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Willem Levelt, A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan era

Article  in  Historiographia Linguistica · January 2014

DOI: 10.1075/hl.41.1.10bol

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 A History of Psycholinguistics: The pre-Chomskyan era. Willem J. M. Levelt.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, 672 pp. ISBN-13: 978-
0199653669, ISBN-10: 0199653666. £60 (HB or eBook).
Reviewed by Julie E. Boland (University of Michigan)

Most psycholinguists mark the beginnings of their field with the birth of cog-
nitive science in the 1950s. However, the central thesis of Willem Levelt’s (b.1938)
weighty volume is that serious psycholinguistic research began much earlier and
that we are selling the discipline short with our ignorance of a far richer history.
Remarkably, Levelt (p. 3) describes the landmark events of the 1950s as merely “a
hinge in an old, well-established, and respectable science”. His book provides a
window into the earliest history of psycholinguistic research, from 1770 through
the 1950s. Readers will learn how theoretical constructs rose, fell, and were re-
invented again — the contributions from early scholars vulnerable to barriers of
language, geography, politics, and time.
The book is an astounding compilation that reflects Levelt’s painstaking read-
ing of the source material, exploiting both his multilingualism and his long career
in the field. (For those who may doubt Levelt’s translations, he provides the origi-
nal text in footnotes.) Throughout the book, I discovered connections (and often
disconnections) among early scholars that I had not grasped before, and I felt as
if I were privy to tidbits of old academic gossip. This is not to say that the book
is an easy read, to be digested at bedtime while propped up by pillows. Levelt is
nothing if not exhaustive in his approach. I found myself wanting to skim through
some of the dreary details to get to the good parts. But in the end, this is a book
that psycholinguists will want on their shelves or in their Kindles. It is an invalu-
able resource, both for those who want to look up the answer to a few historical
questions and for those wanting a complete historical perspective on this fascinat-
ing discipline. Subject and author indexes, though not error-free, help one find
targeted information without reading the entire book.
I have been teaching psycholinguistics for nearly 25 years and I regularly in-
clude a lecture or two on the history of the field. After reading Levelt’s book,
my history lectures will not change dramatically (as there is little time to go into
greater detail), but all my lectures will be enriched by my increased understand-
ing of the lengthy accumulation of psycholinguistic knowledge. For example, I
discovered that Sigmund Exner (1846–1926) speculated about a cohort theory

Historiographia Linguistica 41:1 (2014), 168–175.  doi 10.1075/hl.41.1.10bol

issn 0302–5160 / e-issn 1569–9781 © John Benjamins Publishing Company
 Reviews / Comptes rendus / Besprechungen 169

of spoken word recognition (Exner 1894) 90-odd years before Marslen-Wilson &
Welsh (1978) outlined their cohort theory. And I learned that associative priming
experiments were conducted as early as 1897 by Walter Pillsbury (1872–1960),
who would go on to become a professor at the University of Michigan and for
whom my classroom this fall is named.
While Levelt’s scholarly exhaustiveness makes the book a terrific resource, it
also hampers the book’s readability somewhat. Rather than focusing solely on the
findings, hypotheses, and theories that still play a role in psycholinguistics today,
Levelt takes us on a much broader tour, visiting the writing of scholars who played
only minor roles in the development of the field. For example, in Chapter 2, we
learn about the speculations of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803; see Herder
1772), Dietrich Tiedemann (1748–1803; see Tiedemann 1772), and others on the
origins of language, which bear little relation to the current debates on how lan-
guage evolved. Likewise, in Chapter 7, the discussion of linguistic structuralists
such as Henri Delacroix (1873–1937) seemed peripheral. Those early writings are
interesting for their own sake, and they helped to form a foundation on which
psycholinguistics could emerge, but some sections of the book struck me as more
pre-history than history of the field.
A strength of Levelt’s book is the context he provides around scholars and their
contributions. He notes numerous missed connections in which scholars fail to cite
one another, often speculating as to why this happened. Occasionally, Levelt notes
the extra obstacles faced by women scholars, e.g., Clara Stern (1877–1948; cf. Stern
& Stern 1907 in Chapter 10), and throughout the book, Levelt includes “first woman
to” milestones, such as Charlotte Bühler (1893–1974), the first woman to write an
experimental dissertation in psycholinguistics, in Germany in 1918. In most chap-
ters, women scholars appear relatively infrequently, reflecting what was clearly a
boys’ club of scholars — especially in the early years and especially outside the do-
main of language acquisition.
The book is divided into four sections: a brief orientation (Chapter 1), estab-
lishing the discipline 1770–1900 (Chapters 2–6), early 20th century psycholin-
guistics (Chapters 7–14), and psycholinguistics re-established (Chapter 15). The
third section contains the bulk of the book and is organized both by schools of
thought (e.g., structuralism in Chapter 7; behaviorism in Chapter 8) and by topic
(e.g., language acquisition in Chapter 10; language in the brain in Chapter 11).
Important themes in this section are the theoretical divisions between Ameri-
can and European scholars, and in Chapter 14, the impact of anti-Semitism and
World War II. Most chapters could stand alone as a class reading assignment. In
the remainder of this review, I will provide brief glimpses of each chapter before
closing with some comments about Levelt’s central premise.

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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170 Julie E. Boland: Review of Willem J. M. Levelt (2012)

Chapter 1 is a thrill ride through the year 1951, with juicy details about major
figures in the field. For example, I discovered that John Bissell Carroll (1916–2003),
who helped organize the “Interdisciplinary Summer Seminar in Psychology and
Linguistics” in 1951, had been Benjamin Lee Whorf ’s (1897–1941) teen-age re-
search assistant, Burrhus Frederick Skinner’s (1904–1990) first graduate student,
and was later mentored by George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950). This succinct chapter
provides a great deal of insight into three landmark events of that year, Carroll’s
Seminar and two publications: George Armitage Miller’s (1920–2012) textbook,
Language and Communication (1951), and Karl Spence Lashley’s (1890–1958) pa-
per, “The Problem of Serial Order in Behavior” (1951).
Chapter 2 describes the work of historical-comparative linguists, philoso-
phers of language, and others (including Charles Darwin (1809–1882)) in the
Romanticism era, who laid a foundation upon which psycholinguistics could
emerge. Compared with Chapter 1, this chapter is plodding and less directly rel-
evant to the history of psycholinguistics as a discipline. There is little risk in skip-
ping this chapter on the first go-round, because later chapters will point you back
to the best bits.
Chapter 3 focuses on language in the brain and reflects a series of substantial
developments that continue to influence current psycholinguistic and neurolin-
guistic research. In addition to an excellent section on Franz Gall’s (1758–1828)
work on faculty psychology, the chapter includes the lesser-known but fascinating
story of Marc Dax (1771–1837) and his prescient claim that language was left-
lateralized. I won’t spoil the plot, but it involves hemiplegia, leeches, and a paper
that was supposed to be presented in 1836 but didn’t actually appear until 1865.
The sections on Paul Broca (1824–1880) and Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) are en-
grossing and thorough.
Chapter 4 covers early diary-based research on child language acquisition.
What begins as an engaging account of early efforts to document language devel-
opment turns into an exhausting list of contributions by mid-chapter. Impatient
readers can skip to the last major section of the chapter, “Issues and Controversies
in Child Language”. This highly readable section summarizes the stages of lan-
guage acquisition, as understood at that time, and the theoretical controversies of
the day, closing with a fascinating section on the rise and fall of signed languages.
Chapter 5 is a favorite of mine; I was riveted by descriptions of the equip-
ment and methodology used in 19th century experimental research. Highlights
included Franciscus Cornelius Donders’ (1818–1889) and Johan Jacob de Jaager’s
(1839–1887) measurement of spoken reaction times using a phonautograph and
a tuning fork in 1865, Wolfgang von Kempelen’s (1734–1804) 22-year project to
complete the first speaking machine in 1791, the cylindrical device James McKeen

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 Reviews / Comptes rendus / Besprechungen 171

Cattell (1860–1944) used to first demonstrate the word superiority effect (Cattell
1885), and the first eye movement experiments performed in several different
labs during the period 1878–1898. The science is further enlivened with personal
details about the interactions between scholars and the challenging financial cir-
cumstances under which some of them lived. Likewise Chapter 6, which is devot-
ed to Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) and is the final chapter of Part 2, provides rich
detail, both in terms of Wundt’s actual contributions and the context in which
they were made.
Chapter 7 brings us into the 20th century, focusing on linguistic structuralism
and the psychology of thinking during the early part of the century prior to World
War I. I found the latter topic of more interest: With Karl Marbe’s (1869–1953)
methodology for studying introspection and Otto Selz’s (1881–1943) computa-
tional approach to mental operations and incremental theory of sentence formu-
lation, it is easy to see connections between these German scholars and modern
psycholinguistics.
Chapter 8 focuses on American behaviorism. There are strong sections on
the well-known figures John Broadus Watson (1878–1958), Leonard B ­ loomfield
(1887–1949), B. F. Skinner, and Charles Egerton Osgood (1916–1991), as well
as lesser-known scholars such as Grace de Laguna (1878–1978) and Charles
N.  Cofer (1916–1998). By comparing scholars, Levelt illustrates his point that
there was no single dogma of behaviorism. Although Levelt notes that rigor-
ous experimental design was a lasting impact of behaviourism — one that gave
American psycholinguists an advantage — this chapter focuses more on theory
than experimentation. Nonetheless, I was delighted by the description of a Rus-
sian semantic generalization experiment (Razran 1939) that used salivation as
the dependent measure. Chapter 8 also introduces us to Zellig Sabbettai Harris
(1909–1992), founder of the first American linguistics department at the Univer-
sity of Pennsylvania in 1946 and supervisor of Noam Chomsky’s (b.1928) disser-
tation (Chomsky 1955). Levelt writes: “Generative grammar was conceived in a
strictly behavioristic framework. There is no hint in Chomsky’s dissertation that
he would soon become the leader of the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’” (p. 260).
Chapter 9 focuses primarily on European functionalists and covers an over-
lapping but generally earlier time period compared to Chapter 8. A new emphasis
is the role of the listener in sentence interpretation and in understanding speech
acts. Levelt weaves together threads from different eras to illustrate how the mod-
ern fields of sentence processing, pragmatics, and conversational analysis were
influenced by early scholars. Even so, this chapter fails to build much excitement.
Karl Bühler’s (1879–1963) theoretical contributions are discussed at most length
(see Bühler 1990 [1934]).

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172 Julie E. Boland: Review of Willem J. M. Levelt (2012)

The next three chapters are more empirically oriented, but continue to pro-
vide rich details about the most influential scholars of the era. Chapter 10 covers
language acquisition from the 1900s through the first half of the century; the last
22 pages efficiently summarize the European and American research from this
productive period. Chapter 11 covers language in the brain, focusing on (mostly
European) aphasia research and lively debates over functional localization. Here,
I was particularly struck by Pierre Marie’s (1853–1940) anticipation of computa-
tional models of distributed processing (see Marie 1922): In his crusade against
localization, he suggested that each nerve cell participates in many different psy-
chological processes via different vibratory patterns.
Chapter 12 returns to adult psycholinguistics, although research in lan-
guage production and language comprehension was meager during the first half
of the 20th century. The German scholarly tradition dwindled under two world
wars, while American scholars were too deeply entrenched in behaviorism to
focus on the mental processes. The most productive domains were speech pro-
cessing (leading up to, and including, George Miller’s well-known intelligibility
experiments), word association studies, statistical analyses of text, and the mea-
surement of eye movements during reading. Within these limited domains, we
see increasing methodological sophisti­cation. The discussion of Zipf ’s law and
associated controversies is especially interesting. John Ridley Stroop’s (­1897–
1973) famous experiments are described and we learn why Stroop published
no other experiments of note. There is also a somewhat bewildering section
on phonetic symbolism; apparently, there was much interest in direct mapping
from sounds to meaning, using nonsense syllables or unknown foreign words
(e.g., Sapir 1929).
Chapter 13 focuses on linguistic relativity, with substantial sections on the
early theoretical claims of Edward Sapir (1884–1939) and Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Both professed an egalitarian ‘horizontal’ view of the world’s languages, in con-
trast to the vertical assessments of Wundt and others, who put Latin at the top
and signed languages at the bottom with other ‘primitive’ languages. The empiri-
cal research on linguistic relativity that followed a few decades later, in the 1950s,
is toward the end of the chapter. In between is a section on language purification
movements, which Levelt describes as “a colorful chapter in folk psycholinguis-
tics” (p. 494) and which gave rise to Neuro-Linguistic Programming, which is still
around. Some of these linguistic activists were motivated by Whorf ’s work, but
Whorf dismissed them as linguistically unsophisticated.
Chapter 14 considers the great decline of German psycholinguistic research
and the personal suffering of numerous scholars, primarily in Germany and Aus-
tria, during Germany’s Third Reich. The chapter opens with the dramatic history

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company

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 Reviews / Comptes rendus / Besprechungen 173

of the German Psychology Society and the pivotal 1933 session of its biennial
Congress. The Congress was originally scheduled for April, but soon after Hitler
was sworn in as German chancellor in January, there was a political movement
to dismiss Jewish and foreign-born professors. Four of seven board members
resigned and a new Psychology Society board (of party loyalists) was formed;
the Congress was moved to October under new leadership. The resulting “real
German Psychology” contributed little to psycholinguistics. A particularly grim
section of this chapter concerns the forced sterilization and then large-scale eutha-
nasia of psychiatric patients and other persons judged to be defective. Through-
out, Levelt points to well-known scholars who toed the line as well as some who
protested vigorously. Even so, Levelt warns us against assuming that we ourselves
would have been among the heroes.
Chapter 15, the lone chapter in Part 4, overlaps chronologically with Chap-
ter 1, and ends on a positive note. While scientific progress had been hampered by
World War II in many European countries, British and American scientists made
great wartime progress in electronic signal processing and cryptography, and
machine translation was rapidly becoming plausible. Crucially, these advances
involved engineers and mathematicians who had no interest in behaviorism and
were thus free to develop mentalistic models — a nice illustration of the value of
interdisciplinary research. Furthermore, there were many brain-damaged veter-
ans needing speech and language therapy. As Levelt notes, “[l]inguistics was in for
serious funding” (p. 549)!
In closing, I return to Levelt’s central thesis: that psycholinguistics began
not with the cognitive revolution, but as early as the late 18th century. The de-
gree to which this claim will resonate with the reader may depend upon his or
her research specialty. Substantial progress was clearly made in the domains of
speech perception and production, word recognition, aphasia, and language ac-
quisition. In contrast, there was no serious psycholinguistic research on syntac-
tic processes, in either language production or language comprehension, during
the pre-Chomskyan era, and precious little on syntactic development during
language acquisition. Nonetheless, many of the theoretical and methodological
tools used in modern parsing experiments were first introduced during the pe-
riod covered by this book.

© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company

All rights reserved
174 Julie E. Boland: Review of Willem J. M. Levelt (2012)

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© 2014. John Benjamins Publishing Company
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 Reviews / Comptes rendus / Besprechungen 175

Reviewer’s address:
Julie E. Boland
Department of Psychology
University of Michigan
530 Church Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043
U. S. A.

email: jeboland@umich.edu

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