Introduction

Trying to write a coherent overview of psycholinguistics is a bit like trying to assemble a face out of a police identikit. You can't use all of the pieces and no matter which ones you choose it doesn't look quite right. Part of the difficulty is that psycholinguistics is concerned with three somewhat distinct questions: (1) how language is acquired during development; (2) how people comprehend language; and (3) how people produce language. The study of language comprehension and production forms one field, ‘experimental psycholinguistics’, and the study of language acquisition forms a separate field, ‘developmental psycholinguistics’. In theory, many of the issues in experimental and developmental psycholinguistics are interrelated, but in practice there is little overlap between the two areas. As a result it is difficult to do justice to both within the same brief review.

A second problem is that contrary to what the name might suggest, psychology and linguistics have never been successfully integrated within psycholinguistics for more than short periods. Until recently, most psycholinguists were psychologists who were influenced in varying degrees by linguistics. In the last few years, an increasing number of linguists have begun to explore psycholinguistic issues. There is a fundamental disagreement about the relationship between language and cognition that more or less divides psycholinguists along disciplinary boundaries.

Linguists tend to follow Chomsky in assuming that the core of language is a specialized linguistic system or grammar which represents a sentence at a number of different levels and contains rules for relating these representations.