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INTRODUCTION The psychology of language ‘psycholinguistics’ as its known today was invented by the 19th century linguists.This was after idealism and logic couldn’t be relied fully to address the issues on language and consciousness.Linguists at this time viewed language as a spontaneous product of nature.Language is a natural product of consciousness this was according to the 19th century scientists such as Herder,Steinthall and Lazarus. The romantic,evolutionary perspective shifted the weight of explanation in linguistics to psychology.”Fortunate advances in linguistics presuppose a developed psychology”wrote Heymann Steinthall in 1855.Knoblauch 1988 in his thorough account of this early history notes that this “developed” psychology didn’t exist in Steinthall’s time.What was available was Herbert’s atomistic individual psychology and the occasional self-proclaimed psychologist of his time wasn’t interested in this kind of challenge.In other words,’the psychology of language’ was invented by linguists pour besoin de la cause-it was little else than linguistic folk psychology. Matters changed when Wundt did take up the challenge in the 1800’s and eventually resulting in his two volume Die Spra-Che of 1900.For Wundt,his main aim was to expain language as a spontaneous product of consciousness.As an expression of the mind. The original perspective of psycholinguistics was a genetic one.Where does language come from,phylogenetically,microgenetically,ontogenetically,and-only occassionaly discussed by Wundt but a lot by his contemporaries such as Wernickes-neurogenetic view on language and the brain. PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE The first to write anything on the brain and language were the ancient Egyptians.A catalogue of effects of head injury exists in what is reffered to as Edwin Smith’s Surgical Papyrus written about 1700 B.C.The writer reffered to what is believed to be the first recorded case of aphasialanguage breakdown following brain trauma. The Egyptians however didn’t pay any attention to the brain,they believed that the heart was the soul and the the repository for memory.This was a view shared by Aristotle who was a greek philosopher(384-322 B.C) a somewhatsurprising position to take given that he as student at Plato’s academy and that Plato(427-347 B.C)believed the brain to be the best seat of intelligence. Plato was probably the earliest to write at length on language where others may have just spoken but not written.Certainly his writings were the most influential with respect to the philosophy of language and the question ‘what does a word mean?’Plato studied prisoners who had been chained all their lives in a cave.In this allegory all the prisoners saw were the shsdows of objects cast upon a wall by the flames of a fire.Plato came to realize that the prisoners described what they saw in the shadows using words which refer to objects in the real world all this uknown to them since they had been imprisoned all their lives. Thus for Plato and a host of more contemporary philosophers such as Frege and Puttnam,-the true meaning of a word-its reference-is external to the person who by using the word is attributing meaning to it. Wittgenstein in his philosophical investigations proposed that the meaning of a word is knowledge of its use in a language here being knowledge of the contexts in which it would be appropriate to utter that word,where such knowledge is shaped by experiences. The pre-history of psycholinguistics up until the 19th century was dominated by philosophical conjecture.The term ‘dominated’ is used loosely here since there was no systematicand on going questioning of the relationship between the mind and language-there was no community of researchers asking the questions. PSYCHOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE Psychology plays an integral part in language comprehension and production.In this section we will look at various psychologists,their theories and their effect on language. SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT; BEHAVIOURISM In the early 1900s, after inception of structuralism and functionalism another school of thought;behaviourism was introduced.Behaviourists tried to establish psychology as an empirical science with all the requisite tools of scientific but devoid of mental constructs like mind,thought and imagery. J.B Watson and B.F Skinner wanted a psychology based on observable behavior,and not mental constructs.In the 1950s classical conditioning was used to account for how words acquired emotional meaning.Behaviourism for a period helped change the way experts viewed language however this would change at the beginning of the cognitive revolution. STRUCTURALISM Structuralism emerged as the first school of thought.It focused on breaking down the mental processes into the most basic parts.Structuralists used introspection to understand the basic elements of consciousness.One of the pre-eminent structuralists Ferdinand de Saussure in his book Course in General linguistics analyses not the use of language but the underlying system of language.Saussure claimed that linguistic signs were made up of two parts; i)the signifier;which is the action when someone says or thinks a word. ii)the signified;which is the meaning or the cocept of a word.Edward Tichener coined the term structuralism and also described some tenets. FUNCTIONALISM Functionalism followed structuralism.It was started by an American psychologist William James,the functionalist school of thought was based around studying what people do with language and thoughts rather than the structure of the mind.Functionalists such as James were pragmatic thinkers as they believed that the value of knowledge depended on its usefulness.However the flaw with was that for some people it was not enough of a rigorous science,and some changes would be made to include more scientific aspects. COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE In the past 20-30 years, a new point of view has emerged.The cognitive science school of thought is a multi disciplinary effort that integrates research from linguistics,psychobiology,neuroscienceperspectives to better understand how humans think and communicate.Cognitive neuroscience is a field of research that links the brain and the nervous system to cognitive processing.Ultimately cognitive science became the study of how people perceive,organize,remember and use information. The works on the brain and language led to the cognitive revolution.The work by Chomsky main propagator and other influencial experts such as George Miller at Harvard University led to a revolution in psychology in which a transition began to occur from behaviourism to the cognitive perspective.This transition came to be known as the cognitive revolution.The cognitive revolution was crucial to the birth of psycholinguistics,it turned away from from behaviourism towards language and mental processes.Cognitive psychology thus became the study of how people perceive,organice,remember and use information. THE MODERN ERA Chomsky’s influence on modern psycholinguistics cannot be overstated.He draws an important distinction between ‘competence’,or the knowledge we have about a language and ‘performance’ the use of that language.(a distinction reminiscent of Sassures earlier distinction between langue and parole)Both competence and performance arise through the workings of the human mind a mind which is innately enabled to learn the structures of human language.L.A.D language acquisition device. Traditional theories in ciognition suppose that the jop of the perceptual system is to deliver to the cognitive system a representation of the external world.The job of the cognitive system is then to reconstruct mentally the external world.This reconstruction subsequently forms the basis for ‘commands’ sent to for example the motor system.Cognition thus mediates between perception and action. Cognition is thusgrounded in the same neuralsubstrates that support sensory-motor interaction with the external world. The computer falls under the modern era.It had a significant impact on psychology as well as language.Computer programs worked by breaking down complex behaviours into sequences of simpler,more manageable behaviours.They relied on symbol manipulaition and the control of information flow. Influences of the digital computing revolution were felt in different ways.Some were direct with researchers building computer simulations of mental behavior(in the growing field of artificial intelligence).Several language ‘understanding’ programs were written in the early 60s and are still relevant 35 yrs on.e.g Terry Winograd’s SHRDLU programwritten in 1968-1970. Immernse resources,time and personnel have been directed towards this area of artificial intelligence which heavily borrows from the human cognitive system.These machines were essentially built to ease our day to to day lives and language is no exception. THE FUTURE OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Psycholinguistics as a discipline is a field that taken a while to research,understand and explain.The postulations put forward from the ancient Egyptians as seen from Edwin Smith to Wundit’s structuralism,Skinner’s behaviourism,Chomsky’s cognitive approach to artifitial intelligence have all led to a profound understanding of psycholinguistics.This has laid a good foundation for future inventions and researches in the field. The encouraging of students in institutions of higher learning to pursue degrees and the political goodwill by the governments to support research social sciences in our case psycholinguistics and incorporate it with technology is a sure stategy for the future. The future of the science of language couldn’t be much brighter.Unlike the behahaviourists skinner and functionalist who died long we are fortunate enough to have Noam Chomsky who is a huge resource in the psycholinguistic field. CONCLUSION Overall, many important people contributed to the history of psycholinguistics. Many important theories were put forth, and much progress was made regarding the understanding we have about language and how we think about it. The different schools of thought provided a framework for how thinkers shaped their thoughts and ideas. While the thinkers did not always agree with each other, there was always stimulating discussions and we furthered our knowledge of the subject as a result of these debates. Brilliant men such as Wundt, Piaget, Chomsky and many others have changed the way we think about language in a psychological context. The cognitive revolution was a time of the breakthrough of many fresh ideas that enlightened us even more. In the future, there will surely be many more breakthroughs that we have not even pondered yet. REFERENCES Altmann G T M (1997)The assent of Babel:An exploration of language,mind,and understanding.Oxford University Press. Altmann G T M (2001).The language machine:’Psycholinguistics in review.’British journal of Psychology 92,129-170. Blumenthal A L (1970).Language and psychology:Historical aspects of psycholinguistics.New York:John Wiley and Sons. Chomsky N (1957).Syntactic structures.Mouton. Chomsky N (1959) ‘Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour.’Language 35,26-58. UNIVERSITY OF NAIROBI COLLEGE OF EDUCATION AND EXTERNAL STUDIES DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS COURSE TITLE:PSYCHOLINGUISTICS COURSE CODE:TLE 403 TASK:HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS LECTURER:MR.ATOH. PRESENTED BY:STEPHEN KAGUAMBA MUTUMA REG.NO:E35/39670/2011 SIGNATURE: DATE OF SUBMISSION: 30th /OCTOBER/2014.