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Winner of the Patrick Suppes Prize for the History of Science of the American Philosophical Society 2013
A History of Psycholinguistics
The Pre-Chomskyan Era
Willem Levelt
672 pages
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246x171mm
978-0-19-965366-9
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Hardback
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25 October 2012
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- Describes the history of the field in terms of its multidisciplinary "roots" so that readers from different disciplines can concentrate on, or selectively read, the corresponding chapters.
- Explores the history of research on brain and language, making the book valuable for aphasiologists, communication scientists and neuroscientists of language.
- Covers the history of linguistic approaches to psycholinguistics - making the book of interest to both theoretical and applied linguists.
- Written by a scientist whose own contribution to the field has been seminal, resulting in a work that will be seen as the definitive of psycholinguistics, for many years to come
How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries.
Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan "cognitive revolution" of the late 1950s/1960s, the history of empirical psycholinguistics actually goes back to the end of the 18th century. This is the first book to comprehensively treat this "pre-Chomskyan" history. It tells the fascinating history of the doctors, pedagogues, linguists and psychologists who created this discipline, looking at how they made their important discoveries about the language regions in the brain, about the
high-speed accessing of words in speaking and listening, on the child's invention of syntax, on the disruption of language in aphasic patients and so much more. The book is both a history of ideas as well of the men and women whose intelligence, brilliant insights, fads, fallacies, cooperations, and rivalries created this discipline.
Psycholinguistics has four historical roots, which, by the end of the 19th century, had merged. By then, the discipline, usually called the psychology of language, was established. The first root was comparative linguistics, which raised the issue of the psychological origins of language. The second root was the study of language in the brain, with Franz Gall as the pioneer and the Broca and Wernicke discoveries as major landmarks.
The third root was the diary approach to child development, which emerged from Rousseau's Émile. The fourth root was the experimental laboratory approach to speech and language processing, which originated from Franciscus Donders' mental chronometry. Wilhelm Wundt unified these four approaches in his monumental Die Sprache of 1900. These four perspectives of psycholinguistics continued into the 20th century but in quite divergent frameworks. There was German consciousness and thought psychology, Swiss/French and Prague/Viennese structuralism, Russian and American behaviorism, and almost aggressive holism in aphasiology. As well as reviewing all these perspectives, the book looks at the deep disruption of the field during the Third Reich and its optimistic, multidisciplinary re-emergence
during the 1950s with the mathematical theory of communication as a major impetus.
A tour de force from one of the seminal figures in the field, this book will be essential reading for all linguists, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, and psychologists with an interest in language.Readership: Linguists, psychologists, aphasiologists, communication scientists, cognitive (neuro-)scientists, whether professionals or graduate students, as well as historians of science.
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Willem Levelt, Director Emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands Willem Levelt is director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, which he founded in 1980. He is also emeritus honorary professor of psycholinguistics at Nijmegen University. He has a PhD in psychology from Leiden University (1965), was a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University, a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, full professor of psychology at Groningen University, member at The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1971-1972), professor of experimental psychology at Nijmegen University and, since 1980, scientific member of the
Max Planck Society. He has published widely in psychophysics, mathematical psychology and psycholinguistics. His books include On binocular rivalry (1965), Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics (3 Vols, 1974, republished in 2008) and Speaking: From intention to articulation (1989).
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"What a gift Willem Levelt has bestowed upon language scientists! He has given us with a treasure chest of fascinating and invaluable scholarship that deepens our understanding of language and our attempts to understand it. Every language scientist should read this book." - Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor of Psychology, Harvard University, author of The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought "No one else could have written the history of psycholinguistics. For Levelt has gone on a deep archaeological exploration of what he terms the prehistory of his field, bringing to life dozens and dozens of strange and wonderful thinkers and researchers, back to the true beginnings of the field about 250 years ago. This is a
gripping book... It is a book to live with, to wander through, to return to again and again. These remarkable fifteen chapters guarantee, indeed, that language remains." - Dan I. Slobin, Departments of Psychology and Linguistics University of California, Berkeley
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Orientation
1: 1951
Establishing the Discipline: 1770-1900
2: Inventing a Psychology of Language
3: From Bumps to Diagrams: Tracing Language in the Brain
4: Language Acquisition and the Diary Explosion
5: Language in the Laboratory and Modeling Microgenesis
6: Willem Wundt's Grand Synthesis
Twentieth-Century Psycholinguistics Before the 'Cognitive Revolution'
7: New Perspectives: Structuralism and the Psychology of Imageless Thought
8: Verbal Behaviour
9: Speech Acts and Functions
10: Language Acquisition: Wealth of data, dearth of theory
11: Language in the Brain: The lures of holism
12: Empirical Studies of Speech and Language Usage
13: A New Cross-Linguistic Perspective and Linguistic Relativity
14: Psychology of Language During the Third Reich
Psycholinguistics Re-Established
15: Psycholinguistics Post-War, Pre-Chomsky
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An Interview with the Author Listen to the interview with the author where he talks about some of the recurring themes of the book - forgetting and rediscovery, the remarkably prescient nature of much 19th century theoretical and experimental work, and the collective misunderstanding of the history of the discipline. The interview also touches upon the intentional misunderstandings that allowed research in psycholinguistics to be exploited for financial gain or more sinister purposes.
A History of
Psycholinguistics in the Pre-Chomskyan Era: William Levelt on the OUPblog
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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