PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

INTRODUCCIÓN A LA LINGÜÍSTICA APLICADA

UNED
PEC
SONIA MUÑOZ GÓMEZ 76429506T
 1. INTRODUCTION TO PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

The aim of this paper is to provide an overlook at the most influential theoretical
approaches that have dominated the scope of psycholinguistics from its very beginnings.
Although many cognitive models have not been included here due to length issues, the
present review offers a general framework that will serve as a good starting point for
further inquiries.
It starts with a brief revision through the origins of the field that will help to understand
the basic foundations of psycholinguistics and how these influenced the development of
the field in the subsequent period. The next section explores the main questions and issues
that have been object of debate among the psycholinguistic community during the
twentieth century. The paper closes with a personal conclusion about the subject matter
and references for further readings.

1.1.A brief history of Psycholinguistics

Although most scholars set the beginnings of psycholinguistics in the 1950s

coinciding with the birth of cognitive sciences, a quick review of the literature
demonstrates that this is not the case. For instance, Levelt (2013) situates the actual
origins of the field as early as 1772, with the publication of a series of studies concerned
with the investigation of the origin of the languages. According to Levelt, the two major
philosophical works that contributed to a new conception of language were Johann
Gottfried Herder’s Essay on the Origin of Language and Dietrich Tiedemann’s Versuch
einer Erklärung des Ursprunges der Sprache. While both Herder and Tiedemann rejected
the idea of language as a gift granted by divine providence, they differed in providing an
alternative that could better explain the origin of the human language: Herder attributed
the phenomenon to human nature itself, arguing that it is characteristic of the human mind
its reflexivity and consciousness. Tiedemann, on the other side, established the basis of
human communication by means of the development of gestural and onomatopoeic
devices. Regardless of their differences, what is central to psycholinguistics is the fact
that a new emerging conception of language was being praised as related to philosophical,
psychological and scientific issues. Later in 1971 scientist Wolfgang von Kempeler
published his book Mechanism of Human Speech as a product of his investigations while
attempting to invent a speaking machine. He added further arguments to the origin of the
language issue, arguing that language is a product of human creation and providing his
own theory of human speech sound formation.
The appearance of these works was immediately followed by a great deal of studies
of what would be later labelled under the generic term comparative linguistics, coined in
1820 by Wilhelm von Humboldt. This discipline started with the publications of a series
of studies that attempted to shed light on the commonalities and similarities that could be
traced among languages in order to reconstruct a previous, common one. After the
influence of Humboldt, the focus in linguistic studies shifted towards the grammatical
relations among languages. His major work Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen

1
Sprachbaues can be considered a turning point in the field, where he introduced his notion
of linguistic relativity as well as language seen as an articulated activity shared by all
human beings. His genetic conception of language largely influenced the work of further
scholars such as Wilhelm Wundt and Gustave Guillaume. The arrival on the scene of
these two figures, favored by the increasing growth of psychological studies arising in
German universities, contributed for the nineteenth century to witness the emerging field
of ‘psychology of language’.
Wundt’s major contributions for the creation of the area of psycholinguistics were
collected in Völkerpsychologie, a ten-volumes work which included Die Sprache (The
Language), which resulted in an especially interesting work from the point of view of
linguistics since it constitutes a massive compilation and revision of the whole previous
linguistic theories from the viewpoint of a renowned psychologist.
On the other hand, Gustave Guillaume is considered by most scholars as the father
of psycholinguistics. His most famous and remarkable contribution was coined as
psychomécanique du langage (known simply as ‘psychomechanics’ in English) were he
adopted the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole and reformulated the
theory with the introduction of two new concepts: langue and discours (language and
discourse). Within the frame of Gillaumean linguistics, the production of language is the
product of a cognitive process whereby langue is the internal level to be concreted into
tangible, observable discourse after an extremely short operative time.
But it is not until 1936 that the term Psycholinguistics was first introduced by Jaco
Robert Kantor and more widely spreaded later after the publication of Henry Pronko’s
article ‘Language and psycholinguistics: a review’ in 1946. In the Preface of his book An
Objective Psychology of Grammar, Kantor aims at ‘an attempt to study grammatical
phenomena from the objective psychological point of view’, thus consolidating the
interdisciplinary nature of the field.
The development of psycholinguistics soon started to theorize on what would be their
main concerns, that is, language acquisition and language use, these understood as the
final results of cognitive processes. More recently, scholars have acknowledged the
importance of second language acquisition as a rich source of evidence in their
investigations and thus leading to a current state where the understanding of language
acquisition, second language acquisition, language production and language
comprehension are its major concerns.
Thus, Psycholinguistics can be defined as the study of the mental processes involved
in the acquisition, production, understanding and use of language by means of the
interdisciplinary activity of both psychology and linguistics. The following sections will
provide a brief review of the most important and influential theories provided by
psycholinguistics during the twentieth century.

2
 2. PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: Language Acquisition, Second Language
Acquisition and Language Use

2.1.Language acquisition.
As stated at the beginning of this paper, psycholinguistic is often considered to have
burst into the linguistic landscape during the 1950s, regardless of the fact that, as we have
seen in the section above, many other linguists had already formulated their questions and
theories addressed in psycholinguistics. Although it is true that these previous scholars
actually contributed greatly to the subject matter, the decade coincides with the
blossoming of the new modern theories that will dominate the scope of linguistics in the
twentieth century.
During the 1950s and the following decades the world of disciplines such as
psychology, philosophy or linguistics changed so dramatically that the period became
known as the ‘cognitive revolution’ era. The influence of cognitive sciences and the
prominence of the new emerging fields such as computational linguistics largely
contributed to the interdisciplinarity among the different fields of knowledge as well as
the need to include the scientific method in their investigations.
Previous to 1950, in 1913 psychologist John B. Watson published his influential work
‘Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It’, were he postulated the foundations of
Behaviorism. In his article, Watson claimed that psychologists should dismiss the focus
on cognitive processes or mental events and shift towards observable behavior only.
Behaviorists as defined by Watson stand for the idea that there is not a difference in the
learning process of humans to that of animals, and that such learning process is achieved
by means of stimuli and responses. As human and animal’s behaviors are observable
entities, the scientific method can be thus applied when studying such behaviors, and
therefore psychology acquires the status of a science.
Behaviorism’s postulations were of major importance not only in psychology.
Following the behaviorist approach, in 1957 B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior came out.
For Skinner, language learning is no different of other types of learning. The human’s
mind is thus conceived as a tabula rasa at the time of being born, and by means of
imitation, association and reinforcement one finally achieves the learning of the mother
tongue. This reinforcement is embodied in the feedback provided by adults: when a child
produces a grammatically ill-formed sentence, negative feedback will be provided by
his/her caregivers, so he/she won’t repeat it in the future. In Skinner’s (1957) words,
In teaching the young child to talk, the formal specifications upon which
reinforcement is contingent are at first greatly relaxed. Any response which vaguely
resembles the standard behavior of the community is reinforced. When these begin to
appear frequently, a closer approximation is insisted upon. In this manner, very complex
verbal forms may be reached. (pp. 29-30).

Skinner’s theories about language learning were largely influential in the linguistic
community. His conception of language as any other human behavior that is to be learned
like any other skill was put into practice and led to the well-known audio-lingual method,
a grammar-focused method based on the assumptions that learners would better success
in learning a foreign language when positive and negative reinforcement are given when

3
attempting to use the foreign language. Despite the success that the audio-lingual method
achieved during its first years, as behaviorism became disregarded and felt out of favour,
audio-lingual method supporters soon started to look up to the new emerging approaches.
The end of the decade is undoubtedly marked by the irruption into scene of the figure of
Noam Chomsky. In 1957 he published Syntactic Structures, a groundbreaking work that
marked a before and an after in the linguistic sphere. This influential work introduced a
new conception of grammar as independent of meaning, which he demonstrated by means
of the famous sentence ‘colorless green ideas sleep furiously’, arguing that any native
speaker of the English language would consider it as grammatically correct, but which
makes no sense (Chomsky, 1957).
More important to our issue is his work A Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior,
first published in 1959 and where he effusively rejects Skinner’s theories about language
learning. For Chomsky, language is not ‘learnable’ but is rather ‘acquired’. As López
Ornat and Gallo (2004) summarizes, Chomsky’s conception of language is unlearnable
because:
1. Language is a surprisingly early acquisition that, nevertheless, involves
building a complex formal system (grammar). And this is performed by a cognitive
system that is still prelogical and preoperative.
2. Language is acquired with no apparent effort.
3. Language is acquired without any explicit instruction, that is, nobody teaches
the child to talk.
4. Language is acquired despite “stimulus poverty.” Grammatical information is
not found explicitly in the stimulus input and, in addition, this input contains informative
noise, interruptions, differences between speakers, and is grammatically incomplete.
(p.162).

From the time being, the term ‘acquisition’ rather than ‘learn’ would domain the scope of
psycholinguistic to refer to the cognitive processes that serve to develop the mastery of
grammatical rules. The fact that language is not ‘learned’ but ‘acquired’ takes us to
another important aspect of Chomsky’s perspective, that is, that the human’s mind is no
longer seen as a tabula rasa, but instead children are born with what he labelled
‘Universal Grammar’ (UG). The theory implies that the human faculty of acquiring a
language is innate, that is, it is present in children’s brain before being born. The
principles of universal grammar would be stored in a theoretical item inside the human’s
mind known as the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). As Lightbown and Spada
(2013) summarize:

Chomsky argued that the behaviourist theory failed to account far ‘the logical
problem of language acquisition’ -the fact that children come to know more about the
structure of their language than they could reasonably be expected to learn on the basis
of the samples of language they hear. The language children are exposed to includes false
starts, incomplete sentences, and slips of the tangue, and yet they learn to distinguish
between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences. He concluded that children’s minds
are not blank states to be filled by imitating language they hear in the environment.
Instead, he hypothesized, children are born with specific innate ability to discover far
themselves the underlying rules of a language system on the basis of the samples of a
natural language they are exposed to. This innate endowment was seen as a sort of

4
 templare, containing the principles that are universal to all human languages. This
universal grammar (UG) would prevent the child from pursuing all sorts of wrong
hypotheses about how language systems might work. If children are pre-equipped with
UG, then, what they have to learn is the ways in which the language they are acquiring
makes use of these principles.(p20).

When Chomsky’s notion of innatism were put into test, results seemed to prove him right.
For instance, De Casper and Spence (1986) carried out a study where a group of mothers-
to-be were asked to read aloud the same book during the final stage of their pregnancy.
After the babies were born, these showed signs of recognizing as familiar what they were
listening to when their mothers were asked to read the same book again.
However, Chomsky’s perspective is not free from criticism and the principles of
generative grammar -as the approach is commonly known- has been challenged over the
last decades of the twentieth century. For instance, scholars that place themselves within
the scope of Corpus Linguistics usually attack the lack of attention given in the
Chomskyan perspective to real-world speech acts, as Chomsky’s theoretical conception
of language focuses on grammar rules and disregards other aspects such as pragmatics or
semantics.
On the other hand, further contemporary linguists such as Piaget or Sinclair
dismissed the idea of any innately specific skill that serves as the means to achieve the
acquisition of languages, and provided a model based on cognitive development. Piaget’s
Theory of Cognitive Development -as it is called- describes the process of language
acquisition in four stages, these coinciding with the biological and psychological
development of the child and thus closely linked to other developmental aspects such as
behavior. Cognitive models like Piaget’s thus defend the notion that, as soon as children
first start to be aware of concrete concepts of the real world, they acquire the patterns and
skills to organize and transform such concepts into language.
Piaget’s vision of language acquisition is often related to that of Lev Vygotsky’s Social
Interactional Theory (SIT) as both opposed to the nativist theory proposed by Chomsky.
From Vygotsky’s point of view, the study and understanding of language acquisition
should be approached by focusing on the child’s environment and his/her interactions
with other children and adults. Since the purpose of language is no other than
communication, it is by means of observing interactions and conversations among
children and their caregivers that we can shed light on the basis of how children acquire
language.
One of the major contributions of Vygotsky to the field was the introduction of the notion
of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which refers to the distance between what
children are already capable of by their own and what they are capable of with the help
of an adult. The concept was later further developed and applied to educational contexts
leading to the term ‘scaffolding’, which is commonly used to refer to the input that makes
the child capable of achieving a goal that would at first surpass his skills, in order to draw
on their knowledge to acquire new knowledge. For instance, it is a usual practice among
language teachers to provide students with cues and the insights they need to achieve
desirable knowledge by building on what they already know.

5
 More recent theories addressing the language acquisition question include the so-
called Usage-based theory and optimality theory. The first of these models can be traced
back to Langacker during the 1990s and 2000s and is still today conditioning the work of
many psychologist such as Michael Tomasello. As Tomasello (2000) himself describes:
In usage-based models of language […] all things flow from the actual usage events
in which people communicate linguistically with one another. The linguistic skills that a
person possesses at any given moment in time -in the form of a ‘strucutred inventory of
symbolic units’- result from her accumulated experience with language across the totality
of usage events in her life. This accumulated linguistic experience undergoes processes
of entrenchment, due to repeated uses of particular expressions across usage events, and
abstraction, due to type variation in constituents of particular expressions across usage
events. Given this focus on usage events and the processes of language learning that occur
within these events, a crucial item on the research agenda of usage-based models of
language is, or should be, the study of how human beings build up the most basic aspects
of their linguistic competence during childhood.(p.62).

They suggest that children start constructing their knowledge about language by hearing
samples of individual words and so that they are later able to use language by means of
that knowledge. Thus, under the perspective of usage-based models, children acquire
languages on the basis of linguistic experience.
Optimality theory, on the other hand, was first introduced in 1993 by Paul Smolensky and
Alan Prince with the publication of their work Optimality Theory. Constraint Interaction
in Generative Grammar but was later fully developed by J. McCarthy among other
scholars. Dekkers, Boersma and van de Weijer (2000) describe the process of learning
languages under this perspective:
In generative grammar, one task of the learner is to determine which of the
possible grammars allowed by an innate Universal Grammar is compatible with the
language she is learning. In Principles and Parameters (P&P) framework, this task
amounts to determining the correct settings of a number of usually binary innate
parameters, while in an Optimality-theoretic (OT) framework, the task amounts to
determining the correct relative rankings of a number of innate constraints.

Thus, defendants of this model, although relate themselves to the Universal Grammar
proposed by Chomsky, they reject the idea of binary innate parameters that determine the
grammatically well- or ill-formed nature of a sentence. Instead, they introduce the concept
of ‘constraint’ which stands for the requirements that linguistic devices must fit if they
are to fulfill the speaker’s expectations.
As we have seen in this rather short overview across the different models,
psycholinguistics is far from providing the ultimate answers to its questions. Many other
models have not been mentioned here; first, for the sake of length; second, because they
are rather combinations of two or more of the ones mentioned above. Finally, newer
modern models are still under the spotlight and their assessment in psycholinguistics as
valid or discarded models is yet to be considered.

6
 2.2.Second Language Acquisition
Regarding the area of second language acquisition, the most influential and cited work
is that of Stephen Krashen, author of the well-known ‘Monitor Theory’ or ‘Input
Hypothesis’. Within the frame of this model, he developed five major hypotheses that
have been largely discussed among many different fields of knowledge such as
linguistics, psychology or anthropology and, what is more noticeable, as Krashen (2009)
himself states in the Preface of the online version of his Principles and Practice:
It is gratifying to point out that many of the predictions made in this book were
confirmed by subsequent research, for example, the superiority of comprehensible-input
based methods and sheltered subject matter teaching (Krashen, 2003), the inefficacy of error
correction (Truscott, 1996, 1999), and the "power of reading" (Krashen, 2004). Subsequent
research has also, in my opinion, confirmed that in footnote 5, chapter 3, option 3 is the correct
one, that we acquire vocabulary best through comprehensible input (Krashen, 1989; 2003).

That is, Krashen’s model has not just been largely discussed but also put into test time
after time by different researchers that, so far, proved him right. In this section we will
revise these five hypotheses and their applications to language learning and training.
The first of these hypotheses is known as ‘The Acquisition-Learning Distinction’,
whereby Krashen makes a distinction between adults ‘acquiring’ a second language to
that of adults ‘learning’ a second language. The first term refers to the acquisition of the
language in a subconscious way, similar to how children acquire their native language.
Krashen (2009) describes this process as follows:
The result of language acquisition, acquired competence, is also subconscious.
We are generally not consciously aware of the rules of the languages we have acquired.
Instead, we have a ‘feel’ for correctness. Grammatical sentences ‘sound’ right, or ‘feel’
right, and errors feel wrong, even if we do not consciously know what rule was violated.
(p.10).

On the other side, ‘language learning’ refers to the process whereby learners are conscious
and well aware of the rules of the new language. This hypothesis may at first sight appear
to be contrary to the Critical Period Hypothesis, which states that the first years of a
person’s life are decisive in his/her language acquisition process and that, after that period
has passed by, language acquisition becomes harder or even impossible. However,
Krashen does not deny that such critical period exists; what he actually makes is a
distinction between acquiring a second language by means of the same processes
employed by children’s brains and acquiring a native-like proficiency in a second
language at an adult age.
The second of the five hypotheses is called ‘the natural order hypothesis’. Krashen
(2009) summarizes it as follows:
One of the most exciting discoveries in language acquisition research in recent
years has been the finding that the acquisition of grammatical structures proceeds in a
predictable order. Acquires of a given language tend to acquire certain grammatical
structures early, and others later. The agreement among individual acquirers is not always
100%, but there are clear, statistically significant, similarities. (p.12).

7
The natural order hypothesis traces its roots back to a longitudinal study published by
Roger Brown in 1973, where Brown found out that children acquiring English as their
native language learnt a list of fourteen grammatical morphemes in the same sequence.
Although at first sight it might be appealing to apply such discoveries to language
training, Krashen’s attitude remains careful and recommends not to follow this pattern
strictly since the individuals’ first language always play an important role in second
language acquisition.
The third of Krashen’s hypotheses is the ‘Monitor Hypothesis’. Once again,
Krashen (2009) argues:
The Monitor Hypothesis posits that acquisition and learning are used in very
specific ways. Normally, acquisition "initiates" our utterances in a second language and
is responsible for our fluency. Learning has only one function, and that is as a Monitor,
or editor. Learning comes into play only to make changes in the form of our utterance,
after is has been "produced" by the acquired system. This can happen before we speak or
write, or after (self-correction). The Monitor hypothesis implies that formal rules, or
conscious learning, play only a limited role in second language performance. These
limitations have become even clearer as research has proceeded in the last few years.
(pp.15-16).

So, contrary to the Chomskyan dichotomy learning/acquisition as conceived as mutually

exclusive, Krashen argues that both can be present in an adult’s path to bilingualism, but
in a different manner: while the acquisition process is what makes us proficient speakers,
learning is related to the rules we consciously learn -most times under direct instruction-
and can appear when producing the speech act in order to act as a filter that corrects what
is about to be said. He further argues that, when optimally managed, Monitor Theory can
be applied in order to make learners achieve a higher level of proficiency.
The ‘Input Hypothesis’ seek for an answer to the question of how languages are acquired.
According to this view, individuals that receive the proper second language input -that is,
one level above their current level- progress in accordance with the natural order. About
the question of how learners can understand language that contains structures that they
have not yet acquired, Krashen (2009) argues that:
The answer to this apparent paradox is that we use more than our linguistic
competence to help us understand. We also use context, our knowledge of the world, our
extra-linguistic information to help us understand language directed at us. (p.21).

The Input Hypothesis has been put into test by several researchers in order to determine
whether this model would benefit students over more traditional language learning
methodologies such as audio-lingual method. Although results showed that these
different methods lead to learning outcomes that are slightly significant, Krashen
attributes these poor results to the lack of ‘comprehensible input’ that was provided to
learners during the process.
Finally, the last of the hypotheses introduced by Krashen is named the ‘Affective Filter
Hypothesis’, which stands for the affective variables that have been proved to affect the
course of a second language acquisition. He names three of these: motivation, self-
confidence and anxiety. Speakers with a higher degree of motivation and self-confidence
and those with lesser anxiety levels appear to better perform in the second language. In

8
this view, the role of language teachers would be not to just ‘teach’ the second language,
but they must also encourage their students and try to raise their motivation and self-
confidence levels in order to achieve better results.

2.3.Language use: a brief overview of speaking models

The third major issue that has concerned psycholinguistics is that of the language in
use. The main questions that have been formulated regarding both L1 and L2 performance
can be summarized as follows: How do people produce L1? What are the main differences
or similarities between L1 and L2 production? How is language performance related to
the development of L2? What is the role of memory and attention in L2 development? In
order to answer these questions, several models have emerged in the last century. In this
section we will review some of the most influential ones.
The first model that must be necessarily mentioned due to its impact in the linguistic
scope is the introduced by psychologist Willem Levelt in his work Speaking: From
Interaction to Articulation (1989). Although this model provided by Levelt was focused
mainly in monolingual production, it attempts to provide some interesting aspects of how
L1 operates so that they have been largely applied to the understanding of L2 production
as well.
Levelt’s ‘Speaking model’ is framed under the categorization of a ‘modular model’,
that is, it assumes that language performance is the product of the operations made by
separated modules in the brain, each of which have a different aim. He coined the term
‘blueprint’ to refer to this structure and then proceeded to describe it. In Levelt’s (1995)
words:
According to this 'blueprint', the ability to speak is based on the interaction of a set of
processing components that are relatively autonomous or 'modular' in their functioning. Each
component is comparatively simple; the system's intelligence derives from the co-operation
of the components. (13).

These components manage four stages: speakers conceptualize their thoughts and
formulate them into linguistic devices; the resulting linguistic plan is then articulated into
phonological items through speech to finally undergo a process of self-monitoring, that
is, a process of self-evaluation of what they have said.
The way these processing components work is widely developed in the aforementioned
book Speaking: From Interaction to Articulation (1989) and later summarized in
successive articles and publications. For instance, in his 1998 collaborative work,
Roelofs, Meyer and Levelt stated:
[…] speech planning proceeds through conceptualization and formulation,
followed by articulation (see Levelt, 1989 for a review). Conceptualization processes map
a communicative intention onto a message, which indicates the conceptual information
to be verbally expressed in order to reach a speaker’s communicative goal. Formulation
processes activate and select words for the message concepts, which is called lexical
access, and plan syntactic and morphophonological structures. The result is an
articulatory program for the utterance, which, when executed, yields overt speech.
(p.220).

9
Levelt’s model is particularly important for its explanations of other similarly remarkable
processes related to language production such as memory and attention, as well as for it
is supported by a great deal of research evidence.
The model served other scholars in their attempts of explaining the particularities of
second language production. For instance, Keen De Bot (1992) proposed his ‘Bilingual
Production Model’, where the processing components described in Levelt’s ‘Speaking’
Model interlock with other linguistic factors that are equally relevant in the L1
production, such as sociolinguistic phenomena. According to De Bot, individuals that are
proficient in more than one language differentiate the various aspects of each language in
the three components described by Levelt: conceptualizer, formulator and articulator.
Then, when speaking, speakers choose one over the other in each of these three levels.
On the other hand, Nanda Poulisse (1997) points out that there are three
differences between L1 and L2 that must be taken into account: First, speakers do not
have a L2 knowledge as they have of L1, so that relevant rules or semantic and
grammatical information may be missing at certain points. Second, depending on the
proficiency of the L2 speaker, he/she usually shows a poorer degree of automaticity in
the production of L2. Third, both intentional and unintentional transfers are often made
by L2 speakers, the former normally due to sociocultural factors -L2 speakers might
eventually want to assert their foreign identity-; while the later stands for the cross-
linguistic interference.
Poulisse and Bongaerts, in their 1994 article ‘First Language Use in Second
Language Production’ they took De Bot’s model and developed their Spreading
Activation Model, in order to shed light on how L1 and L2 operate in the speaker’s mind
both separately and mixed together. According to their view, the conceptual level of a
bilingual speaker processes both the conceptualization of thoughts and the choice of the
language in which such thoughts are to be produced, while the rest of the processing
components remain equal to L1 production.
What all these models have in common is their relationship with the analysis of speech
errors or ‘slips of the tongue’, for they provide linguists with prized cues in the production
of language. Researchers have acknowledged the consistency of speech errors among
individuals, such as shifts, deletion or blending. At the same time, speech errors may be
seen as evidence for the actual categorization of the different linguistic levels proposed
by the models above: it seems clear that speech errors occur only at one level at a time.
For instance, an utterance that is delivered with an exchange at the phonetic level will be
perfectly fine in its semantic and syntactic level.

10
 3. CONCLUSIONS
The present work offers an overview through the most important theories and
approaches that have influenced psycholinguistics from its very beginning to present
days. The relevance of the models presented here are not just mere attempts to provide a
theoretical framework that could explain the cognitive processes involved in language
learning and language production; they also make sense due to their pedagogical
implications and the whole range of possibilities that they may offer to language teachers.
Although a long way is yet to be walked, the impact of cognitive sciences in
general and psycholinguistics in particular during the last few decades is unparalleled in
history. The proliferation of studies and researches in the field have changed the scope of
language methodologies and turned it into a more scientific-like nature, where a great
deal of different disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, neurobiology or
linguistics merge together and serve to each other as a source for inspiration. It is precisely
this interdisciplinary nature of psycholinguistics what makes it especially interesting;
with the passage of time, I assume these interrelations will become more and more narrow
and new perspectives will blossom.

4. REFERENCES
Balamurugan, K. and Thirunavukkarasu, S. (2018). Introduction to Psycholinguistics-A
Review. Studies in Linguistics and Literature. 2(2) pp.110-113. Retrieved from
http://www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/sll/article/view/1371.
Boersma, P., Dekkers, J. & van de Weijer, J. (eds.). (2000). Optimality Theory.
Phonology, Syntax and Acquisition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Carrol, D. (2008). Psychology of Language. Belmont: Wadsworth.
Chomsky, N. (1959). A Review of B.F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. Language. 35 (1)
pp.26-58. Retrieved from http://cogprints.org/1148/1/chomsky.htm
Chomsky, N. (1957) Syntactic Structures. Massachusetts: Mouton Publishers.
De Bot, K. (1992). A Bilingual Production Model: Levelt’s ‘Speaking’ Model Adapted.
Applied Linguistics. 13(1) pp.1-24.
DeCasper, A. J., & Spence, M. J. (1986). Prenatal maternal speech influences newborns’
perception of speech sounds. Infant Behavior and Development. 9, pp.133–150.
Feehan, C. (2016). An Optimality Theoretic Approach to Child Language Acquisition.
Linguistic Portfolios. 5, pp.15-19. Retrieved from
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060&context=stcloud_li
ng.
Guendouzi, J., Loncke, F., William, M.J. (eds.). (2011). The Handbook of
Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Processes. New York: Psychology Press.

11
Hoff, e. and Shatz, M. (ed.). (2007). Blackwell Handbook of Language Development.
Blackwell.
Heo, J., Han, S., Koch, Ch & Aydin, H. (2011). Piaget’s Egocentrism and Language
Learning: Language Egocentrism (LE) and Language Differentiation (LD). Journal of
Language Teaching and Research. 2(4) pp.733-739. Retrieved from
http://www.academypublication.com/issues/past/jltr/vol02/04/01.pdf.
Kantor, J.R. (1952). An Objective Psychology of Grammar. Bloomington: The Principia
Press.
Krashen, S. D. (1981). Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning.
California: Pergamon Press Inc.
Krashen, S. D. (2009). Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition.
Retrieved from http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/books/principles_and_practice.pdf.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1993). Psycholinguistics. In Companion Encyclopedia of Psychology
(pp.319-377). London: Routledgde
Levelt, W. J. M. (2013). A History of Psycholinguistics. The Pre-Chomskyan Era.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1989). Speaking: From Interaction to Articulation. Massachusetts: The
MIT Press.
Levelt, W. J. M. (1995). The ability to speak: from intentions to spoken words. European
Review. 3(1) pp.13-23.
Lightbown, P.M & Spada, N. (2013). How Languages are Learned. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
López, S. O. and Gallo, P. (2004) Acquisition, Learning, or Development of Language?
Skinner’s ‘Verbal Behavior’ Revisited. The Spanish Journal of Psychology. 7(2) pp.161-
170.
McCarthy, J.J. (2002). A Thematic Guide to Optimality Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-
Crofts.
Miller, G.A. (2003). The cognitive revolution: a historical perspective. Trends in
Cognitive Sciences. 7(3) pp.141-144. Retrieved from http://miashs-www.u-
ga.fr/prevert/SpecialiteSC/FichiersPDF/2018_19_Loevenbruck_Miller_2003.pdf
Poulisse, N. & Bongaerts, T. (1994). First Language Use in Second Language Production.
Applied Linguistics. 15, pp.36-57.
Prince, A. & Smolensky, P. (1993). Optimality Theory. Constraint Interaction in
Generative Grammar. Retrieved from http://roa.rutgers.edu/files/537-0802/537-0802-
PRINCE-0-0.PDF
Roelofs, A., Meyer, A. S. & Levelt, W. J. M. (1998). A case for the lemma/lexeme
distinction in models of speaking: comment on Caramazza and Miozzo (1997). Elsevier
Science. Cognition. 69, pp.219-230.
12
Tomasello, M. (2000). First steps toward a usage-based theory of language acquisition.
Cognitive Linguistics 11(1/2) pp.61-82.
VanPatten, B. & Williams, J. (eds). (2015). Theories in Second Language Acquisition. An
Introduction. Michigan/Chicago: Routledge.
Von Stecher, P. (2012). La lingüística de Gustave Guillaume. De la lengua al discurso.
Onomázein. 25 pp.163-180. Retrieved from
https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/1345/134524361008.pdf.

13