Roman Jakobson and the Development of Russian Neurolinguistics

Abstract

On May 21-23, 1963, the symposium "Disorders of Language" organized by the Ciba Foundation was held in England. It brought together many outstanding specialists from different parts of the world: "neurophysiologists, psychologists, phoneticians, linguists, a philosopher and an expert in information theory" (Disorders of Language, 1964, p. vii). That was the time of early flourishing of psycholinguistics: the first seminar in psycholinguistics, which lasted two months, was held ten years earlier in Bloomington, [Indiana], N. Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures was published in 1957, J. Miller's well-known article on checking the psychological reality of transformational grammar appeared in 1962. Much was expected of psycholinguistics and first and foremost because of the development of computers—the technical miracle of the twentieth century.