Most of the past research in cognitive linguistics has focused on semantics (Croft and Cruse 2004), but syntax and morphology have also been addressed, and as we will see in Ch. 3, cognitive linguists have recently made substantial progress in exploring issues related to (mainly first) language acquisition. The semantic emphasis has been a consequence of the central belief in cognitive linguistics that words reflect broader underlying conceptual systems, not unlike the tip of an iceberg; in Fauconnier’s (2003: 540) words: ‘Hidden behind simple words and everyday language are vast conceptual networks manipulated unconsciously through the activation of powerful neural circuits.’ This perspective explains the special significance attached to the study of metaphors in their role as powerful conceptual mappings that are central to both everyday language use and scientific terminologies. Metaphor theory, started by Lakoff and Johnson in the 1980s, proposes that by linking source domains of human experience to abstract concepts, metaphors contribute considerably to the development of thought. That is, except for talking about purely physical reality, our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature, and therefore unpacking the conceptual meaning behind metaphors offers unique inroads into the understanding of cognition. (For summaries of metaphors, see Cameron 2003; Kövecses 2005.)
Psycholinguistics
According to Gernsbacher and Kaschak (2003), the term ‘psycholinguistics’ was coined in 1953 at a conference at Cornell University, but the field really took off only after the 1957 publication of Noam Chomsky’s book Syntactic Structures. (It is interesting to note here that, as Altmann (2006) recounts, Syntactic Structures was based on Chomsky’s lecture notes for undergraduate students, notes that he only wrote up in a book upon the encouragement of a friend who happened to visit MIT.) In many ways psycholinguists have been pursuing similar goals to those of cognitive linguists – namely, to expound the psychological reality and the cognitive mechanisms underlying language structure and use – yet the particular foci and research methods of the two disciplines are dissimilar due to their different disciplinary affiliation. Most cognitive linguists would consider themselves linguists first with an interest in cognition, while most psycholinguists would regard themselves primarily as psychologists with an interest in language. Accordingly, while cognitive linguistics has adopted the standard research methodology of linguistics, namely introspection in conjunction with theoretical analysis (Talmy 2007), psycholinguistics has been drawing on the research techniques of experimental psychology (described in detail in Ch. 2).
The first decade of psycholinguistic research was largely taken up by developing theories of language processing based on Chomsky’s generative grammar, and this scope was broadened at the end of the 1960s by the influence of information processing theory. As Altmann (2006) explains, it was this period when the ‘mind-as-computer’ metaphor started to have a pervasive influence on both psycholinguistics and the study of cognition in general – which is a good illustration of the profound significance of metaphors discussed in the previous section. As a result of these developments, the 1970s saw enormous growth in psycholinguistics across a wide range of topics, including word recognition, sentence comprehension, and the mental representation of texts. This momentum further increased in the 1980s and 1990s with the spread of neuroimaging techniques (described in detail in Ch. 2); as MacWhinney (2001c) summarizes, the current emphasis is on trying to link experimental methodology to methods of imaging the human brain during language processing. Thus, we can observe an increasing integration of traditional psycholinguistic approaches and cognitive neuroscience (to be discussed below). Altmann (2006: 8) sums this up clearly:
What we can be sure of is that the boundaries between the study of language and the study of other aspects of cognition are wearing thinner. No doubt there are already developments in ‘neighbouring’ fields of study (e.g. the computational sciences and non-cognitive neurosciences) that will also have an impact, but have yet to emerge as quantifiable influences on psycholinguistics.
A special subdomain of psycholinguistics that is particularly relevant to the topic of this book is developmental psycholinguistics. This field has traditionally focused on the study of child language acquisition and will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter. Here we need only note the peculiar academic phenomenon that L1 acquisition has traditionally been seen as an area of psychology, whereas L2 acquisition has almost entirely been studied by (applied) linguists. Although this divide is still as a whole in existence, the recent converging trend of linguistics and language psychology has not been without effect and communication amongst scholars across the L1/L2 boundary has become more featured. (For a good illustration, see for example the discussion of L1 influences on SLA concerning age effects, such as ‘language entrenchment’, at the end of Ch. 6.)
Neurolinguistics
The previous section briefly mentioned the powerful contemporary drive of incorporating the methods and findings of neuroscience into more traditional approaches such as psycholinguistics and, in this sense, neurolinguistics can be seen as a linguistic companion to psycholinguistics. Neurolinguistics shares similar objectives with cognitive linguistics but draws on neuropsychology rather than cognitive psychology as the main source of psychological knowledge. In his comprehensive summary of the neurolinguistics of bilingualism, Paradis (2004) explains that the term ‘neurolinguistics’ was first used by French neurologist Henry Hécaen in the late 1960s, to denote a discipline that was to bridge a gap between the neurosciences (neurology, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and neurochemistry) and human communication (linguistics and psycholinguistics). Originally, the main emphasis of the field was on studying verbal deficits resulting from cortical lesions (i.e. aphasia) and therefore neurolinguistics was initially closely associated with language pathology. For this reason, some scholars (e.g. Ahlsén 2006) put the genesis of neurolinguistics as being 1861, when Paul Broca presented his seminal findings on what was to be called ‘Broca aphasia’. (See Ch. 2 for more details.) Recently, neurolinguistics has extended its scope well beyond aphasia studies and embraced the whole new spectrum of neuroimaging techniques, thereby blending gradually into the cognitive neuroscience of language – see below.
Cognitive science
The academic discipline cognitive science is the most prominent outcome of the ‘great academic paradigm shift’ described earlier. Its remit includes the ‘scientific study of minds and brains, be they real, artificial, human or animal’ (Nadel and Piattelli-Palmarini 2003: p. xiii). It is thus a rich and diverse area of the study of the mind that has been fuelled by the academic world’s (and also laypeople’s) unrelenting interest in the operation of the brain and the growing excitement about the fact that for the first time in human history there are realistic ways of peeping into what had been treated for centuries as a ‘black box’. (For a discussion of a range of brain-related issues, See Ch. 2.) This momentum is palpable in the growing number of university programmes, faculty positions, international conferences, and publications such as academic journals, handbooks, and encyclopaedias that are explicitly related to cognitive science, and which are usually seen as the indices of the vitality of a field. The significance of the field is also measurable in the prestige of its main scholars and the amount of research funding and media coverage that is associated with it. All in all, it is good to be a cognitive scientist nowadays!
In an interview about the genesis of cognitive science, George Miller, one of the fathers of the field, stated that the birthday of the discipline was 11 September 1956, the date of a meeting at MIT where ‘leading cognitivists from computer science, linguistics, and psychology all came together for the first time and began to realize they shared their interest in the human mind’ (Gazzaniga, Ivry, and Mangun 2002: 18). Three talks in particular – Miller’s ‘The magical number seven’ (Miller 1956), Chomsky’s ‘Three models of language’, and Newell and Simon’s ‘Logic theory machine’ – were influential in laying the foundations of a movement whose success story has exceeded even the most fervent enthusiasts’