9.2: Historical Review on Psycholinguistics and Neurolinguistics
selected template will load here
This action is not available.
Starting with philosophical approaches, the nature of the human language had ever been a topic of interest. Galileo in the 16th century saw the human language as the most important invention of humans. Later on in the 18th century the scientific study of language began by psychologists. Wilhelm Wundt (founder of the first laboratory of psychology) saw language as the mechanism by which thoughts are transformed into sentences. The observations of Wernike and Broca (see chapter 9) were milestones in the studies of language as a cognitive ability. In the early 1900s the behaviouristic view influenced the study of language very much. In 1957 B.F.Skiner published his book "Verbal Behaviour", in which he proposed that learning of language can be seen as a mechanism of reinforcement. Noam Chomsky (quoted at the beginning of this chapter) published in the same year "Syntactic Structures". He proposed that the ability to invent language is somehow coded in the genes. That led him to the idea that the underlying basis of language is similar across cultures. There might be some kind of universal grammar as a base, independent of what kind of language (including sign language) might be used by humans. Further on Chomsky published a review of Skinner´s "Verbal Behaviour" in which he presented arguments against the behaviouristic view. There are still some scientists who are convinced that it does not need a mentalist approach like Chomsky proposed, but in the meantime most agree that human language has to be seen as a cognitive ability. [edit] Current goals of Psycholinguistics
A natural language can be analysed at a number of different levels. In linguistics we differ between phonology (sounds), morphology (words), syntax (sentence structure), semantics (meaning), and pragmatics (use). Linguists try to find systematic descriptions capturing the regularities inherent in the language itself. But a description of natural language just as a abstract structured system, can not be enough. Psycholinguists rather ask, how the knowledge of language is represented in the brain, and how it is used. Today's most important research topics are: