Advanced Psychol

8/7/2019 Advanced Psychol

1/10

ADVANCEDPSYCHOLINGUISTICS

A B ressa no ne R etro sp ectivefor G iovanni B. Flores d 'Arca is

Edited byWillem J.M. LeveltMax Planck Institute, Nijrnegen


2/10

W.J.M. Levelt (Ed.), (1996)Adv an ce d P sy ch o l in gu is tic s: A B re ss an on e R etr os pe ctiv e fo rGiovanni B. Flores d 'Arcais. Nijmegen: MPLPublished byMax Planck Institute for PsycholinguisticsCover: Inge Dohring, Linda van den AkkerIllustrations: Bernadette SchmittLay-out and copy-editing: Diete M. OudesluijsPrinted by SSN, PB 1206, NL-6501 BE Nijmegen 1996 MPI/the authorsAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproducedwithout permission in writing from the publisher/the author.ISBN: 90-9009829-1Limited edition.


3/10

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface VIIPSYCHOLINGUISTICS IN PERSPEC fIVEJa cqu es Meh le r1969 - The renaissance of psycholinguistics 1Thomas G. BeverExperimental psycholinguistics: Then, now and thence 7

Id a K urc zPsycholinguistics at the end of the century 17

Btfnedicte de Boysson-BardiesBressanone and after: A short, yet productive period 24

PSYCHOLOGICAL REALITYWillem J.M LeveltLinguistic intuitions and beyond 31

H W ilfre d C am p be ll & Camel i s H v an S ch oo ne ve ldThe psychological reality of an ordering of phonological distinctive features 36

THE ACQUISmON OF lANGUAGEEve V. GarkEn route to pragmatics 49Ma rg ar et D o na ld so nTrue negatives and false beliefs 55

Robin N Cam pbellSemantic development of adjectives 60

R og er W alesAcquiring comparatives and comparing acquisition 68

Bernard T . T ervoortDo deaf children still need passive sentences? 75

Dan 1 . SlobinBeyond universals of grammatical development in children 82


4/10

PRODUCING AND UNDERSTANDING lANGUAGE

Daniel C. O'Conne ll, S .! &Sabin e KowalGood timing: Twenty eight years of team research 93

H erb ert H C larkFrom comprehension to understanding 99

Merri ll Gar re ttCounting the cost:Processing options in symbolic and subsymbolic systems 105

Donald G. MacKayAmbiguity, language, and cognition: Retrospect and prospect 110

She ldon RosenbergSemantic integration in sentence processing 118

Pa tr ic ia Wr igh tCognitive skills for reading functional texts:The multiple skills needed for reading in everyday life 122

REASONING

Pete r Wa so nThe selection task: Beyond the first response 133

P hilip N J oh nso n-L airdThe study of deductive reasoning: 1969 - 1996 138P a o l o L e g r e n z iReasoning on Bressanone 145

COGNIT IVE IMPAIRMENTJohn C. Marshal lRaynor's revolution 153

Lu ig i P iz zam ig io , Ce cilia Guar ig lia , Dan ie le N i co &A le ss andr o Pado vaniTwo separate systems for space cognition 157

List of contributors 163


5/10

avances inpsycholinguistics ...


6/10

Preface

More than a quarter century ago, my friend Giovanni B.Flores d'Arcais, 'Ino' for short, made me his ally in a boldinitiative. He had put his mind on convening a first majorpsycholinguistics conference at the European continent, firstthat is sinceWorld War II. More specifically, he intended toinvite the 'young Turks' who were then zealously advocatinga new partnership between psychology and linguistics and tomix them thoroughly with the cream of continental psycho-linguistics. Many of these young Turks Ino and I had metduring our postdoc at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies(1965-'66), where Jerome Bruner and George Miller hadirreversibly changed the scientific conception of mind. Butothers had been bred in that exceptional, barely Europeancenter of excellence, the University of Edinburgh.Ino skilfully worked his way through fathomless Italian

bureaucracy, eventually collecting generous amounts of liras,handpicked the gorgeous old Dolomite city of Bressanone asmeeting place, contracted the graceful Elefante Hotel, in-vited his target participants and was pleasantly surprised bysheer universal acceptance. Eventually, the conference tookplace in July, 1969. My memory is undecided on whetherIno attended more to the culinary or the scientific well-beingof his guests, but surely, he did plenty of both. Theconference was exciting, the moods were high, and a networkof contacts was forged that survives till the present day.Though duly satisfied, Ino tirelessly set out to edit the

proceedings, again asking me to join him in the effort. Andthis was really editing! The book was based on the empiricalpsycholinguistic conference papers, but it got a logicalstructure of its own, covering the (then) major areas inpsycholinguistics. Additional papers were invited where theconference had left noticeable gaps, and wewrote lengthyexplanatory texts to increase the coherence of the book. Itworked: A d va n ce s in p sy ch o lin g uis tic s appeared in 1970 and


7/10

PREFACE

In retrospect, Bressanone has become a landmark in thehistory of psycholinguistics, and European psycholinguisticsin particular. But who cares about the history of psycholin-guistics? There is no written record of what happened toour discipline since the years of the 'cognitive revolution'.Most of our students and younger colleagues are unaware ofthe battle that was fought to establish cognitive science andabout the pioneering role psycholinguistics played in it. Notso Ina. When the 25th anniversary of the Bressanoneconference was approaching, he took the initiative to re-convene the meeting in order to consider what had beenachieved (and lost) since these early days. Whether it wasdue to the decline of the Mafia, the cleansing of Ina's ethicsby many years of Dutch Calvinism, or the financial suctionforce of the European Union, the Italian funding agenciesapproached by Ina didn't give in, and only let him know at alate, too late moment.Lacking a Bressanone retrospective conference, this book

is a second best solution. When Ina's sixtieth birthday(October 3, 1996) came into the offing, I approached allsurviving authors ofAdvances with the request to write ashort, retrospective paper about how psycholinguistics, andin particular their own work, had evolved since Advances."Back to the future", as John Marshall put it. I neitheroffered elegant lodging nor culinary reward, still to mypleasant surprise my request too met with sheer universalacceptance. The result is a book, not by young Turks, but byestablished scientists, many of them main players in therecent history of psycholinguistics. Together, we are offeringIno a petite histoire of our field, for whatever it is worth.This solution is second best, because our specialcommunity has not been able to discuss the course of aquarter century of psycholinguistics. And indeed, many ofthe observations surfacing in this book call for much deeperconsideration. The ever-going push and pull betweenpsychology, linguistics and the neurosciences is not fullygrasped by anyone, but steadily affecting all of our work inunpredictable ways. A better sense of history would not be aluxury for psycholinguists.The solution is only second best for another reason as


8/10

PREFACE

much more imaginative (and more pleasant) if he and I haddone it jointly, but also the book would have included amuch needed retrospective chapter by the 'Urheber' himself.What would Ino have written about? His own chapter inAdvances was about the processing of comparative sentences.He reported on remarkable differences in the processing ofmore .. than and less ... than constructions and adduced thedifference to what he called "the focus of comparison". In asentence likeA cat is more friendly than a dog, the subject (Acat) is the focus of comparison, whereas in the sentence A catis less friendly than a dog this is not the case, a dog being thefocus there. The grammatical subject as preferred 'focuser'has been a continuing theme in Ino's subsequent work onsentence understanding and picture verification. Ino would,no doubt, have referred with satisfaction to the recent paperby Lila Gleitman et al. (Cognition, 1996) where exactly thesame mechanism, the foregrounding effect of the subject, isinvoked to explain the apparently asymmetrical interpreta-tion of symmetric predicates, such as is similar to. Or wouldIno have written about any of the other themes in his richrepertoire: sentence parsing, idiom comprehension, objectnaming and event description, word recognition, the acquisi-tion of function words and connectives, or about hispioneering work in the reading of kanji and Chinesecharacters? We'll ask him in due time.Returning, finally, to Bressanone's future, one should

ask, How come that the young crowd over there wasdestined to leadership in late 20th century psycholinguisticsand cognitive science? There are, at least, two possibleanswers. Maybe Ino, in his clairvoyance, made just theappropriate choice of contributors. Or the meeting plus thewriting ofAdvances worked as a latter-day Pentecost,sparking our vocation to study the world's tongues andtheir use. Either way, Ino did the right thing.

Nijmegen, August 1996 Willem ].M. Levelt


9/10

List of contributorsThomas G. BeverDepartment of Psychology, Cognitive Science, University ofArizona, USABenedicte de Boysson-BardiesLaboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale, CNRS, Paris, FranceH. Wilfred CampbellStudia Interetnica Research, Maarssen, The NetherlandsRobin N. CampbellDepartment of Psychology, University of Stirling, ScotlandEve V. ClarkDepartment of Linguistics, Stanford University, USAHerbert H. ClarkDepartment of Psychology, Stanford University, USAMargaret DonaldsonProfessor Emeritus, University of Edinburgh, ScotlandMerrill GarrettDepartment of Psychology, Cognitive Science, University of Arizona, Tucson,USACecilia GuarigliaDipartimento di Psicologia, Universita degli Studi di Roma and IRCCS, Roma,ItalyPhilip N. Johnson-LairdDepartment of Psychology, Princeton University, USASabine KowalInstitut fur Linguistik, Technische Universitat Berlin, GermanyIda KurczInstitute of Psychology, Polisch Academy of Sciences, Faculty of Psychology,University of Warsaw, PolandPaolo Legrenzi


10/10

Donald G. MacKayDepartment of Psychology, University of California, LosAngeles, USAJohn C. MarshallNeuropsychology Unit, Department of Clinical Neurology, Radcliffe Infirmary,University of Oxford, EnglandJacques MehlerLaboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, Ecole des HautesEtudes Sociales, CNRS, Paris, FranceDaniele NicoDipartimento di Pslcologia, Universita degli Studi di Roma and IRCCS S. Lucia,Roma, ItalyDaniel C. O'Connell, S.JDepartment of Psychology, Georgetown University, Washington DC, USAAlessandro PadovaniDipartimento di Psicologia, Universita degli Studi di Roma and IRCCS S. Lucia,Roma, ItalyLuigi PizzamiglioDipartimento di Psicologia, Universita degli Studi di Roma and IRCCS S. Lucia,Roma, ItalySheldon RosenbergProfessor Emeritus, University of Illinois at Chicago, USACornelis H. van Schooneveld[anua Linguarum Foundation, La Roche-sur-Foron, FranceDan I.SlobinDepartment of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley, USABernard T. TervoortProfessor Emeritus, University of Amsterdam, The NetherlandsRoger WalesSchool of Behavioral Science, University of Melbourne, AustraliaPeter WasonReader Emeritus, Pegasus Group, Oxford, EnglandPatricia WrightMRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, England

Advanced Psychol

Documents

Transcript of Advanced Psychol