Читать книгу The Psychology of Second Language Acquisition - Zoltan Dornyei - Страница 8

According to Gernsbacher and Kaschak (2003), the term ‘psycholinguistics’ was coined in 1953 at a conference at Cornell University, but the field really took off only after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures. (It is interesting to note here that, as Altmann (2006) recounts, Syntactic Structures was based on Chomsky’s lecture notes for undergraduate students, notes that he only wrote up in a book upon the encouragement of a friend who happened to visit MIT.) In many ways psycholinguists have been pursuing similar goals to those of cognitive linguists – namely, to expound the psychological reality and the cognitive mechanisms underlying language structure and use – yet the particular foci and research methods of the two disciplines are dissimilar due to their different disciplinary affiliation. Most cognitive linguists would consider themselves linguists first with an interest in cognition, while most psycholinguists would regard themselves primarily as psychologists with an interest in language. Accordingly, while cognitive linguistics has adopted the standard research methodology of linguistics, namely introspection in conjunction with theoretical analysis (Talmy 2007), psycholinguistics has been drawing on the research techniques of experimental psychology (described in detail in Ch. 2).

The first decade of psycholinguistic research was largely taken up by developing theories of language processing based on Chomsky’s generative grammar, and this scope was broadened at the end of the 1960s by the influence of information processing theory. As Altmann (2006) explains, it was this period when the ‘mind-as-computer’ metaphor started to have a pervasive influence on both psycholinguistics and the study of cognition in general – which is a good illustration of the profound significance of metaphors discussed in the previous section. As a result of these developments, the 1970s saw enormous growth in psycholinguistics across a wide range of topics, including word recognition, sentence comprehension, and the mental representation of texts. This momentum further increased in the 1980s and 1990s with the spread of neuroimaging techniques (described in detail in Ch. 2); as MacWhinney (2001c) summarizes, the current emphasis is on trying to link experimental methodology to methods of imaging the human brain during language processing. Thus, we can observe an increasing integration of traditional psycholinguistic approaches and cognitive neuroscience (to be discussed below). Altmann (2006: 8) sums this up clearly:

What we can be sure of is that the boundaries between the study of language and the study of other aspects of cognition are wearing thinner. No doubt there are already developments in ‘neighbouring’ fields of study (e.g. the computational sciences and non-cognitive neurosciences) that will also have an impact, but have yet to emerge as quantifiable influences on psycholinguistics.

A special subdomain of psycholinguistics that is particularly relevant to the topic of this book is developmental psycholinguistics. This field has traditionally focused on the study of child language acquisition and will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. Here we need only note the peculiar academic phenomenon that L1 acquisition has traditionally been seen as an area of psychology, whereas L2 acquisition has almost entirely been studied by (applied) linguists. Although this divide is still as a whole in existence, the recent converging trend of linguistics and language psychology has not been without effect and communication amongst scholars across the L1/L2 boundary has become more featured. (For a good illustration, see for example the discussion of L1 influences on SLA concerning age effects, such as ‘language entrenchment’, at the end of Ch. 6.)