ABSTRACT
Psycholinguistics, a coming together of linguistics and psychology, developed out of the linguistic revolution of the 1960s and attempted to bring a rigorous experimental methodology to investigations of language behaviour. In the 1970s another blending of disciplines emerged with cognitive neuropsychology, when cognitive psychologists became interested in testing and developing their new models of reading and writing with people with brain damage. Early psycholinguistic studies in aphasia took the neoclassic model as a theoretical base, but fierce theoretical and a clinical criticisms were levelled against the model and the research paradigms used to test it. In the latter half of the twentieth century philosophers of language, linguists, and psychologists began to recognise that language was more than a cognitive process. Language is also behaviour and has a social function and is not only more than single words, but is more than sentences. Research developed into the behavioural and social uses of language and these too were to have a significant impact on aphasiology.
