国外心理语言学1.pptVIP

* * * * * * * Plato too * * * * * Wundt suggesteed that the fundamental unit of language is the sentence -- not the word or the sound.? He identified the sentence not just with a sequence of words and sounds, but as a special mental state.? Sounds, words, the rules of grammer, etc., all have their meaning only in relation to that underlying mental sentence. Wundt actually invented the tree diagram of syntax we are all familiar with in linguistics texts!? Language starts with S (the sentence) at the top, and selective attention separates the subject (the focus or figure) from the predicate (the ground), and so on, in contrast to the popular bottom-up, associationistic conception the behaviorists proposed.? Wundts ideas are now the standard -- yet no one remembers they were his in the first place! language processes = mental processes * Historical linguistics - comparing languages (primarily IndoEuropean languages) and discovering the principles guiding the changes undergone by the languages had been the dominant Descriptive linguistics - describing a language as a whole at a particular point in time * Viewed language as systems of stimulus-response patterns (kind of verbal habits), built up through conditioning Focus of the behaviorist tradition is to only make theories about observable behaviors (basic argument: mental processes aren’t directly observable, so they aren’t testable, so they don’t belong in theories) * * * Cognitive Science - a multi-disciplinary field to investigate the mind/brain * * * Among the arguments, perhaps the most famous is his example: “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” Even though the associations between these words are virtually absent, the sentence is recognized as syntactically correct. In contrast “furiously sleep ideas green colorless” is recognized as ungrammatical. * * * * * * * * * By mid 90s there are over 200 Cognitive Science programs around the world Brought together, within the same departments, linguists, psych