296 • CHAPTER 11 Language
that are involved in understanding and producing language. When we described this
work in Chapter 2, we saw that this early research provided evidence that functions
are localized in specifi c areas of the brain. We also saw that more recent physiologi-
cal research, using new technologies such as brain scanning, has shown that language
processing does not occur only in the areas originally identifi ed by Broca and Wernicke,
but is distributed over a large area of the brain (see page 35). Some research focusing
on behavioral aspects of language was also being done during the fi rst part of the 20th
century, but large-scale research on cognitive aspects of language began only with the
cognitive revolution of the 1950s.
This chapter focuses mainly on behavioral research, and it is in the 1950s that we
take up the story. At that time behaviorism was still the dominant approach in psy-
chology (see page 9), and in 1957 B. F. Skinner, the main proponent of behaviorism,
published a book called Verbal Behavior in which he proposed that language is learned
through reinforcement. According to this idea, just as children learn appropriate behav-
ior by being rewarded for “good” behavior and punished for “bad” behavior, children
learn language by being rewarded for using correct language and punished (or not
rewarded) for using incorrect language.
In the same year, the linguist Noam Chomsky published a book titled Syntactic
Structures in which he proposed that human language is coded in the genes. According
to this idea, just as humans are genetically programmed to walk, they are programmed
to acquire and use language. Chomsky concluded that despite the wide variations that
exist across languages, the underlying basis of all language is similar. Most important
for our purposes, Chomsky saw studying language as a way to study the properties of
the mind and therefore disagreed with the behaviorist idea that the mind is not a valid
topic of study for psychology.
Chomsky’s disagreement with behaviorism led him to publish a scathing review
of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior in 1959. In his review, he presented arguments against
the behaviorist idea that language can be explained in terms of reinforcements and
without reference to the mind. One of Chomsky’s most persuasive arguments was that
as children learn language, they produce sentences that they have never heard and that
have never been reinforced. (A classic example of a sentence that has been created by
many children, and that is unlikely to have been taught or reinforced by parents, is
“I hate you, Mommy.”) Chomsky’s criticism of behaviorism was an important event
in the cognitive revolution and began changing the focus of the young discipline of
psycholinguistics, the fi eld concerned with the psychological study of language. (Also
see “If You Want to Know More: The Beginnings of Psycholinguistics,” page 321.)
The goal of psycholinguistics is to discover the psychological processes by which
humans acquire and process language (Clark & Van der Wege, 2002; Gleason & Ratner,
1998; Miller, 1965). The four major concerns of psycholinguistics are as follows:- Comprehension. How do people understand spoken and written language? This
includes how people process language sounds; how they understand words, sen-
tences, and stories expressed in writing, speech, or sign language; and how people
have conversations with one another. - Speech production. How do people produce language? This includes the physical
processes of speech production and the mental processes that occur as a person
creates speech. - Representation. How is language represented in the mind and in the brain? This
includes how people group words together into phrases and make connections
between different parts of a story, as well as how these processes are related to the
activation of the brain. - Acquisition. How do people learn language? This includes not only how children
learn language, but also how people learn additional languages, either as children
or later in life.
Because of the vast scope of psycholinguistics, we are going to restrict our attention
to the fi rst three of these concerns, describing research on how we understand language
and how we produce it. (See “If You Want to Know More: Language Acquisition,”Copyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.