ABSTRACT
The end of World War II saw a number of nearly concurrent developments in the study of language. One was the introduction of experimental methods for analyzing the cognitive underpinnings of linguistic processing. As general modus operandi, the field of psycholinguistics had to bring a targeted operation into the laboratory by eliciting it from users of the language under experimental manipulations that were designed to reveal something about the nature of the process involved. These methods began to supplement the traditional ones of naturalistic observation and simple achievement testing in the study of both language acquisition and language breakdown.
