Wundt , Bloomfield, and Chomsky:
Metaphors
and Metaphysics in the History of Psycholinguistics


Joseph F. Kess
Department of Linguistics, University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada (V8W 2Y2)

 


In the early history of psycholinguistics, there have been in fact two major eras in which psycholinguistic interests have flourished, one historical and one modern. The first took place primarily in Europe, in the late 19th Century, with the ascendancy of Leipzig's Wilhelm Wundt as the first influential psycholinguist, and ended with the cessation of WWI and the parallel rise of behaviourism in psychology and Bloomfieldian structuralism in linguistics. The second appeared in in the late 1950s and 1960s, primarily in America, with the development of Chomskyan notions about the nature of language, universality, and the portrayal of linguistic knowledge. This paper charts the changing relationships between the fields of linguistics and psychology in their emerging stages, the rise of modern psycholinguistics, and the models, metaphors, and metaphysical underpinnings which motivated research at the point of their interdisciplinary intersection.