, to a machine.

4, But the behaviourist ’machine’ is too simplistic.

The model it takes is that of the slot machine.
A coin is inserted into the slot (stimulus) and something comes out (response).
What happens between these two events? According to Watson, we neither know nor need to know.
5, Despite this, his successors asked themselves what was going on inside the ’black box’.
First Tolman and then Hull introduced the idea of ’intervening variables’;
Osgood and Mowrer the notion of ’mediational responses’.

6, However, the crucial move forward was to come from a completely different field.
 2

Wiener’s cybernetics proposes a general theory of machines, now conceived of not as simple apparatuses for the transmission of
energy but as general systems of transformation.
The same theory was also to popularize the notion of information, in connection with which Shannon was simultaneously developing
a mathematical theory.

7, From a mechanical model we progress to a more generalized informational model,

and psychologists were swift to see the advantages they could draw from it.
8, Armed with the first fully elaborated theories
which attempted to go beyond the S-R model - and, in particular, with the support of information theory –
psychology in 1950 was ready to join forces with linguistics once more.

1, First stage: language as code

It was in 1951 that Cornell University hosted a first summer seminar which gathered together a number of psychologists and linguists
who wished to define a common field of research.
The results were promising enough for second seminar to be held two years later at the University of Indiana.
The following year (1954) a joint work, compiled under the direction
of Osgood and Sebeok - a psychologist and a linguist - brought together the fruits of these interdisciplinary efforts.
2, Psycholinguistics:
A survey of theory and research problems defined a new discipline,
gave it a name and proposed a vast research programme.

3, Three disciplines were brought together to form this movement.

First of all, psychology, primarily represented by theories of learning
Secondly, structural linguistics, characterized by the distributionalist methods of Bloomfield and Harris
(as well as the works of Jakobson).
Thermal partner was the information theory which had developed from the works of Shannon.
This theory introduced a large number of new concepts along with a mathematical apparatus borrowed from probability theory, and
was to provide much of the theoretical background.

Second stage: language as grammar

1, Chomsky’s work Syntactic Structures appeared in 1957.
It was very soon to create considerable excitement in psycholinguistic circles,
2, Throughout the 1960s generative and transformational grammar was to constitute
the almost exclusive basis of works in psycholinguistics.
3, According to Chomsky, the description of a language must consist of
the formulation of a finite set, of all the correct (’well-formed’) sentences of the language, and only these.
Such a set of rules constitutes a generative grammar.
4, These rules are of two types:
(a) phrase-structure rules
which give rise to ’underlying phrase markers, via a series of ’rewritings’; they result in strings of
symbols;
(b) transformational rules
(some obligatory, some optional) which are applied to these strings to produce ’terminal strings’.
The application of morphophonemic rules to these strings finally produces the sentence in the form in which it is spoken.

5, in 1965, Chomsky provided a new version of his model by publishing a theory on an Aspects of the Theory of Syntax
(often known as the Standard Theory’).
This included the following new principal elements:
 The syntactic component of language, which has just been described, is joined by a semantic component
(which interprets the meaning of the sentence) and a phonological component (which translates the terminal string into sounds).
 The semantic component bears on the deep structure of the sentence that is to say, on the structure obtained through the
application of phrase-structure rules before the performance of transformations. This implies that the transformations have no
effect on meaning (and also does away with the idea of ’optional transformations’).
 The lexical elements are inserted at the deep-structure level.

6, Finally, Chomsky distinguishes between linguistic competence

 3

(the intuitive knowledge which all speakers possess of the rules of their language as they are described by the linguist)
and performance (which concerns the processes linked to the production and comprehension of specific utterances).
7, Psycholinguistic research initially sought to prove the psychological validity of Chomsky’s descriptions.
Interpreting (incorrectly) the formal rules for the generation of utterances as the description of psychological operations,
this research undertook many ingenious experiments in the attempt to demonstrate the reality of these operations.

8, One of the first fields in which Chomsky exerted considerable influence was that of language acquisition.
Thus a considerable body of work has been devoted to the establishment of the ’grammars’ of children’s language,
the identification of the stages in their construction and the way in which they progressively come to resemble adult grammar.
In effect, at the root of linguistic competence in human beings Chomsky was postulating the existence of an innate language
acquisition device (LAD) which functions independently of cognitive development.”
This LAD would allow children to proceed from an implicit knowledge of what the rules of a language must be in general to a
progressive elaboration of the rules of their mother tongue on the basis of the utterances they hear.

10, The error of Chomskyan-inspired psycholinguistics (an error which can, of course, be established only with the benefit of
hindsight) was doubtless to understand a purely formal model of language description as a psychological model of processes.
Nevertheless, we should not underestimate the positive aspects of this stage.
In the first place, the antibehaviourist reaction which Chomsky initiated now appears to be irreversible.
Even if the mental operations postulated on the basis of generative grammar were not confirmed by experimental results, they have at
least inspired psychologists with the idea that it is possible to attempt to construct models of the functioning of the human mind
without necessarily lapsing into the illusions of introspection.
Moreover, psycholinguistics has played an important role in the development of the cognitivist approach in psychology.
Secondly, as we shall see, even the failures encountered by the Chomskyan perspective on the problems have brought to light aspects
of language processing which would certainly not have been revealed otherwise.

Third stage: psycholinguistics today

1, From the 1970s onwards, psycholinguistics started to react against its former domination by generative linguistics.
This reaction took two forms:
on the one hand, some psycholinguists still considered that the Chomskyan theory provided the most satisfactory description of the
structure of language, and , they emphasized performance strategies.
on the other hand - and more radically - a number of researchers refused to consider any linguistic theory as definitive
and looked instead to a variety of linguists (as well as philosophers of language) for heuristic suggestions
with a view to establishing experimentally a psychological model of the language user.
2, Although the attempt to define the essential traits of contemporary events is a problematic one,
we can attempt to define the following characterization of modern-day psycholinguistics:
a, it is tending towards an increasing integration into the framework of cognitive psychology.
a number of researchers, following Fodor (1983), continue to hold on to
the theory of an autonomous language faculty,
a ’module’ possessing its own structure which is independent of the rest of the subject’s mental life.
For many other researchers, language processing is simply one of the aspects of the general functioning of the mind.
As we shall see, the debate is not yet over. In bolh cases, however, the nature of the mechanisms to be identified is the same,
and is expressed in the same terms. The approach in terms of information processing - which has continued to gain
ground over the last twenty years, and has brought about psychology’s definitive break with the behaviourist paradigm -
now constitutes a common ground for all researchers. At the same time,
the results of work investigating perception, memory, problem solving, etc,
are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore in the study of language.
b. Secondly, the approach to language has widened.
From the purely syntactic approach of the Chomskyan school
(to speak is to construct or identify sentences formed in accordance with the rules of language)
we have moved on through a study of the semantic aspects
(to speak is to transmit meanings) to a study of the pragmatic aspects (to speak is to use language in a fashion which is
adapted to the context, the listener and the objectives of the communication).

C, In the general theory of signs which he proposed in 1933, Morris distinguished between three types of approach:
a syntactic approach which studies the relationships that signs have to one another;
 4

a semantic approach which focuses on the relationship between signs and the things designated by them;
and finally, a pragmatic approach, the object of which is the relationship between signs and their users.
The first researchers into psycholinguistics concentrated primarily on the first of these aspects.
It was not until quite late (towards the end of the 1960s)
that research into the semantic aspects of language started to emerge

Researchers turned their attention to the pragmatic aspects a little later (in the mid 1970s).
D, Thus from a structural approach to language, which characterizes psycholinguistics as inspired by Chomsky,
we have proceeded to a functional perspective.
E, This widening of scope finds its expression in the concern of researchers
not to remain bound to the level of processing of individual sentences,
but to start to tackle larger units within the framework of discourse.
Although the theoretical apparatus is less well established here,
such research is currently seeing some promising developments.

3, we should not forget the (sometimes indirect, but today increasingly important)
role played by research into the automatic processing of language in artificial intelligence.
Largely developed over the course of the last ten to fifteen years,
this research, while not necessarily providing plausible psychological models,
has at least provided the psychologist with interesting suggestions and the example of rigorously defined theories.
4, The exchange of ideas between artificial intelligence and cognitive psychology within the framework of a ’cognitive science’
which has been developing for a number of years - is certain to play an important role in the development of psycholinguistics,
and of psychology in general.

The methods

Experimental procedures
The processes which the human mind employs to deal with language
cannot, for the most part, be adequately explained in terms of introspection. They can be approached only by indirect methods.
To this end, psycholinguistics has developed a large number of experimental techniques, many of them highly ingenious,
and we can give only a brief overview of them here.
In the main, works in this field have focused on comprehension. In general, we can distinguish between three types of method,
depending on whether they are designed to determine the conditions of identification of the verbal stimulus,
reveal the processing procedures as they are implemented, or subsequently characterise the product of this processing.
1, The first type comprises methods based on the controlled treatment of the physical character of the stimuli –
whether these are artificial stimuli, used predominantly in the study of the perception of words, or recorded words which can be
distorted in various ways (masking by another sound, filtering out of certain frequencies, excisions, etc.).
These methods enable researchers to determine both the nature of the information used by the listener and the role of contextual data
in the reconstruction of missing information.
2. A second type of method - highly developed nowadays - aims to analyze the processing procedures
while they are operative (researchers speak of ’real-time’ or ’on-line’ methods). These methods are generally based on very
precise chronometrical measurements. For example, researchers measure the time a subject takes to decide whether the
presented stimulus is a word or not (lexical decision), whether a sentence is true or false, etc.
While the subject is listening to a verbal message it is also possible to measure the time taken to detect a specified sound,
phoneme, word, etc. In the technique of shadowing, subjects have to repeat a message as they listen to it. The time interval
between the message and its reproduction provides interesting information about the nature and complexity of processing.
Alongside these chronometric methods, researchers also make use of physiological measurements such as ocular fixation time,
electrodermal response, etc. Electroencephalographic measurements (evoked potentials) have also been producing interesting results
for a number of years.
3. Finally, the most classical methods aim to explore the product of processing, whether this remains present in short-term memory
(for example, when the subject is asked to locate a short noise - a ’click’ - in a sentence which has just been heard) or whether, in
the majority of cases, it is retained in long-term memory. To this end, experimenters can use the habitual recall procedures: free
recall, cued recall, recognition. The subject can also be confronted with a variety of tasks: completing or paraphrasing an
utterance, producing judgements about its acceptability or similarity to other utterances, etc.
 5

Researchers studying the processes at work in the production of speech have fewer possibilities at their disposal. Experimentation
in this field is difficult and the majority of the available data are based on observation: the analysis of errors, the study of the
temporal organization of spontaneous language (rhythm, pauses, hesitations, etc.) as well as the study of aphasic speech.
The difficulties experienced in conducting experiments on the production of language mean, on the one hand, that there is only a
small body of work in this field and, on the other, that the theoritical models are highly conjectural. It is to be hoped that research
in this field will develop over the coming years. Two avenues of investigation appear to be promising:
 first, research into artificial intelligence;6
 second, the study of verbal production in well-defined situations. In such situations it is also possible to analyze and control the
mental procedures implemented by the subject (here we are thinking primarily of situations of problem solving).

General methodological problems

To conclude, let us indicate two problems of a very general nature which an experimental approach to the activity of language
encounters:

1. So far we have spoken only of language. In fact, there is a considerable multiplicity of

languages (between three and four thousand languages are currently spoken in the world). What validity,
then, can we attribute to results observed within one specific language? Certainly, we can hope that the
mechanisms we reveal are based on general characteristics of the human race. However, we must make
sure that this is really the case and undertake a sufficient number of cross-linguistic studies. This type of
research started some ten years ago and can no doubt be expected to increase considerably over the
coming years.
2. A second problem (and one which is not limited to psycholinguistics) concerns the ’artificial’ nature of experimental situations. Is it
possible to generalize the results obtained in the laboratory, often using isolated sentences, out of context, deprived of any
communicative function, and expect them to apply to the ’natural’ use of language?
This question can be asked equally well of any other field of research in experimental psychology. It is, of course, possible to reply
that scientific | development is based on the assumption that the complex can be explained in terms of the simple.
However, we still have to make certain:
1. That the simplicity of the studied phenomena is genuine. We shall see
that there are times when this simplicity is misleading. Subjects bring to experimental situations all their implicit knowledge about
language and its conditions of use. The result is that, for the subjects, the material can contain far more than the experimenter thinks
they have put there.

2. That the experimental situation does not make use of specific procedures different to those which are encountered in
everyday life. Such procedures can take two forms:
 the experimental conditions can impose on the subject operations which do not occur in habitual situations (for example, the
comprehension of an isolated sentence such as ’The television has been repaired’ presupposes, under experimental conditions, an
inference, ’It was broken’, whereas in normal communication the inference does not have to be made, since the listener is
already aware of this fact);
 in contrast, the experimental conditions may prohibit certain operations which are required in the normal use of language (the
procedures for in identifying a referent, for example: if I am told ’The neighbour has had an accident’, I have to identify which
neighbour has been affected, etc., whereas in the experimental situation such a sentence refers to nothing).

These difficulties in no way imply that we should give up experimenting. In fact experimentation is the only way of validating
interpretations and establishing our knowledge on a scientific basis.
usman