ABSTRACT

Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental mechanisms that make it possible for people to use language. It is a scientific discipline whose goal is a coherent theory of the way in which language is produced and understood. This book describes the most important discoveries that have been made in the attempt to construct such a theory. The present chapter begins by explaining certain biases in psycholinguistic research – why, for example, the emphasis is on language understanding rather than language production. It then outlines the overall goal of psycholinguistics – the identification of what information is conveyed by language, and how. This goal is broken down into a number of subgoals, and the subprocessors that contribute to the interpretation of discourse and text are described. The genesis and evaluation of psycholinguistic theories are then considered with reference to some ideas from the philosophy of science, and the use of statistical methods for analysing psycholinguistic data is briefly discussed. Some problems with the experimental approach to psycholinguistic problems are outlined, and the computer modelling approach of artificial intelligence (AI) is introduced as a possible alternative. Its strengths and weaknesses are discussed, and a synthesis of the two approaches – cognitive science – is suggested.