Abstract
Recent years have seen a small but growing body of psycholinguistic research focused on typologically diverse languages. This represents an important development for the field, where theorising is still largely guided by the often implicit assumption of universality. This paper introduces a special issue of Language, Cognition and Neuroscience devoted to the topic of cross-linguistic and field-based approaches to the study of psycholinguistics. The papers in this issue draw on data from a variety of genetically and areally divergent languages, to address questions in the production and comprehension of phonology, morphology, words, and sentences. To contextualise these studies, we provide an overview of the field of cross-linguistic psycholinguistics, from its early beginnings to the present day, highlighting instances where cross-linguistic data have significantly contributed to psycholinguistic theorising.
Acknowledgements
We thank Jürgen Bohnemeyer, Agnieszka Konopka, Chigusa Kurumada, Dan Jurafsky, Mikel Santesteban, Sebastian Sauppe, Peter de Swart and Tom Wasow for their feedback on this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. Growing interest in cross-linguistic psycholinguistics is also reflected in the increasing number of recent events dedicated to the topic. A panel held at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America organised by Alice Harris drew attention to recent work focusing on the processing and acquisition of endangered languages, and at the same meeting Sandra Chung delivered her Presidential Address on psycholinguistic work done on endangered languages in the Pacific in collaboration with Manuel F. Borja and Matthew Wagers. The 2014 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science featured a symposium “The Large Cognitive Implications of Small Languages”, organised by Douglas Whalen.
2. See, for example, the ongoing debate over whether nouns are universally learned before verbs, which has drawn on language data from English (Childers & Tomasello, Citation2006; Gentner, Citation1982), Japanese (Imai, Haryu, & Okada, Citation2005), Korean (Gopnik & Choi, Citation1995; Pae, Citation1993), Mandarin (Tardif, Citation1996; Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, Citation1999), Navajo (Gentner & Boroditsky, Citation2009), and Tzeltal (Brown, Citation1998).
3. See Levelt (Citation2013) for a comprehensive treatment of the various manifestations of verticalist perspectives in nineteenth century thought, and their close connection to theories of biological evolution. We adopt the terms “verticalist” and “horizontal” from Levelt’s exposition.
4. This is not to say that there were not exceptions to this general trend. In a series of studies Forster (Citation1966, Citation1968) and Forster and Clyne (Citation1968), for example, compared English and Turkish in order to test the hypothesis that differences in syntactic branching direction would have differential processing consequences; see Cutler (Citation1985) for discussion.
5. Including Dutch (Brysbaert & Mitchell, Citation1996), German (Konieczny & Hemforth, Citation2000), Greek (Papadopoulou & Clahsen, Citation2003), Italian (French-Mestre & Pynte, Citation2000; Grillo & Costa, Citation201Citation4), Japanese (Kamide & Mitchell, Citation1997), Korean (Jun, Citation2003; Lee & Kweon, Citation2004), Russian (Sekerina, Citation2002, Citation2004; Fedorova & Yanovich, Citation2004, Citation2006) (all “high” attachment languages) and Basque (Gutierrez-Ziardegi et al., Citation2004), Brazilian Portuguese (Miyamoto, Citation1999), Chinese (Shen, Citation2006), Norwegian, Romanian and Swedish (Ehrlich, Fernández, Fodor, Stenshoel, & Vinereanu, Citation1999) (all “low” attachment languages).
6. We thank Tom Wasow (p.c.) for drawing our attention to this connection. It constitutes a classic example of how linguistic typology can serve to inform psycholinguistic theorising (see Hawkins, Citation2004, Citation2007 for detailed discussion of this point).
7. Our use of the term “Phrase Structure theories” is a label of convenience and is not meant to imply that all phrase structure grammars necessarily postulate a universal configurational subject position (thanks to Juergen Bohnemeyer (p.c.) for alerting us to this point).
8. Some memory-based theories also posit a competing mechanism, activation boosts with every retrieval, that can sometimes lead to facilitation with increasing distance (Lewis et al., Citation200Citation6; Vasishth & Lewis, Citation2006). Here we simplify for the purpose of discussion and focus on strictly locality-based memory accounts (e.g. Gibson, Citation1998, Citation2000; Grodner & Gibson, Citation2005).
9. They do differ, however, in where exactly they predict the locus of processing difficulty to reside in object RCs (see discussions in Grodner and Gibson, Citation2005; Levy, Citation2008; Levy & Gibson, Citation2013).
10. Specifically, Levy and Keller (as noted above) found locality and anti-locality effects in German verb-final structures and Vasishth and Drenhaus (Citation2011) found locality effects when memory costs were made high.
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Funding
This research was partially supported by NSF CAREER award IIS-1150028 to TFJ. The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the funding agencies.
Cross-linguistic psycholinguistics and its critical role in theory development: early beginnings and recent advances
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1158-7308
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