Recent advances in the psychology of language

formal and experimental approaches

Robin N Campbell, Philip T. Smith

The Stirling Psychology of Language Conference was held in the University of Stirling, 21-26 June 1976. 250 people attended the conference and 70 papers were presented. The two volumes of Pro­ ceedings present a selection of papers from the conference reflect­ ing as far as possible the range of topics that were discussed. Volume 1 is concerned exclusively with language acquisition. In recent years the 'centre of gravity' of acquisition research has shifted from syntactic and phonological description to the amor­ phous domains of semantics and pragmatics. This shift is reflected in the two large sections (II and III) devoted to these aspects of language development. In addition the volume contains three smaller sections dealing with general problems of acquisition theory, syntax and the development of comprehension, and applied developmental psycholinguistics. Volume 2 contains a substantial section of papers which stress the formal aspects of psycholinguistics: these include papers in which artificial intelligence figures prominently, papers which apply re­ cent developments in syntax and semantics to psycholinguistic prob­ lems, and papers that are broadly critical of the use psychologists have made of linguistic theories. Volume 2 also contains a section dealing with the experimental study of sentence comprehension and production, and there is a final section concerned with phonology and its development.