Overview

Are linguists and psycholinguists studying the same mental object?

Since the late 1960s it has been widely assumed in linguistics and psychology that the human language system consists of a number of independent systems, each of which is responsible for a different aspect of language abilities: linguists study linguistic competence, a body of knowledge which accounts for the ability to make grammaticality judgments; psychologists study linguistic performance systems, which are the systems of the mind/brain which are directly responsible for language perception and production.

The alternative view that human language abilities are less fragmented, and consist of a system of knowledge which is directly used in comprehension and production, seems to have been common in the early years of generative grammar and cognitive psychology, but has only surfaced sporadically since then. In this course we will reexamine this issue in the light of current knowledge in linguistics, language comprehension and production and neurolinguistics.

The course presupposes some background in syntax - roughly the equivalent of the first year graduate curriculum in syntax - and little background in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics.