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.
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