A history of psycholinguistics : the pre-Chomskyan era

672 Pages·2013·17.643 MB·English

by  W J M Levelt

A History of Psycholinguistics
The Pre-Chomskyan Era
This page intentionally left blank
A History of
Psycholinguistics
The Pre-Chomskyan Era
Willem J.M. Levelt
Director Emeritus,
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Nijmegen, the Netherlands

1
1

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Oxford University Press, 2013
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2013
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012937862
ISBN 978–0–19–965366–9
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Whilst every effort has been made to ensure that the contents of this work are as complete, accurate
and-up-to-date as possible at the date of writing, Oxford University Press is not able to give any
guarantee or assurance that such is the case. Readers are urged to take appropriately qualifi ed medical
advice in all cases. The information in this work is intended to be useful to the general reader, but
should not be used as a means of self-diagnosis or for the prescription of medication.
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Dedication
To Claartje, dear daughter
and psycholinguist
Preface
I have developed the habit of collecting statements about the age of psycholinguistics.
They abound in textbooks, their promotion materials, reviews, and anthologies. Here are
some: “With psycholinguistics in its fifth decade of existence,” “Psycholinguistics began
with attempts to test the empirical validity of various formal linguistic concepts,”
“Psycholinguistics is a young and fast changing science,” “The young science of
psycholinguistics,” “For about four decades following its emergence around 1950, psy-
cholinguistics . . .,” and so on.
I t is, indeed, the default view among us psycholinguists and our students that our sci-
ence took off during the 1950s. It all began with the 1951 Summer Seminar in Psychology
and Linguistics at Cornell University, held under the auspices of the Social Science
Research Council, and the subsequent 1953 seminar at Indiana University. They led to
Psycholinguistics. A survey of theory and research problems, so ably edited by Charles
Osgood and Thomas Sebeok. It became the “charter” of the new discipline. Then, by the
end of the 1950s, there was the “cognitive revolution.” The cooperation between George
Miller and Noam Chomsky transformed the young science into a mentalistic “genera-
tive” psycholinguistics, initially testing the “psychological reality” of transformational
grammar, then by and by unfolding into our present science.
Every people cherishes its own myth of origin and so do we psycholinguists. But evolu-
tion theory has taught us otherwise. There has been history before history. This book
reviews that “prehistory.” Psycholinguistics used to be called the psychology of language.
Its empirical roots go back to the late eighteenth century. It was an established discipline
a century later and it was a booming science during the first half of the twentieth century.
Its roots are tripartite. Psychology (both experimental and developmental) and linguistics
are inseparably unified in our modern designation. There is, in addition, the study of
language in the brain, which has always figured in the psychology of language. We will
trace their mutual inte ractions and sketch how they came to travel together.
T he book opens in the year 1951, our historical common ground. From that starting
point we dive into the real origins of our empirical science. Chapters 2 to 6 move us from
pioneers such as Tiedemann, Gall, Humboldt, and Steinthal, to the year 1900, when
Wundt published his monumental two-volume P sychologie der Sprache. Chapters 7 to 13
review the twentieth century developments, both theoretical and empirical, up to the
“cognitive revolution.” Chapter 14 is explicitly devoted to the tragic repercussions during
the Third Reich, which drastically reshaped the world map of psycholinguistics. Chapter
15, finally, returns to the 1950s, sketching an optimistic interdisciplinary ambience,
which would, by the end of the decade, become the cradle of the Chomskyan revolution
in psycholinguistics. But there we halt. The book does not deal with that revolution, and
PREFACE vii
I have drawn a sharp line. Skinner’s Verbal behavior of 1957 is covered in this book,
Chomsky’s (1959) review of it is not. That review was the declaration of war which
sparked the “revolution.” The new paradigm and its state after some 15 years I have
already treated in great detail in my Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics ,
which reappeared in 2008.
In short, this book tells the history of “pre-Chomskyan” psycholinguistics, “psycholin-
guistics BC” for short. It is a history both of ideas and of theory, and one of empirical
exploration and methodology. Last but not least, it is a personal history of the men and
women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries
have created our discipline. The book is entirely based on consulting the original sources.
Many of them had hardly ever left their libraries; some could only be consulted in darkish
rooms, laid out on soft cushions (the books I mean). I was, of course, often inspired and
informed by secondary sources, to which I make due reference. But afterwards, I always
went ad fontes.
The “roots” approach makes it possible for different categories of readers to select the
chapters relevant to them. Child language students will find a comprehensive, self-
contained history of their field by reading Chapters 4 and 10. Aphasiologists and neuro-
scientists of language are similarly served by reading Chapters 3 and 11. Experimental
psycholinguists get the full historical picture from Chapters 5 and 12. The linguistic
historical perspective, finally, is covered by Chapters 2, 7, 9, and 13.
Acknowledgments
T he solo venture of writing a monograph turned out, after all, to be team work in many
respects. Finding the sources became a huge exercise. On average, two books and many
more papers went through my hands every week over the five-year writing period. This
flood was professionally channeled by the helpful librarians of my Max Planck Institute
in Nijmegen, Karin Kastens (head of the library), Meggie Uijen, and Annemieke Sweere.
My dedicated secretary of 15 years, Evelyn Giering, also managed to retrieve the most
unlikely documents and historical information. Another excellent source of historical
books has been the Amsterdam University Library, just five minutes from my home in
the center of Amsterdam. I also gratefully acknowledge access to the Boas and the Köhler
archives in the library of the American Philosophical Society, and access to the informa-
tion on Kainz in the archives of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and of the University
of Vienna.
Many friends and colleagues provided me with solicited and unsolicited advice during
writing and some did not even know they were sources of inspiration for me. Clemens
Knobloch, for instance, has in many respects been ahead of me in his thorough mono-
graphs on the German history of language sciences. And so was Arthur Blumenthal on
Wilhelm Wundt’s psycholinguistics. In fact, he was already working on the early history
of psycholinguistics when we were both postdocs at Harvard’s Center for Cognitive
Studies, long ago. Magdalena Smoczynska put me on the trail of her brilliant countryman
Baudouin de Courtenay. She also helped me on Gvozdev’s work in phonologogical devel-
opment. My Max Planck colleague and friend Wolfgang Klein time and again brought
me, even gave me, wonderful first editions of historical sources from his own gigantic
library. Without Achim Eschbach, I could not have written my texts on Karl and Charlotte
Bühler. Achim gave me access to all relevant documents in the Bühler archive, which is
under his trust. Even more important was his personal tutoring of me on the Bühlers’
work and life. His col league at Essen University, Walter Schmitz, has been my main
source of information on the Dutch Significa movement.
D uring the end phase of writing, five dear colleagues helped me by reviewing the whole
draft manuscript or parts thereof. Wolfgang Klein from my own institute worked through
the whole text and offered me detailed comments. Dan Slobin did a thorough job on the
developmental chapters and in addition opened many windows for me on Russian his-
torical sources. He also reviewed the chapter on linguistic relativity, as did my dear Max
Planck colleague Stephen Levinson. Simon Garrod reviewed two chapters during his busy
sabbatical year in Perth, Australia. But the main contribution during this phase came
from Asifa Majid, also from my own institute. It would be a violation of Grice’s maxim of
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix
quantity to say that she read the whole manuscript. Rather she read every chapter, every
paragraph, sentence, word, letter, and punctuation mark, correcting my less than
i diomatic English, spotting errors, and making suggestions for improvements all over the
place. The dedication of all these critical minds has pleased and touched me.
T he final production of the book was again real team work. I am grateful to the compe-
tent and dedicated OUP staff with whom I had the pleasure to cooperate. I want to thank
in particular Abigail Stanley, who edited the production of this complicated book with
foresight, flexibility, and precision. I am also much obliged to tenacious, multilingual
expert Miranda Bethell, who worked wonders on the page proofs.
My best team worker, however, has as always been Elisabeth. Thank you, Els.