TOPICS IN PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Lawrence University

WINTER 2005

INSTRUCTOR: Terry Rew-Gottfried

OFFICE HOURS: MTF 1:00-2:00 p.m., or by appointment

OFFICE: Briggs Hall 311

TELEPHONE: (832)-6706

E-MAIL: Terry.L.Rew-Gottfried@lawrence.edu
 

The 1960s were watershed years, not only politically, but also scientifically, particularly in the social sciences. Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) Structure of Scientific Revolutions challenged the traditional notions of how scientific theories changed and led scientists and historians to reconsider the nature (or even the possibility) of scientific truth and progress. Even before Kuhn’s landmark book appeared, however, a relatively obscure Dutch press published a book that stood traditional linguistic theory on its head. The innocuous title of Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures (1957) veiled a revolutionary challenge to the dusty dry empiricism of structuralist linguistics, spawned metatheoretical changes in psychology to embrace the notion of innate structures and mental constructs, and led to the establishment of cognitive science as an interdisciplinary enterprise. Way cool. If this wasn’t scientific revolution in progress, what was? Chomsky was hot…and it didn’t hurt that he also preached a radical anarchism in response to the US military intervention in Vietnam.
Like all new approaches in psychology, this was not entirely new. And as Kuhn suggests for scientific revolutions in general, that which was noticed in the new linguistics and psycholinguistics had been observed before, but was now "seen" in an entirely new light. Before Chomsky’s work in the late 1950s, linguists and psychologists often considered their disciplines as only tenuously connected. The variety of human languages, which was once seen as evidence for the great mutability and versatility of human behavior, is now seen to demonstrate a great universal grammar, common to all humans. Children’s halting attempts to acquire their first language were once seen as demonstrating the principles of learning and reinforcement, but are now viewed as revealing a language acquisition device and a language "instinct." Psycholinguists today ask questions that have been considered by philosophers and scientists for centuries, but the way we currently understand the relationship between language and thought is only about 40 years old. Modern psycholinguistics is founded in Chomsky’s revolutionary approach to language­that it is not merely behavior, but that it also reveals human knowledge and mental competence.
Psycholinguistics therefore emphasizes, like cognitive psychology, the mental structures and processes that explain the acquisition, comprehension, and production of language. We will, for example, consider experimental and observational studies of speech perception and production, memory and comprehension of text, cognitive and social rules for conversation, first and second language learning, and the brain structures that make such phenomena possible. Psycholinguistics is also, as the name implies, interdisciplinary. We will, therefore, examine theories and data from other disciplinary perspectives­neuroscience, anthropology, computer science, education, philosophy.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Field, John (2004). Psycholinguistics: The key concepts. London: Routledge.

Pinker, Steven (1999). Words and rules: The ingredients of language. New York: HarperCollins.

READINGS

Bates, E., Devescovi, A., & Wulfeck, B. (2001).  Psycholinguistics: A cross-language perspective.  Annual
Review of Psychology, 52, 369-396.
Beeman, M. J., & Chiarello, C. (1998). Complementary right- and left-hemisphere language comprehension.
Current Directions in Psychological Science, 7, 2-8.
Best, C. T., & Avery, R. A. (1999). Left-hemisphere advantage for click consonants is determined by linguistic
significance and experience. Psychological Science, 10, 65-70.
Bowers, J. S., Vigliocco, G., Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H., & Vinson, D. (1999). Distinguishing language from
thought: Experimental evidence that syntax is lexically rather than conceptually represented. Psychological Science, 10, 310-315.
Cameron, D. (1998). Gender, language, and discourse: A review essay. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, 23, 945-973.
Edwards, R., & Hamilton, M. A. (2004).  You need to understand my gender role: An empiritcal test of
Tannen's model of gender and communication.  Sex Roles, 50, 491-504.
Grosjean, F. (1998).  Studying bilinguals: Methodological and conceptual issues.  Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition, 1, 131-149.
Grosjean, F., Li, P., Münte, T. F., & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. (2003).  Imaging bilinguals: When the
neurosciences meet the language sciences.  Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 6, 159-165.
Hakuta, K., Bialystok, E., & Wiley, E. (2003).  Critical evidence: A test of the critical-period hypothesis for
second-language acquisition.  Psychological Science, 14, 31-38.
Heredia, R. R. (1997). Bilingual memory and hierarchical models: A case for language dominance. Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 6, 34-39.
Hickok, G., & Poeppel, D. (2000).  Towards a functional neuroanatomy of speech perception.  Trends in
Cognitive Sciences, 4, 131-138.
Jusczyk, P. W. (2002).  How infants adapt speech-processing capacities to native language structure.  Current
Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 15-18.
Marcus, G. F. (1996). Why do children say "breaked"? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 5, 81-85.
Mayberry, R. I., & Nicoladis, E. (2000). Gesture reflects language development: Evidence from bilingual
children. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 9, 192-196.
Pavlenko, A. (1999).  New approaches to concepts in bilingual memory.  Bilingualism: Language and
Cognition, 2, 209-230.
Werker, J. F., & Desjardins, R. N. (1995). Listening to speech in the 1st year of life: Experiential influences on
phoneme perception. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 4, 76-81.

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Revised 31-Dec-04