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The Language Machine: Psycholinguistics in Review

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The Language Machine: Psycholinguistics in Review BritishJournal ofPsychology (2001), 92, 129–170 Printedin Great Britain 129 © 2001The British Psychological Society Thelanguage machine: Psycholinguistics in review Gerry T.M.Altmann* Departmentof Psychology,University of Y ork,UK Psycholinguisticsis the empirical and theoretical study of the mental faculty that underpinsour consummate linguistic agility. This review takes a broadlook at how the eldhas developed, from the turn of the20th century through to theturn of the 21st. Sincethe linguistic revolution of themid-1960s, the eldhas broadenedto encompass a widerange of topicsand disciplines. A selectionof theseis reviewed here, starting with a briefoverview of the origins of psycholinguistics. More detailed sections describe the languageabilities of newborninfants; infants’ later abilities as they acquire their rst wordsand develop their rstgrammatical skills; the representation and access of words (bothspoken and written) in the mental lexicon; the representations and processes implicatedin sentence processing and discourse comprehension; and nally,themanner inwhich, as wespeak, we produce words and sentences. Psycholinguistics is as much aboutthe studyof thehuman mind itself as it isabout the study of that mind’ s abilityto communicateand comprehend. Bydegrees I madea discoveryof stillgreater moment. I foundthat these people possessed a methodof communicatingtheir experience and feelings to oneanotherby articulate sounds. I perceivedthat the wordsthey spoke sometimes produced pleasure or pain, smiles or sadness, in the minds and countenancesof the hearers. This was indeed a godlikescience, and I ardentlydesired to become acquaintedwith it. MaryShelley Frankenstein,or, the modern Prometheus (Penguinedition, p. 108) Throughlanguage weeach of uscut throughthe barriers of ourownpersonal existence. In doingso, we use language as an abstraction of the world within andaround us. Our ability tointerpret that world is extraordinary enough,but our ability to abstract from it just certain key aspects, andto convey that abstraction throughthe medium of language toanother individual, is even more extraordinary.Thechallenge for psychologyhas been toreveal, in the face ofextraordinary complexity,somethingof the mental representations andprocesses that underpinour faculty for language.The purpose of this review is to convey those aspects ofpsycholinguistic research that have shapedthe current state-of- the-art. Thereader shouldbear in mind,however, that the Handbook of psycholinguistics (Gernsbacher, 1994)contains in excess of1100pages anda subject index with barely fewer wordsthan the numberoriginally suggestedfor, butsubsequentlyexceeded by,this *Requestsfor reprintsshould be addressed to Dr Gerry Altmann,Department of Psychology,University of York, Heslington,York YO10 5DD, UK (e-mail:[email protected]). 130 Gerry T.M.Altmann review. Thefull depth,richness andscope of psycholinguistics thusgoes far beyondthe limits afforded here. Psycholinguistics boomed(as didthe rest of psychology) in the early to mid-1960s. TheChomskian revolution (e.g. Chomsky,1957,1965, 1968) promoted language, and specically its structures,as obeyinglaws andprinciples in muchthe same way as, say, chemical structures do.The legacy of the rst 50orso years ofthe 20thcentury was the studyof language as an entity that could bestudiedindependently of the machinery that producedit, the purposethat it served, orthe world within which it was acquired and subsequentlyused. The philosopher Bertrand Russell (1959)was sensitive to this emerging legacy whenhe wrote: ‘Thelinguistic philosophy,which cares only about language,and not about the world,is like the boywho preferred the clock withoutthe pendulumbecause, althoughit nolonger told the time, it went more easily thanbefore andat amore exhilarating pace.’Subsequently ,psycholinguistic research has nonetheless recognized the inseparability oflanguage from its underlyingmental machinery andthe external world. Thereview beginswith some brief comments onthe early days of psycholinguistics (includingboth early andcurrent British inuences onthe eld). It thenmoves to a selection of current topics in psycholinguistics, beginningwith the language abilities of newborninfants, andmoving on from howinfants represent thespeech they hear to how they acquire arst vocabulary andhow later, as adults,they represent andaccess wordsin the mental lexicon (bothspoken and written). Fromthere, wemove onto the acquisition of grammatical skills in children andthe processing of sentences byadults andto text and discourse understanding.The article thenconsiders howadults produce,rather than comprehend,language, and ends with abrief overview ofsome ofthe topics that are not covered in-depthin this review. Psycholinguistics: the early days Psycholinguistics is, as Wilhelm Wundt(1832 –1920)noted in Die Sprache (1900), as muchabout the mindas it is aboutlanguage. All themore paradoxical, then,that perhaps the earliest use ofthe term ‘psycholinguistics’was in J. R.Kantor’s Objective psychology of grammar (1936),in which Kantor,an ardent behaviourist, attempted to refute the idea that language reected any form ofinternal cognition or mind.According toKantor,the German psycholinguistic tradition was simply wrong.The term became more rmly established with the publication in 1954of areport of aworkinggroup on the relationship between linguistics andpsychology entitled Psycholinguistics: Asurvey of theory and research problems (Osgood& Sebeok,1954/ 1965);the report was published simultaneously in two journals that,separately ,served the linguistics andpsychology disciplines. Almost 50years on,research into the many different aspects of the psychologyof language is nowpublished in avast range of journals, andaccounts for around10% of all publications in psychology, 1 agurethat has remained remarkably constant given the approximately vefold increase in the annual publication rate across psychologyas awhole since the 1950s. 1 The gureis estimated from avariety of keywordsearches throughthe PsycLIT database (American Psychological Association).It ispossibly a generousestimate of thepublication output that would fall under the psychology of language rubric. Psycholinguistics in review 131 Psycholinguistics suffered aturbulenthistory duringthe rst part of the20thcentury , notleast because ofthe behaviourist movement. Even William James, whoforesaw many psycholinguistic issues in his The principles of psychology (1980,1950), had turned his back onWundtianpsychology at the very endof the 19thcentury .Blumenthal (1970),in his historical overview of the early years (and onwhich parts of this section are based), described psycholinguistics in the early tomid-20thcentury as the study,in the West at least, ofverbal learning andverbal behaviour—areection ofthe behaviourist approach tolanguage learning (the more mentalist approach advocated byWundtstill prevailed in German,and to an extent Soviet, psychologyduring that time). Within linguistics, the Bloomeldian school was born(with Bloomeld’ s Language publishedin 1933)which, althoughacknowledging the behaviourist endeavour within psychology,promotedthe studyof language independentlyof psychology,andtook to the limits the taxonomic approach to language.Notwithstanding the behaviourist backdrop,a signicant number ofempirical studies reported phenomenain those early days that still predominate today (mostly onreading or speech perception; e.g.Bagley ,1900;Cattell, 1886;Dodge & Cline, 1915;Huey ,1900,1901; Pillsbury ,1915;Pringle-Morgan, 1896; Stroop, 1935; Tinker,1946). Theoretically ,the eld moved on(or at least, shouldhave done) following Karl Lashley’s (1951)article onserial order in behaviour.Despite noreference to Wundt, there were considerable similarities with the Wundtiantradition. Specically ,Lashley soughtto showthat the sequential form of an utterance is notdirectly related to the syntax ofthat utterance (a theme to be foundin Wundt’s writings,and later taken upby the Chomskianschool), andthat (partly in consequence) the productionof an utterance could notsimply be amatter ofcomplex stimulus–response chains as the behaviourist movement wouldhave it. Skinner,in his Verbal behaviour (1957),took on-board some of these limitations ofbehaviourism when,despite advocating that psychologyabandon the mind,he arguedfor asystem of internal mediating events to explain some of the phenomenathat the conditioningof verbal responses could notexplain. Theintroduction ofsuchmediated events into behaviourist theory led tothe emergence of neo-behaviorism , most notably associated, within language,with Charles Osgood. Theyear 1957was somethingof awatershed for psycholinguistics, notbecause of the publication of Verbal behaviour ,butbecause of the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic structures (1957)—amonograph devoted to exploring the notionof grammatical rules. Subsequently,in his review ofSkinner’s Verbal behaviour ,Chomsky(1959) laid to rest the behaviourist enterprise (at least as it applied to language). Space precludes the breadthof argument,but crudely speakingno amountof conditioned stimulus-to-verbal-response associations could explain the innite productivity (and systematicity) of language.With Chomsky,outwent Bloomeld, andin came mental structures,ripe for theoretical and empirical investigation. Chomsky’s inuence onpsycholinguistics, let alone linguistics, cannot beoverstated. Althoughthere have been many critics, specically with regard to his beliefs regardingthe acquisition of grammar (see under‘ Fromwords
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