PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

INTRODUCCIÓN A LA LINGÜÍSTICA APLICADA

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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

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menschlichen 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.

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 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

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reinforcement are given when 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

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 samples of a natural language they are exposed to. This innate endowment was seen as a
sort of 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

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insights they need to achieve desirable knowledge by building on what they already
know.
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.

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 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

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 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).

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.

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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 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:

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 […] 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).

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.

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 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.

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