Abstract
Psycholinguistics as a discipline can be traced back further than one would think, but what we refer to as modern psycholinguistics emerged in the 1950s. The gradual accumulation of interdisciplinary knowledge, cross-linguistic research, and the development of ideas formed the foundation for new approaches. Indeed, interdisciplinarity, multi-methodology, and linguistic diversity are to this day inevitable and integral parts of psycholinguistics. The aim of this paper is to argue the interplay of different approaches and methodologies, namely in relation to syntactic processing. The paper provides a general overview of former state-of-the-art and newer research trends, discusses the challenges of new approaches, and presents them in the context of a recently performed attachment preference study in Croatian. Using multiple methodologies, the study shows that Croatian is a high attachment preference language. More importantly, it illustrates the significance of a carefully planned research design and the relevance of obeying the properties of the studied language. These considerations are crucial in order to avoid that someone’s choice of theoretical framework and methods influences results.
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Notes
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The long lasting debates of the 1950s and 1960s—mostly related to language acquisition research and partly to the broader concepts of processing—to this day remain unresolved; ongoing discussions include topics such as the role of innateness versus environmental input and experience, the organization of mental representations, and the universality of language processing mechanisms.
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Speakers of Spanish were asked to analyze a Spanish equivalent of the same sentence.
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- 5.
Due to the amount and complexity of analyses, but mainly due to the fact that the purpose of the current paper goes beyond presenting the study per se, here we do not provide all of its results, nor we discuss all of its findings.
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Matić, A., Kovačević, M. (2022). Challenges of Different Approaches and Methodologies in Psycholinguistics: The Example of an RC Attachment Preference Study in Croatian. In: Gervain, J., Csibra, G., Kovács, K. (eds) A Life in Cognition. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66175-5_10
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