In setting a framework for the papers that follow, I have explored some of the major characteristics of disciplines and the factors that breed ethnocentrism among disciplines, considered what factors can lead researchers to cross disciplinary boundaries, and explored the kinds of conceptual as well as social and institutional products that result from cross-disciplinary work. While drawing out the significance of these various considerations for psycholinguistics, I have presented a fairly general conceptual analysis that is not restricted to this (...) case. The following papers consider in much more detail the particular features of the historical and current endeavors in developing psycholinguistics. (shrink)

In setting a framework for the papers that follow, I have explored some of the major characteristics of disciplines and the factors that breed ethnocentrism among disciplines, considered what factors can lead researchers to cross disciplinary boundaries, and explored the kinds of conceptual as well as social and institutional products that result from cross-disciplinary work. While drawing out the significance of these various considerations for psycholinguistics, I have presented a fairly general conceptual analysis that is not restricted to this (...) case. The following papers consider in much more detail the particular features of the historical and current endeavors in developing psycholinguistics. (shrink)

Quantificational determiners are often said to be devices for expressing relations. For example, the meaning of _every_ is standardly described as the inclusion relation, with a sentence like _every frog is green_ meaning roughly that the green things include the frogs. Here, we consider an older, non-relational alternative: determiners are tools for creating restricted quantifiers. On this view, determiners specify how many elements of a restricted domain (e.g., the frogs) satisfy a given condition (e.g., being green). One important difference concerns (...) how the determiner treats its two grammatical arguments. On the relational view, the arguments are on a logical par as independent terms that specify the two relata. But on the restricted view, the arguments play distinct logical roles: specifying the limited domain versus supplying an additional condition on domain entities. We present psycholinguistic evidence suggesting that the restricted view better describes what speakers know when they know the meaning of a determiner. In particular, we find that when asked to evaluate sentences of the form _every F is G_, participants mentally group the Fs but not the Gs. Moreover, participants forego representing the group defined by the intersection of F and G. This tells against the idea that speakers understand _every F is G_ as implying that the Fs bear relation (e.g., inclusion) to a second group. (shrink)

This article introduces the topic ‘‘Production of Referring Expressions: Bridging the Gap between Computational and Empirical Approaches to Reference’’ of the journal Topics in Cognitive Science. We argue that computational and psycholinguistic approaches to reference production can benefit from closer interaction, and that this is likely to result in the construction of algorithms that differ markedly from the ones currently known in the computational literature. We focus particularly on determinism, the feature of existing algorithms that is perhaps most clearly at (...) odds with psycholinguistic results, discussing how future algorithms might include non-determinism, and how new psycholinguistic experiments could inform the development of such algorithms. (shrink)

This paper is partly exegetical, partly systematic. I argue that Frege's account of what he called “colouring” contains some important insights on how communication is related to mental states such as mental images or emotions. I also show that the Fregean perspective is supported by current research in psycholinguistics and that a full understanding of some linguistic phenomena that scholars have accounted for in terms of either semantics or pragmatics need involve psycholinguistic elements.

This commentary focuses on two aspects of eye movement behaviour that E-Z Reader 7 currently makes no attempt to explain: the influence of higher order psycholinguistic processes on fixation durations, and orthographic influences on initial and refixation locations on words. From our understanding of the current version of the model, it is not clear how it may be readily modified to account for existing empirical data.

The article describes the postmodern features of Ukrainian language education and psycholinguistic term system, which is important for understanding the direction of optimizing the language situation among young people. Then, after careful selection and multimodal analysis, the authors cite about 30 key features of youth speech in the late postmodern era. The urgency of the topic is determined by postmodernist trends that are still observed in Ukraine, as well as their specific impact on youth speech. The authors used a body (...) of fragments of living youth discourse 2018 - 2020, as well as relevant methods of analysis: psycholinguistic, semantic, culturological, pragmatic ; the method of establishing correlations between cultural, social and speech phenomena, as well as the method of generalization. The authors came to an important generalization: contemporary youth uses their speech in such a way that it can be decoded differently only in the current discourse - among other carriers of postmodern linguistic consciousness. And this is also a manifestation of the general game, performance and even the way of existence of the individual in a real or hyperreal society that is constantly communicating. (shrink)

The paper urges that polysemous phenomena are typically semantic not pragmatic. The part of a message sent by a polysemous expression is typically one of its meanings encoded in the speaker's language and not the result of pragmatic modification. The hearer receives that part of the message by a process of disambiguation, by detecting which item in the lexicon the speaker has selected. This is the best explanation of observed regularities. The paper argues that the experimental evidence from psycholinguistics, (...) particularly that produced in discussions of “underspecification” and “overspecification,” does not undermine this view nor support the pragmatic alternative. (shrink)

Purpose. This article is devoted to the case study of relevant linguacultural stereotypes of the particular organization’s managerial culture and based on corresponding results the inquiry of the discourses formation features associated with the lexico-semantic meanings dispersion of (Foucault). -/- Methods and Procedure of Research. Top managers of a large Ukrainian enterprise (67 respondents) were asked to arbitrarily describe the following concepts – “manager”, “subordinate”, “managerial style”. Each concept was differentiated according to the principle of the lexico-semantic opposition (“productive – (...) counterproductive”). The obtained set of texts was lemmatized and a frequency analysis of the lemmas was carried out as well. Collocations were also evaluated, in particular, repeated n-grams were identified. In the further analysis were used all detected n-grams and those lemmas, the observed frequencies of which statistically significantly exceeded the expected ones. -/- Results. Discourse formation features are determined by the paradigmatic relations of lexico-semantic units (words) and their semantic linear compatibility. The paradigmatic dispersion of a discourse is represented by the quality of connections between lemmas according to the criterion of the paradigm types to be found. Also informative is the assessment of the lemmas number (granularity of the discourse) and the spectrum diversity of paradigmatic relations in the discourse. These parameters reflect the properties of homogeneity/complexity of discourse meanings dispersion. The syntagmatic dissemination of discourse is manifested by the features of the words semantic linear interrelationship in each n-gram. This parameter reflects the quality of rationalizations (verbal-logical chains) associated with the corresponding discourses. The length of n-grams (the number of words) is also indicative – the higher n, the more differentiated the discourse is and vice versa. Matching the words semantics in n-grams with lemmas allows one to draw a conclusion regarding the internal consistency (integration) of the discourse. -/- Conclusions. Psycholinguistic tools can be effectively used in an organizational phenomena study. In particular, the frequency analysis of lemmas, their lexico-semantic evaluation, as well as the qualitative analysis of n-grams in the problem-targeted texts of respondents allows one to solve applied research issues related to the assessment of current linguacultural trends in an organization and understanding their possible causes. Managerial culture, as a linguacultural phenomenon, is represented by a set of stably reproduced discourses in the process of the organization’s functioning. At the same time, discourses are constituted by the dispersion of meanings (words), which is being realized in two linguistic dimensions – paradigmatic and syntagmatic ones. (shrink)

At its birth, a new scientific discipline is baptized with the names of the two parent disciplines, Science X and Science Y. Subsequently, usage tends to shorten this compound name by giving preference to one or the other of the constituting terms so that the new term is less disconcerting and novel. Take biophysics, for example. Is it more closely related to physics than to biology, or the other way round? Today this question seems naive but it did not appear (...) so a scarce thirty years ago, that is, at the beginning of the creative activity of the most, eminent scientists in the field of biophysics: it was then the subject of intense discussion. (shrink)

With contributions from the fields of psychology, linguistics, cognitive neuroscience, attention, genetics, development, and neuropsychology divided into five themed sections, this new edition of The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics is unparalleled in its breadth of coverage.

David Kaplan’s analysis of the factors that determine what words someone has used in a given utterance requires that a speaker can only use a word through producing an utterance performed with a particular, related intention directed at speaking that word. This account, or any that requires a speaker to have an intention to utter a specific word, proves inconsistent with models of speech planning in psycholinguistics as informed by data on slips-of-the-tongue. Kaplan explicitly aims to formulate a theory (...) of words that elides the details of the processes responsible for speech planning and production. Though it may superficially seem that the picture of speech planning and production offered by psycholinguistics can add no insight into our analysis—on closer inspection—we find a rich body of empirical data that should be integrated into any viable account of what words someone has used in a given utterance. (shrink)

The aim of the study was to answer the question whether the words “zaskoczenie” [phon. zaskɔˈʧ̑ɛ̃ɲɛ]- “surprise” and “zdziwienie” [phon. ʑʥ̑iˈvjɛ̇̃ɲɛ]- “astonishment”, which are treated in the Polish language as synonyms, possess a fixed pattern of application, and whether the colloquial context of using these words differs in terms of its emotional valence. The theoretical background for this investigation was the triadic approach to language cognition that includes perception, conceptualization and symbolization, and corresponding to this approach concept of mental representation (...) of emotions. The obtained results have shown that people tend to use the word “zaskoczenie” to describe emotions that occur in positive situations, whereas the word “zdziwienie” is more frequently applied in negative situations. The observed emotive connotation of the investigated words has been explained by the rules of phonetic symbolism and implicative meaning of the words preserved in the popular/colloquial understanding. (shrink)

There has been a tendency, natural perhaps in such ‘verbal’ disciplines as philosophy and linguistics, to assume that language and communication are the same thing. But while no one would deny that language is one powerful medium of human communication, is it the only one? Is there any real distinction between communicating one's desire to leave a dinner party by making verbal remarks like, ‘I must go’ or ‘We could only get Jane as a babysitter’, as opposed to fidgeting, standing (...) up and looking longingly towards the door? As Michael Argyle argues, a great deal of information is conveyed by non-verbal cues. To take the argument a step further, are even verbal statements examples of purely linguistic communication? Whereas the manifest linguistic content of ‘I must go’ is obvious to anyone who speaks English, the meaning of the remark about the babysitter can only be understood by those who know the particular neighbourhood social context in which it was uttered. Does it make sense, then, to try and analyse the linguistic structure and content of an utterance without taking into account the use to which it is being put in a particular extra-linguistic context? (shrink)

A response to a paper by Berwick and Weinberg, in an ealier issue of Cognition, about the Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC).

Linguistic interventions aim to change our linguistic practices. A commonly discussed type of linguistic intervention is meaning revision, which seeks to associate existing words with new or revised meanings. But why does retaining old words matter so much? Why not instead introduce new words to express the newly defined meanings? Drawing on relevant psycholinguistic research, this paper develops an empirically motivated, general, and practically useful pro tanto reason to retain rather than replace the original word during the process of conceptual (...) improvement. (shrink)

This book discusses developments in the study of implicatures and presuppositions, drawing on recent linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. It provides original discussions of specific formal aspects of the theoretical reconstruction of these phenomena. The authors offer innovative experimental analyses in which crucial processing questions are addressed, and new experimental methodologies are introduced. The result is an advanced debate featuring broad empirical coverage of the issues, as well as an informed discussion of the connections between a Compositional Semantics and a Pragmatic (...) Theory of Implicit Communication, in light of the empirical data coming from Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. This book will be a worthwhile read for those with interests in both the formal and methodological aspects of these arguments. (shrink)

This paper presents a neglected philosophical approach, redevelops it on fresh empirical foundations, and seeks to bring out that it is of not merely historical interest. Building on ideas Ludwig Wittgenstein mooted in the early 1930s, Friedrich Waismann developed a distinctive metaphilosophy: Through case studies on particular philosophical problems, he identified a characteristic structure and genesis displayed by several philosophical problems and presented a distinctive dialogical method for dissolving problems of this kind. This method turns on exposing the need to (...) endow philosophical questions or claims with more determinate meaning and meeting this need by proposing linguistic rules and explanations which the problems’ proponents are free to accept or reject. The approach is embedded in the view that unconscious thought decisively shapes the formulation of philosophical problems. This paper first presents the approach on the basis of Waismann’s texts and then redevelops it through a case study on the ‘problem of perception’ and within a post-Freudian conception of unconscious thought: We will draw on psycholinguistic findings about automatic inferences in language comprehension and production, to examine how unconscious cognition shapes the problem formulation. Findings provide fresh, empirical foundations for the approach which has advantages over more familiar critical projects in ordinary language philosophy, to which it is kindred in spirit. (shrink)

Psycholinguistics has provided numerous theories that explain how a person acquires a language, produces and perceives both spoken and written language, including theories of proceduralization. Learners of English as a foreign language often find it difficult to achieve oral fluency, a key construct closely related to the mental state or even mental health of learners. According to previous research, this problem could be addressed by the mastery of formulaic sequences, since the employment of formulaic sequences could often promote oral (...) fluency in the long run, reflected in the positive relationship between formulaic sequence use and oral fluency. However, there are also findings contradicting the abovementioned ones, without adequate explanations. This study aims to explore the roles of formulaic sequences in oral fluency, taking into account the relationship between formulaic sequence use and oral fluency. This study investigated 120 pieces of spoken narratives by Chinese EFL learners, using both quantitative and qualitative methods, combined with artificial intelligence techniques. Results of canonical correlation analysis showed that the frequency of formulaic sequences was significantly related to speed fluency and breakdown fluency, while the variety of formulaic sequences was significantly related to repair fluency. Case studies further demonstrated that formulaic sequences could contribute to oral fluency development by promoting speed and reducing pausing when retrieved holistically, but they sometimes lost processing advantages when retrieved and processed in a word-by-word manner. The inappropriate use of formulaic sequences also neutralized the facilitative effects of formulaic sequences on repair fluency and could mirror speakers’ occasional tendency to sacrifice repair fluency for the improvement of speed and breakdown fluency when using formulaic sequences. Pedagogical implications were provided accordingly to promote sustainable oral fluency development through the use of formulaic sequences. (shrink)

_Linguistics and Aphasia_ is a major study of recent developments in applying psycholinguistics and pragmatics to the study of acquired language disorders and their remediation. Psycholinguistic analyses of aphasia interpret disorders in terms of damaged modules and processes within what was once a normal language system. These analyses have progressed to the point that they now routinely provide a model-based rationalefor planning patient therapy. Through a series of case studies, the authors show how the psycholinguistic analysis of aphasia can (...) be assessed for its effectiveness in clinical practice. Pragmatic approaches to the study of aphasia are of more recent origin. Ruth Lesser and Lesley Milroy evaluate their considerable significance to the study of aphasia and their relevance to practical issues of diagnosis and treatment. Controversial analysis, in particular, offers a fruitful and productive framework within which to assess the functional adequacy of the language used by aphasic speakers in everyday contexts. (shrink)

The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics brings together the views of 75 leading researchers in psycholinguistics to provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. With almost 50 chapters written by experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled.

This is a superb introduction to the application of Chomskian linguistics in cognitive psychology and the study of linguistic performance. It is exceptionally clear, accurate, concise, and well-organized; so very well done, in fact, that it can be read by someone who knows nothing about recent linguistics or about its use in psychological experimentation, and yet can delight and profit readers who know a great deal about both subjects. Greene begins by giving a clear and discrete account of the linguistic (...) theory of Syntactic Structures and the later "standard theory" of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. This historical approach is helpful because the first psycholinguistic applications derived from the first theory: e.g., attempts were made by George Miller, et alia to confirm that the time taken to grasp a sentence depended on the number of optional transformations involved in its generation—a "kernel sentence" with no optional transformations would take less time than its passive or negative transform, and these in turn less than, say, its passive and negative transform. Since there are neither kernel sentences nor the relevant optional transformations in Aspects standard theory, later experimentation has been concerned with confirming the psychological reality of deep, as against surface, structure: e.g., Bever’s attempt to show that, given that a subject who hears an anomalous click while listening to a sentence will psychologically displace the click to a position between major sentence constituents, there is some tendency for the displacement to operate in terms of what the grammar indicates are deep structure divisions rather than surface ones. (shrink)

In this commentary on “Memory and Common Ground Processes in Language Use,” I draw attention to relevant work on mindreading. The concerns of research on common ground and mindreading have significant overlap, but these literatures have worked in relative isolation of each other. I attempt an assimilation, pointing out shared and distinctive concerns and mutually informative results.

Philosophers are often credited with particularly well-developed conceptual skills. The ‘expertise objection’ to experimental philosophy builds on this assumption to challenge inferences from findings about laypeople to conclusions about philosophers. We draw on psycholinguistics to develop and assess this objection. We examine whether philosophers are less or differently susceptible than laypersons to cognitive biases that affect how people understand verbal case descriptions and judge the cases described. We examine two possible sources of difference: Philosophers could be better at deploying (...) concepts, and this could make them less susceptible to comprehension biases (‘linguistic expertise objection’). Alternatively, exposure to different patterns of linguistic usage could render philosophers vulnerable to a fundamental comprehension bias, the linguistic salience bias, at different points (‘linguistic usage objection’). Together, these objections mount a novel ‘master argument’ against experimental philosophy. To develop and empirically assess this argument, we employ corpus analysis and distributional semantic analysis and elicit plausibility ratings from academic philosophers and psychology undergraduates. Our findings suggest philosophers are better at deploying concepts than laypeople but are susceptible to the linguistic salience bias to a similar extent and at similar points. We identify methodological consequences for experimental philosophy and for philosophical thought experiments. (shrink)

Positive psychology has recently seen unprecedented rise and has reached vast achievements in the area of quality of life improvement. The purpose of this study is to show that there are different aspects of well-being that make healthy older people motivated to learn a foreign language at a later age. The research was conducted in the Czech Republic and Poland in two groups of learners aged 55 years and more. The experimental group consisted of 105 Czech respondents who were targeted (...) with an online questionnaire with the aim to determine the level of FLL outcomes connected to QoL in healthy older adults in their L2 acquisition. The second experimental group was established of Polish seniors who attended similar language courses. The findings of the research clearly show that FLL has an irreplaceable role as one of several non-pharmacological strategies utilized to improve the aging process and reduce drawbacks of aging. The results indicate that seniors' overall satisfaction and subjective feelings of well-being are enormously high when attending foreign language classes at older age. FLL, therefore, creates an environment that can enhance QoL of older adults that can be supplemented by other means such as well-balanced diet, other social activities, sport and physical activity, music, or computer games. All these intervention methods can significantly improve QoL of older adults and the parties engaged and/or responsible for taking care of older generation should take it into serious consideration. (shrink)

We compare our model of unsupervised learning of linguistic structures, ADIOS [1, 2, 3], to some recent work in computational linguistics and in grammar theory. Our approach resembles the Construction Grammar in its general philosophy (e.g., in its reliance on structural generalizations rather than on syntax projected by the lexicon, as in the current generative theories), and the Tree Adjoining Grammar in its computational characteristics (e.g., in its apparent affinity with Mildly Context Sensitive Languages). The representations learned by our algorithm (...) are truly emergent from the (unannotated) corpus data, whereas those found in published works on cognitive and construction grammars and on TAGs are hand-tailored. Thus, our results complement and extend both the computational and the more linguistically oriented research into language acquisition. We conclude by suggesting how empirical and formal study of language can be best integrated. (shrink)

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 psychology; (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. (shrink)

Four philosophical problems--predication, speech acts, rules, and innate ideas--are discussed in the light of their implications for psychological and linguistic research. The discussion of predication concerns both form and use. With respect to form, it is argued that our lexical memory is organized according to a predicate-argument formula that underlies the subject-predicate form of our sentences. With respect to use, it is argued that the illocutionary force of the sentence as a speech act must be taken into account. Both the (...) formation and the use of such verbal constructions are normally characterized by systems of rules, but there is no clear account of what a rule is or how it might operate to control behavior, and this problem is especially difficult when, as in language, the person's knowledge of the rules is implicit. The innate basis for our human ability to acquire linguistic rules is considered and the problem of innateness is redefined around the conjecture that there are innate, language-specific mechanisms unique to human beings. The problem of investigating such language-specific mechanisms psychologically, however, is quite difficult at the present time. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic methods hold great promise for experimental philosophy. Many philosophical thought experiments and arguments proceed from verbal descriptions of possible cases. Many relevant intuitions and conclusions are driven by spontaneous inferences about what else must also be true in the cases described. Such inferences are continually made in language comprehension and production. This chapter explains how methods from psycholinguistics can be employed to study such routine automatic inferences, with a view to assessing intuitions and reconstructing arguments. We demonstrate how (...) plausibility ratings, pupillometry, and reading time measurements can be used to examine hypotheses about automatic inferences in speech and text comprehension. Two experiments on inferences from polysemous (perception-)verbs provide evidence of a potentially consequential ‘salience bias’. Findings help assess intuitions about unusual cases and analyse a philosophical paradox (‘argument from hallucination’). The paper thus illustrates how we can adapt psycholinguistic methods for philosophical purposes and demonstrates the methods’ philosophical usefulness. (shrink)

Stereotypes shape inferences in philosophical thought, political discourse, and everyday life. These inferences are routinely made when thinkers engage in language comprehension or production: We make them whenever we hear, read, or formulate stories, reports, philosophical case-descriptions, or premises of arguments – on virtually any topic. These inferences are largely automatic: largely unconscious, non-intentional, and effortless. Accordingly, they shape our thought in ways we can properly understand only by complementing traditional forms of philosophical analysis with experimental methods from psycholinguistics. (...) This paper seeks, first, to bring out the wider philosophical relevance of stereotypical inference, well beyond familiar topics like gender and race. Second, we wish to provide philosophers with a toolkit to experimentally study these ubiquitous inferences and what intuitions they may generate. This paper explains what stereotypes are, and why they matter to current and traditional concerns in philosophy – experimental, analytic, and applied. It then assembles a psycholinguistic toolkit and demonstrates through two studies how potentially questionnaire-based measures can be combined with process measures to garner evidence for specific stereotypical inferences and study when they ‘go through’ and influence our thinking. (shrink)