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The rise and (surprisingly rapid) fall of psycholinguistics

Article  in  Synthese · September 1987

DOI: 10.1007/BF00413750

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 ARTHUR S. REBER

THE RISE AND (SURPRISINGLY RAPID) FALL

OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

ABSTRACT. Psycholinguistics re-emerged in an almost explosive fashion during the

1950s and 1960s. It then underwent an equally abrupt decline as an independent
sub-discipline. This paper charts this fall and identifies five general factors which, it is
argued, were responsible for its demise. These are: (a) an uncompromisingly strong
version of nativism; (b) a growing isolation of psycholinguistics from the body psy-
chology; (c) a preference for formal theory over empirical data; (d) several abrupt
modifications in the "Standard Theory" in linguistics; and (e) a failure to appreciate the
strong commitment to functionalism that characterizes experimental psychology. In
short, what looked like a revolution two decades ago turned out to be merely a local
reformation that occurred along side of and largely independent from the real
revolution in the cognitive sciences.

No one is really sure when linguistics began as a science. Robins

(1967) argues that a continuous tradition can be discerned that stret-
ches back, as does seemingly everything else, to the pre-Socratics of
early Greece. No one is really sure when psychology began as a
science either, although we like to pretend that it started with Wilhelm
W u n d t one sunny day in 1879 at the University of Leipzig. We do,
however, have a pretty good idea when the hybrid psycholinguistics
began and, oddly,, it seems to have had two beginnings. Its initial
incarnation, as has been d o c u m e n t e d so well by Blumenthal, was
during the later part of the 19th century and was aided and abetted
primarily by the very Wilhelm W u n d t who lies at the center of the
little myth about psychology's genesis. The hybrid was not, of course,
known by this rather tortuous name in those days.
This infant science did not last very long for various reasons. For
one, the purveyor of Wundtian ideas to the United States, Edward
Bradford Titchener, only brought with him the first part of W u n d t ' s
p r o g r a m - the introspectionist, empiricist, laboratory-based Struc-
turalism - while neglecting the more rationalistic, speculative, non-
laboratory-based Volkerpsychologie within which Wundt's psycholin-
guistics was embedded. Secondly, this nascent little science got caught
up in the onslaught of the behaviorists who trashed it along with a
number of other, not-unreasonable attempts to understand the h u m a n

Synthese 72 (1987) 325-339

O 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company
326 ARTHUR S. R E B E R

condition such as epistemology, psychoanalysis, and neurophysiology.

The second incarnation developed during the late 1950s and early
1960s. Its ontogenesis has been documented by many and I will only
make a few cursory comments on it, for my main purpose here is to
examine, not the rise of this hybrid, but its surprisingly rapid demise. It
had, like most scientific movements, a propaedeutic period marked by
significant developments such as Shannon and Weaver's (1949) intro-
duction of information theory to the social sciences, Zelig Harris'
various attempts to extend linguistics past its Bloomfieldian taxonomic
traditions, George Miller and his co-workers' several attempts at the
examination of perception and coding of linguistic material (see
Miller, 1951a, 1951b; Miller and Selfridge, 1950), Karl Lashley's
important 1951 paper on the problem of serial ordering, and various
other less noted publications all of which helped to "soften" up both
linguistics and psychology and to make them more receptive to the
new psycholinguistics.
Things began to gel in the summer of 1951 when the Social Science
Research Council brought together a group of six young scholars for
the purpose of examining the possibility of a fruitful collaboration.
Present at this informal institute at CorneU University were several
people who were to play an important role in the developing field,
including Charles Osgood, John Carroll, and Thomas Sebeok. They
planned a larger summer seminar held at the University of Indiana
during the summer of 1953 which included engineers interested in
communications theory, anthropologists with a focus on comparative
linguistics, linguists with both applied and theoretical interests and, of
course, psychologists with a variety of orientations including early
cognitivists like Susan Ervin and John Carroll and neo-behaviorists
like Osgood and James Jenkins. These folks are also the ones respon-
sible for popularizing the name psycholinguistics for the hybrid science
which has stuck despite Roger Brown's (1958) protest that it sounded
more like a description of a deranged polyglot than a scientific field.
The approach received further impetus in 1956 at the IRE (Institute
of Radio Engineers) convention at MIT where a number of significant
figures were in attendance, including George Miller, Herbert Simon,
and a little-known theoretical linguist named Avrarn Noam Chomsky.
His presence at the IRE meeting is significant for a most obvious
reason: whenever psychologists, linguists, or philosophers with an
historical bent muse about the development of psycholinguistics
 THE RISE AND FALL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 327

Chomsky is always the scholar who stands out in bold relief. It is

Chomsky who is the central contributing figure in the development of
the field in this its central incarnation, In fact, the Chomskyan orien-
tation captured the discipline to such an extent over the next two
decades that the very name psycholinguistics became synonymous with
the set of ideas that emanated on a regular basis from MIT.
The reasons for this Chomskyanization of the field are many: his
enormous output from the early Syntactic Structures onward until
today; his role as codifier of a Standard Theory for the study of
grammar; his behind-the-scenes influence as intellectual godfather to
a generation of formal linguists; his uncompromising stance as a
defender of particular philosophical, linguistic, psychological, and
political principles; and, germanely, his insistence that linguistics is
properly viewed only as a subdiscipline within the larger scope of
cognitive psychology. This last perspective was particularly important
for it allowed, indeed invited, those who called themselves psy-
chologists to have a go at the psychology of language.
But now I turn to the main point of my paper: this infant science
doesn't appear to have had much more staying power than the earlier
form. The Chomsky-inspired psycholinguistics has faded and its fall
has been as sudden as was its rise. Figure 1 is illustrative. It charts the
number of citations of the works of Chomsky in the Science Citation
Index from 1964 through 1983. Even at the anchor points this
inverted U-shaped function is pretty humbling to most of us but it
helps to make my point. The Chomsky-inspired psycholinguistics is
fading. A more careful examination of these citations reveals various
patterns in which individual works of his are being cited and in which
publications they are being mentioned but I don't really want to
pursue these minutiae now. The point is not that Chomsky is in a
descent for surely he is not; the point is that the field that he inspired is
and his SC1 count is, well, data. For whatever else it's worth, it should
I~e noted that the drop-off in citations has been occurring just at the
time when there has been a burgeoning of the fields of cognitive
psychology, cognitive science, epistemology, artificial intelligence,
neuropsychology, and the like, leading to an enormous increase in the
number of journals and books on the topics that used to be argued as
falling within the scope of psycholinguistics. We are not dealing here
with either a cohort effect or a statistical artifact.
The problem was that the psycholinguistics of the 1960s and 1970s
 328 A R T H U R S. R E B E R

240 i
220!
200i
180,!
f

12011

8oi /
f 100J,
/

4o/\/
6ffl /

'64 '66 '68 '70 '72 '74 '76 '78 '80 '82
YEAR
Fig. 1. Noam Chomsky's Science Citation Index count from 1964 to 1983.

was a " f o r c e d " discipline. L e t m e q u o t e f r o m a p a p e r I w r o t e in 1973

in w h i c h I was trying to m a k e sense of the struggles within the field
w h i c h (note Figure 1) was at its p e a k of popularity. In that essay I
referred to the field as psycho-linguistics, with a h y p h e n .
By psycho-linguistics is meant the sometimes joint efforts of both psychologists and
linguists to unravel the problem of language. The term generally used is psycholin-
guistics, without the hyphen. However, in recent years...it has come to refer to a
particular form of the scientific study of psychological and linguistic problems. It goes
almost without saying that many of the theoreticians and researchers discussed.., would
be disturbed to find themselves so labelled. In deference to those who would disparage
the title and to eliminate any distortion, this paper discusses the discipline of psycho-
linguistics rather than that of psycholinguistics. (p. 289)
T h e point was that e v e n then there was detectable uneasiness in the
field, a r e l u c t a n c e to be identified with a particular orientation to the
subject matter. T o d a y the t e r m itself has almost c o m p l e t e l y disap-
p e a r e d f r o m the m o s t significant places, the journals in p s y c h o l o g y
and the c o g n i t i v e sciences w h i c h publish the empirical and theoretical
papers of the w o r k e r s in the field. W h e n used, it is typically in text
b o o k s w h i c h usually reflect w h a t was d o n e and not w h a t is being d o n e
 THE RISE AND FALL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 329

and in the writings of those whose training is in peripheral disciplines

such as philosophy, artificial intelligence, neurology, and the like.
There are, I feel, five identifiable reasons for the rather short-lived
influence of this Chomsky-inspired approach: (a) the uncompromising
nativistic argument; (b) the isolation of psycholinguistics from the rest
of psychology, particularly from the rest of cognitive psychology; (c)
the tendency for theory to take precedence over data; (d) the several
changes made in the "standard" theory of grammar; and (e) the failure
to adapt to experimental psychology's deeply ingrained affiliation with
a functionalist approach. Taking up each of these in turn:

(a) Nativism

At the core of the modern psycholinguistics is a strong form of

nativism. In my 1973 paper I followed Slobin's terminology and
referred to this version as a content specific nativism in that the
underlying contents of mind are assumed to be given. The term
reflects the characterization often given by Chomsky of a "language
organ" whose knowledge base (i.e., its content) is specified by some as
yet unknown principles of evolutionary biology rather than being
acquired by experience. In Chomsky's sense the process here is one in
which language grows in the mind rather than being learned.
Now, there are more than a few disputes currently being engaged in
by various theorists about the defensibility of this position and I don't
wish to get into them. Their truth or falsity is quite beside the point
here. Rather, what I wish to do is identify a number of factors
associated with this kind of nativistic theorizing that may help us
understand why it failed to attract adherents in psychology.
First, nativism is a position that is simply not conducive to the
promotion of an empirical research .program. Nativism, especially
when blended with rationalism, looks for data in intuitions, intro-
spections, and phenomenological experience; it does not encourage
the kinds of research programs that experimental psychologists have
typically felt comfortable with. In fact, much of the early work in
psycholinguistics had a "demonstrative" flavor rather than an "in-
vestigative". It was almost like discerning the truth through rational
means and then going out and doing a study - not to discover
anything new or interesting about how people processed language but
330 ARTHUR S. R E B E R

rather to demonstrate to the benighted the truth of one's rational

insight about how they processed language.
Moreover, nativism, almost by definition, downplays learning.
Learning is a topic which has historically been one of the more
intensively explored in experimental psychology. It is, moreover, a
theory-neutral topic which has attracted the attention of behaviorists,
cognitivists, epistemologists, and psychoanalysts. In the Chomskyan
form of psycholinguistics the essential knowledge base for acquiring a
language is assumed to be inborn and the observed language to be
merely the result of a fixing of parameters in a universal system. There
is no role for learning in the acquisition of a language, at least not the
kind of learning that has fascinated psychological science for so long.
All the interesting questions that psychologists asked about acquisition
were recast into questions about the "growth of organs". This is not
the kind of notion that sits comfortably with psychologists, no matter
whether they are staunch behaviorists or vigorously cognitive in their
approach. And, of course, it all becomes the more difficult to accept
when the psychologist is being told that the linguistic underpinning of
psycholinguistics is actually a branch of cognitive psychology.
Finally, I suspect that many psychologists were made to feel rather
uncomfortable defending any strong nativist position after the con-
troversy over Jensen's hypothesis of the genetic links between race
and intelligence erupted. Now, we need to be very careful here. There
is nothing in Jensen's arguments that entails a Chomskyan nativism
nor vice Versa - in fact the intersection between the set of ideas of
Jensen and Chomsky is very likely the empty set. Jensen's perspective
calls for a focus on individual differences and a search for the genetic
foundations for those observed; Chomsky's calls for a focus on uni-
versality and for a search for the evolutionary biological basis for
those noted.
Nevertheless, psychology has had a long and painful affiliation with
the implications of genetic determinism, from Spencer's social Dar-
winism through the involvement of such eminent men as G. Stanley
Hall, Robert Yerkes, Henry Goddard, and Lewis Terman in the
establishment of a set of immigration quotas based on racial and
ethnic distinctions, and, more recently, the arguments of Butt, Jensen,
Eysenck, and Shockley on race and IQ. This has made many extremely
sensitive to the acceptance of any theory that sets so much stock in
the immutable gene.
 THE RISE AND FALL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 331

Now I want to be very clear here. Nothing I have said cuts one way
or the other with respect to the truth of nativism, its ultimate role in
the development of a science of the psychology of language, or the
logic of any of the previous arguments. 1 am only emphasizing factors
that I suspect played a role in the diminishing of the influence of the
Chomskyan approach; logic and truth aside, nativism has worked to
the disadvantage of the psycholinguistic science that embraced it.

(b) Isolationism
The Chomsky-inspired psycholinguistics views language as the ulti-
mate unique behavior for it is conceptualized as doubly isolated from
other psychological processes. Not only is language viewed as unique
to man, a presumption shared with many other perspectives, but it is
also viewed as unique within man. This position is actually a corollary
of the content specific nativism in that the knowledge base hypo-
thesized is encapsulated and only serves language; it is not seen as
containing anything in the way of general processing systems. The
resulting psyeholinguistic science here becomes one in which it is
presumed that nothing about language can be learned by the
examination of any other cognitive or perceptual process - and vice
versa.
This is a very touchy point. Notice what it asks of a cognitive
psychologist with an interest in language. It argues that linguistics and
psycholinguistics, disciplines which have been put forward as properly
within the umbrella of cognitive psychology, will, in the final analysis,
only be admitted in a sealed box. This notion that the proper focus of
the science of psycholinguistics is an encapsulated module (to use the
newly favored term) has never sat well with psychologists. It has been
tried and found wanting on more than a few occasions since it evolved
out of the philosophy of Thomas Reid through faculty psychology,
McDougall's instinct theories, Gall and Spurzheim's phrenology, the
19th century physiologists' fascination with cortical localization of
function, and up to the specific-factor theories of intelligence such as
Guilford's. Suspicion here is, thus, no big surprise. A good deal of the
frustration and even anger among the participants at the Piaget-
Chomsky debates held a few years back (Piatelli-Palmarini, 1980) can
be traced to this issue. Piaget's system, of course, is one that is
332 ARTHUR S. R E B E R

fundamentally grounded on the presumption of general cognitive and

perceptual principles that operate across modalities and contexts.
The isolationism of the Chomskyan psycholinguistics is most strong-
ly felt in the way in which the defenders of this perspective pay
essentially no attention to the paralinguistic aspects of language,
particularly when looking at the acquisition of language. Since lan-
guage is viewed as the product of an encapsulated module whose
content is "hardwired", the role of the environment is reduced to that
of a trigger with few other causal properties. As a result the prag-
matics of language, the functions of speech acts, the utilization of
conversational postulates, and the other social and interactive ele-
ments of communication are neglected if not ignored. Taken to its full
extreme, psycholinguistics would have separated itself from the cog-
nitive sciences' favorite topics: learning, memory, induction, artificial
intelligence, consciousness, thinking, problem solving, reasoning,
decision making, etc.

(c) Theory over Data

There are two hallowed techniques for a new science to bootstrap

itself into respectability. One is to focus on the collection of data for
the purpose of specification of objective knowledge about the domain
of the science. The other is to emphasize the role of theory in order to
carve out an explanatory framework for that which is known to
happen. Neither of these survives very long without the other - no
matter what the defenders of each faith may profess. But they can
surely be differentiated from each other in terms of emphasis. The
psychology of this century has been strongly in the data camp. Theory
is not its long suit and whenever things start getting sticky psy-
chologists will prefer empirical examination of phenomena to models
of them. Linguistics, of course, has the opposite prejudice.
Things, of course, were not always so. Linguistics as a science first
burst into respectability when the taxonomists showed that a strong
data-based science of language was possible. Psychology began as a
science under the guidance of several sharply circumscribed theories
of mind that had little or no data to support them, including the
mechanism of Herbart, the early Structuralism of Wundt, and, of
course, Freudian psychoanalysis. But when the hybrid psycholinguis-
tics re-emerged under the MIT influence it brought with it the theory
 THE RISE AND FALL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 333

focus of the Chomskyans and not the empirical flavor of the

Bloomfieldians.
At first this focus on formalism was greeted warmly by experimental
psychologists. As Mehler (1980) has pointed out, the accumulation of
data and accretion of facts without guidance from theory was becom-
ing unsatisfying to a good many in the field and there was a tendency
to view Chomsky (and Piaget too - but that is another story for
another essay) as providing a needed antidote. But while this con-
tributed to the early acceptance of the new psyeholinguistics it was,
finally, a factor in its demise.
The easiest way to see this division between theory and data and the
role it played is to note the manner in which workers in the field have
dealt with the dichotomy between competence and performance.
Chomsky, in no uncertain terms, emphasized the central role of
competence. Competence is the underlying ability, the one directed by
the nativistically given language organ. It is also the component
which, by virtue of its status, can only be theorized about. The closest
thing to an empirical examination of competence is that carried out by
a well-schooled linguistic intuition. Performance from this point of
view is merely the output of competence funneled through production
systems, all of which are going to reflect the contaminations of
emotion, context, memory, motor action, and the vagaries of attention
and awareness. Performance, the very soul of empiricism, becomes
worthy primarily of neglect.
Put simply, the reincarnated psycholinguistics was a good deal more
linguistic than it was psychological and, given the tilt taken by the two
contributing fields during the past two decades, it became a discipline
whose prejudice was toward theory rather than data. Once again,
trying to fit such a field into the larger discipline of psychology -
which not only did not share this prejudice but had a long history of
battling against it - has not worked.

(d) Changing Theories

This problem was placed sharply in the attentional focus by the

labored confusion in the study of sentence memory immediately
following the publication of Aspects of a Theory of Syntax by Chore-
sky in 1965. In the preceding years a number of studies had been
published, primarily by George Miller and his co-workers, that seemed
334 ARTHUR S. R E B E R

to show that people processed sentential material in the fashion

predicted by Chomsky's earlier model of language. Few of us around
at the time can forget those marvelous graphs showing how the more
transformations there were underlying a sentence the longer it took a
subject to process it and the more errors the subject would typically
make when trying to recall it. "Kernel" sentences were easiest,
followed by passives, negatives, and interrogatives, and these were
easier than any of the combinations of transformations such as nega-
tive-interrogatives, passive-negatives, etc. Miller even went so far as
to estimate just how long it took the mind to process each trans-
formation.
Aspects, of course, pulled the rug out from under the new psy-
cholinguists, as Miller was calling these frontier scientists. All of these
transformations turned out not to be optional rules applied to terminal
strings but parts of the deep structure tree. To this day many of us
have wondered what to do with all that lovely data. Some such as
Martin and Roberts (1966) have suggested that all these findings are
really reflective of the psychological reality of Victor Yngve's Mar-
kovian model of language but one feels rather reluctant to take up
that cudgel.
A few brave souls did attempt to ferret out support for the Standard
Theory as it evolved following Aspects. Their work has been reviewed
in many places (e.g., Fodor, Bever and Garrett, 1974) and I don't
need to go into it here. Many of those who did this research are, of
course, not terribly pleased with the appearance of Trace Theory nor
with the principles of Government and Binding.
As Blumenthal has pointed out, a feature of the new psycholin-
guistics has been that the psychologist has gone to the linguist to learn
how to study language. The result of this has been that the psy-
chologist keeps having to make these huge adjustments in his ap-
proach to the problems of the field because the linguist to whom he
has turned keeps changing the characterization of the very topic of
discourse. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with changing one's
mind. In fact it is the last thing that any responsible scientist should
counsel against. The issue here is that the changes have been abruptly
introduced by linguists when they encountered weaknesses in the
formal theory of grammar, and have had essentially nothing to do with
the psychological components of language and language use. No
theoretical model of language has ever been rejected because it failed
 THE RISE AND FALL OF PSYCHOLINGU1STICS 335

to account for the data from a psychological study of language. No

matter what the psycholinguists may have thought they were doing, it
was not regarded as truly relevant to the science of linguistics which
was going about its business rather independently. It is clear that part
of this difficulty stems from the previously discussed tendency for
linguistics to favor theory over data. In a nutshell - once burned, twice
shy. Psychologists interested in language are today a little bit leery of
theoretical linguists.

(e) Functionalism
The functionalism I am concerned with here is not the functionalism
that maintains that mental states may be viewed as equivalent to
functional states. That point of view, associated largely with Hilary
Putnam, is an attempt to deal with the mind/body problem and
(perhaps) avoid the culs-de-sac of behaviorism and physicalism. While
there are some deep aspects of Putnam's functionalism that are shared
by the brand of interest here, it should be clear that his is a philoso-
pher's toy and mine a psychologist's.
Actually, within experimental psychology functionalism represents a
loose confederation of attitudes more than anything else. It is not a
theory of the organism nor is it a set of dictates or tenets. Rather, it is
an approach to the examination of things psychological that is so
much a part of the field that its existence is hardly noticed. It derived
from a formal school of thought in psychology of the same name
(although usually capitalized there) founded at the University of
Chicago during the 1890s under the guidance of John Dewey and
James Rowland Angell and was carried on there by Harvey Carr and
elsewhere by various students of these men.
The name of the school of thought was actually first used by
Titchener who planned it as an epithet to be used against psy-
chologists who were, in his mind, wasting their time by studying the
functions of consciousness rather than its structure. Angell pulled off a
stunning public relations ploy by wrapping Titchener's intended insult
about his shoulders and treating it as an honor. Functionalism was thus
born as an orientation that focused on the functions and the adaptive
significance of mind and mental acts. It was unabashedly Darwinian in
spirit but, under Dewey's guidance, deeply cognizant of the need to
336 ARTHUR S. R E B E R

view all acts as the result of the delicate coordination between the
individual and the context within which each act took place.
As a distinct school of thought it was sh0rt-lived. For one, it was too
narrowly focused on the study of consciousness, and for another, it
was too kind to opposing points of view such as Structuralism and
Psychoanalysis. It became ultimately a victim of radical behaviorism.
Ironically, in its liberalness it nurtured and trained the man who "did it
in", one John Broadus Watson who some years after taking his degree
at Chicago attacked his mentors' school of thought for having timidly
tried to make peace with the dragon of Structuralism when it should
properly have slain it. He then proceeded to clean the slate of both of
them and thereby establish an experimental psychology untainted by
messy things like mind and mental states with causal properties.
But the set of attitudes that formed the implicit foundation of
Functionalism continued after the demise of the formal school. The
legacy of Angell and his now long-expired school is an integral part of
contemporary psychology. It encompasses a number of other trends
and prejudices of the field. It envelops the pragmatism of James and
Peirce; the liberal attitudes of Woodworth; the focus on the practical
utility of action of neo-behaviorism; the holism of Dewey with its
preference for examination of the intact, functioning individual inter-
acting with the environment; and, in interesting ways, even the
general processing orientation of the neo-Piagetians.
This functionalism is, moreover, utterly neutral on many deep issues
that have often split areas in philosophy and psychology asunder, such
as acts vs. contents, behaviorism vs. mentalism, empiricism vs.
rationalism, even environmentalism vs. innatism. Adherence to a
functionalist perspective in contemporary psychology does not pre-
judice one in any particular fashion on these kinds of issues. B. F.
Skinner regards himself as a functionalist as do I. Adherence simply
means that one looks to the functional role that a given process or
specific pattern of behavior has in the context within which it occurs.
Adoption of this point of view merely invites the recognition that
people have available a large number of capacities and processing
modes and that circumstances dictate which one will have optimum
functional value and hence which one will be manifested in thought or
action.
Contemporary functionalism is, however, antagonistic to the claims
of the Chomsky-inspired psycholinguistic science in nearly every
 THE RISE AND FALL OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS 337

respect. The failure of this science to reckon with the deeply ingrained
functionalist spirit is arguably the single most significant factor in its
failure to establish itself as a robust science within psychology.
In summary, as I read the current scene in the cognitive sciences,
the recently re-emergent discipline of psycholinguistics inspired by the
always novel and frequently brilliant insights of Noam Chomsky has
had but a brief run. In fact, looking back, it appears to have faded
surprisingly quietly leaving behind a vigorous and active cognitive
psychology that includes within it a sub-speciality on the psychology
of language.
The new psycholinguistics was heralded as a revolution in the early
1960s and treated as though it were one throughout the 1970s. In fact,
from the classical Kuhnian view, it really should have conquered. It
had the essential ingredients: weak targets in behavioristically
dominated experimental psychology and taxonomic linguistics, a very
large number of empirical anomalies which these approaches had
swept under the conceptual rug, a novel approach introduced by a
scholar entering from a discipline outside of and uncontaminated by
the dogma of the field and, an immediate and enthusiastic reception
from a substantial part of the scholarly community in the field which
was waiting for something new and different. How could such a
revolution have failed to materialize?
The answer, I believe, is simplicity itself. No matter how revol-
utionary the early psycholinguists thought they were, the orientation
itself wasn't really very revolutionary. In fact, it was more of a
reformist endeavor than anything else. It succeeded in forcing a
reappraisal of the nature of language and it mandated psychologists to
modify in important ways their approach to the subject matter. These
were important advances but they were little more than reforms. And,
even had the new psycholinguistics become the dominant paradigm in
the study of language, it still would have .had only a reformist charac-
ter. It would have remade one domain of cognitive psychology but it
would have encapsulated it and isolated it from the rest of the field.
One does not revolutionize a field by balkanizing it.
And, while this local reformation was taking place, the real revol-
ution in the cognitive sciences gathered force quite independently of
psycholinguistics. Here the efforts are much more than reformist; the
very fabric of the field is being altered. The very definition of "an
important question" has been changed; the terminology has taken on
338 A R T H U R S. R E B E R

a new cast reflecting the influence of the various disciplines that are
now contributing, including artificial intelligence, epistemology,
neurology, and the like; the operative assumptions have been modified
to admit a host of novel and intriguing procedures; the means for
testing theories has moved in new ways. This new cognitive science,
significantly, has been for the most part quite comfortable with the
factors outlined above. That is, it is an approach that is not partic-
ularly wedded to a content specific nativism; it is strongly interactive
and does not necessarily encapsulate or modularize capacities; it is not
dominated by a particular theory of knowledge; it is (more-or-less
anyway, this one may be a problem in the future) largely concerned
with the data from experimentation rather than with the evaluation of
formal theory and, most important, it is easily adaptable to the
functionalistic spirit that still runs in the marrow of experimental
psychology.

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Department of Psychology
Brooklyn College and
Graduate Center of CUNY
New York, N.Y. 11210
U.S.A.

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