ABSTRACT
The interaction between philosophy, psychology, and linguistics has been remarkably productive since the 1950s. Cognitive neuroscience is contributing novel results, making psycholinguistics one of the most fruitful interdisciplinary research areas within cognitive science. Human language is uniquely powerful. One of its most striking features is that it allows us to combine two or more meaningful items, thereby generating a new meaning. Linguists seek to capture such constraints via an explicit rule system, a grammar, that predicts which combinations a language permits and which meanings will result from the permissible combinations. Broadly speaking, psycholinguistics has two main objects of study: language acquisition and language processing. In the 1950s, empiricism dominated in the form of behaviorist psychology, which viewed all adult behavioral propensities as the outcome of the passive and malleable child being shaped by their environment. The conceptual and empirical grounds for positing UG derive from the “poverty of the stimulus” argument.
