ABSTRACT
Most psycholinguistic research on language comprehension falls into one of two traditions, each with its roots in seminal work from the 1960s (Clark, 1992; 1996) and each with its own characteristic theoretical concerns and dominant methodologies. The language-as-product tradition has its roots in George Miller's synthesis of the then emerging information processing paradigm and Chomsky's theory of transformational grammar (e.g., Miller, 1962; Miller & Chomsky, 1963). The product tradition emphasizes the individual cognitive processes by which listeners recover linguistic representation—the “products” of language comprehension. Psycholinguistic research within the product tradition typically examines moment-by-moment processes in real-time language processing, using fine-grained reaction time measures and carefully controlled stimuli.
