ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by pointing out that linguistics as a science demands empirical and, in some cases, experimental methods. After some brief comments about the broad history of the study of language, this chapter looks at the introduction of experimental methods in the 19th century, mainly in physiology and medicine. It considers the study of speech sounds, eye movement in reading, and brain damage. It then turns to experimental methods introduced from psychology, starting at the end of the 19th century and more particularly the renaissance of such methods following the cognitive revolution of the 1950s. It closes with some comments about other areas of linguistics, which may be more central to the discipline, but in which experimental methods have been less prominent.
