ABSTRACT
One of the unwritten rules of psycholinguistics is that acquisition, comprehension, and production research each keeps to itself—the questions addressed in these three fields, and the researchers who ask them, overlap in only the most general ways. In acquisition, for example, researchers of necessity use comprehension and production measures in assessing children’s progress, but the primary goal of much acquisition research is to understand how the child comes to acquire the grammar, or knowledge of the language, not how the child develops comprehension or production abilities. Production and comprehension research are similarly isolated; neither one digs deeply into the question of how the nature of these adult systems is constrained by the acquisition process, or whether production and comprehension processes exert significant constraints on each other. Research in each field has made a great deal of progress using this isolationist strategy, and there are clearly unique questions in each field for which the neighboring fields offer little insight. There do appear to be some important domains, however, where it appears that the isolationist approach is a distinct limitation. This is the theme of this chapter, which reviews three interrelated findings in comprehension, production, and acquisition research. In each case, the puzzling results in one field appear to have solutions in another. The intricate relationships between these puzzles hold important implications for the nature of the human language faculties and for the isolationist research strategies that currently dominate psycholinguistic research.
