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Psycholinguistics
The term psycholinguistics was coined in the 1940s and came into more
general use after the publication of Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A.
Sebeok's Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems
(1954), which reported the proceedings of a seminar sponsored in the
United States by the Social Science Research Council's Committee on
Linguistics and Psychology.
The boundary between linguistics (in the narrower sense of the term: see
the introduction of this article [под "лингвистикой" в узком смысле
слова здесь подразумевается "внутренняя", или структурная, лингвистика -
А.Б.]) and psycholinguistics is difficult, perhaps impossible, to draw.
So too is the boundary between psycholinguistics and psychology. What
characterizes psycholinguistics as it is practiced today as a more or
less distinguishable field of research is its concentration upon a
certain set of topics connected with language and its bringing to bear
upon them the findings and theoretical principles of both linguistics
and psychology. The range of topics that would be generally held to fall
within the field of psycholinguistics nowadays is rather narrower,
however, than that covered in the survey by Osgood and Sebeok.
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Language acquisition by children
One of the topics most central to psycholinguistic research is the
acquisition of language by children. The term acquisition is preferred
to "learning," because "learning" tends to be used by psychologists in a
narrowly technical sense, and many psycholinguists believe that no
psychological theory of learning, as currently formulated, is capable of
accounting for the process whereby children, in a relatively short time,
come to achieve a fluent control of their native language. Since the
beginning of the 1960s, research on language acquisition has been
strongly influenced by Chomsky's theory of generative grammar, and the
main problem to which it has addressed itself has been how it is
possible for young children to infer the grammatical rules underlying
the speech they hear and then to use these rules for the construction of
utterances that they have never heard before. It is Chomsky's
conviction, shared by a number of psycholinguists, that children are
born with a knowledge of the formal principles that determine the
grammatical structure of all languages, and that it is this innate
knowledge that explains the success and speed of language acquisition.
Others have argued that it is not grammatical competence as such that is
innate but more general cognitive principles and that the application of
these to language utterances in particular situations ultimately yields
grammatical competence. Many recent works have stressed that all
children go through the same stages of language development regardless
of the language they are acquiring. It has also been asserted that the
same basic semantic categories and grammatical functions can be found in
the earliest speech of children in a number of different languages
operating in quite different cultures in various parts of the world.
Although Chomsky was careful to stress in his earliest writings that
generative grammar does not provide a model for the production or
reception of language utterances, there has been a good deal of
psycholinguistic research directed toward validating the psychological
reality of the units and processes postulated by generative grammarians
in their descriptions of languages. Experimental work in the early 1960s
appeared to show that nonkernel sentences took longer to process than
kernel sentences and, even more interestingly, that the processing time
increased proportionately with the number of optional transformations
involved. More recent work has cast doubt on these findings, and most
psycholinguists are now more cautious about using grammars produced by
linguists as models of language processing. Nevertheless, generative
grammar continues to be a valuable source of psycholinguistic
experimentation, and the formal properties of language, discovered or
more adequately discussed by generative grammarians than they have been
by others, are generally recognized to have important implications for
the investigation of short-term and long-term memory and perceptual
strategies.
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Speech perception
Another important area of psycholinguistic research that has been
strongly influenced by recent theoretical advances in linguistics and,
more especially, by the development of generative grammar is speech
perception. It has long been realized that the identification of speech
sounds and of the word forms composed of them depends upon the context
in which they occur and upon the hearer's having mastered, usually as a
child, the appropriate phonological and grammatical system. Throughout
the 1950s, work on speech perception was dominated (as was
psycholinguistics in general) by information theory, according to which
the occurrence of each sound in a word and each word in an utterance is
statistically determined by the preceding sounds and words [имеется в
виду концепция Осгуда - А.Б.]. Information theory is no longer as
generally accepted as it was a few years ago, and more recent research
has shown that in speech perception the cues provided by the acoustic
input are interpreted, unconsciously and very rapidly, with reference
not only to the phonological structure of the language but also to the
more abstract levels of grammatical organization.
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Other areas of research
Other areas of psycholinguistics that should be briefly mentioned are
the study of aphasia and neurolinguistics. The term aphasia is used to
refer to various kinds of language disorders; recent work has sought to
relate these, on the one hand, to particular kinds of brain injury and,
on the other, to psychological theories of the storage and processing of
different kinds of linguistic information. One linguist has put forward
the theory that the most basic distinctions in language are those that
are acquired first by children and are subsequently most resistant to
disruption and loss in aphasia ["one linguist" - это, между прочим, не
кто иной как Р.О. Якобсон! - А.Б.]. This, though not disproved, is still
regarded as controversial. Two kinds of aphasia are commonly
distinguished. In motor aphasia the patient manifests difficulty in the
articulation of speech or in writing and may produce utterances with a
simplified grammatical structure, but his comprehension is not affected.
In sensory aphasia the patient's fluency may be unaffected, but his
comprehension will be impaired and his utterances will often be incoherent.
Neurolinguistics should perhaps be regarded as an independent field of
research rather than as part of psycholinguistics. In 1864 it was shown
that motor aphasia is produced by lesions in the third frontal
convolution of the left hemisphere of the brain. Shortly after the
connection had been established between motor aphasia and damage to this
area (known as Broca's area), the source of sensory aphasia was
localized in lesions of the posterior part of the left temporal lobe.
More recent work has confirmed these findings. The technique of
electrically stimulating the cortex in conscious patients has enabled
brain surgeons to induce temporary aphasia and so to identify a "speech
area" in the brain. It is no longer generally believed that there are
highly specialized "centres" within the speech area, each with its own
particular function; but the existence of such a speech area in the
dominant hemisphere of the brain (which for most people is the left
hemisphere) seems to be well established. The posterior part of this
area is involved more in the comprehension of speech and the
construction of grammatically and semantically coherent utterances, and
the anterior part is concerned with the articulation of speech and with
writing. Little is yet known about the operation of the neurological
mechanisms underlying the storage and processing of language.
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Думаю, Вам интересно также будет взглянуть и на библиографию к разделу
"Лингвистика" (в целом).
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Bibliography
Robert H. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics, 2nd ed. (1979), and
General Linguistics: An Introductory Survey, 3rd ed. (1980), together
offer a comprehensive and balanced treatment of the whole field.
Leonard Bloomfield, Language (1933), a classic introduction to the
subject, is still not completely superseded and is essential reading for
an understanding of subsequent American work.
Charles F. Hockett, A Course in Modern Linguistics (1958), a
comprehensive, stimulating, though somewhat personal textbook,
represents the post-Bloomfieldian period in the United States.
John Lyons has produced a number of notable surveys: Introduction to
Theoretical Linguistics (1968), attempts to synthesize more traditional
and more modern ideas on language, paying particular attention to
generative grammar and semantics; New Horizons in Linguistics (ed.,
1970), contains previously unpublished chapters on developments in most
areas of linguistics; Language and Linguistics: An Introduction (1981),
is a textbook covering theoretical developments.
Martin Joos (ed.), Readings in Linguistics (1957), is an excellent
selection of key articles on structuralism in the post-Bloomfieldian
period.
Z.S. Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951), offers the most
extreme and most consistent expression of the distributional approach to
linguistic analysis - important for the development of generative grammar.
Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (1957), is the first generally
accessible and relatively non-technical treatment of generative grammar,
widely recognized as one of the most revolutionary books on language to
appear in the 20th century; J.P.B. Allen and Paul Van Buren (eds.),
Chomsky: Selected Readings (1971), contains an annotated selection of
key passages from Chomsky's main works.
S. Pit Corder (ed.), The Edinburgh Course in Applied Linguistics, 4 vol.
(1973-77), is a collection of readings covering a wide range of views.
Richard C. Oldfield and J.C. Marshall (eds.), Language (1968); J.A.
Fodor, T.G. Bever, and M.F. Garrett, The Psychology of Language (1974);
and Joseph F. Kess, Psycholinguistics (1976), are important works in
psycholinguistics.
Dell Hymes (ed.), Language in Culture and Society (1964), is an
excellent selection of articles in sociolinguistics and anthropological
linguistics.
Language, Word, International Journal of American Linguistics (United
States); Philological Society Transactions, Journal of Linguistics
(Great Britain); Lingua, Studies in Language (Holland); Bulletin de la
Societe de Linguistique de Paris (France).
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АБ
