Historical accident

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: A CROSS-LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVE

Elizabeth Bates, University of California, San Diego

Antonella Devescovi, University of Rome 'La Sapienza'

Beverly Wulfeck, San Diego State University and University of California, San Diego

Annual Review of Psychology, 2001, 52, 369-396

CONCLUSION

The dominance of English in 20th-century psycholinguistics was a historical accident, more socio-political than scientific. However, it has had particularly unfortunate consequences for those fields that try to study the universal psychological and neural underpinnings of language. Psycholinguistics has finally broken away from the hegemony of English, and the field is better for it.

There is, however, an immense amount of work that needs to be done, to verify whether

English-based findings can be generalized, and to explore the opportunities afforded by the dramatic structural contrasts that characterize human language.

Technical Report CRL-0009, May 2000

Center for Research in Language

University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0526