Psychology and Linguistics

Abstract

In almost every science there are branches or subdisciplines which are revived, so to speak, after having been considered extinct or just dormant for decades. Within psychology this is hardly anywhere as clear as in psycholinguistics or the “psychology of language” (we shall use these two terms, at least for the time being, as synonyms). Psycholinguistics was born, ostensibly from nothing, in the beginning of the 1950s in a series of symposia in the United States and developed at a rapid rate in the Anglo-American language communities, but psycholinguists discovered only after twenty years of this development that there had already been some “psychologies of language” in Europe, in Germany, for instance, notably in the last third of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. They discovered at about the same time that there was and still is a rapidly developing psychology of language in Russia.

I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.

Samuel Johnson

Language acquires life and historically evolves here, in concrete verbal communication, and not in the abstract linguistic system of language forms, nor in the individual psyche of speakers.

V. N. Vološinov

Verbal thought is not an innate, natural form of behavior but is determined by an historical-cultural process and has specific properties and laws that cannot be found in the natural forms of thought and speech.

L. Vygotsky