Entrenchment and the Psychology of Language Learning: How We Reorganize and Adapt Linguistic Knowledge

Linguistic communication is among the most highly automatized forms of human behavior. Effortlessly and with stunning speed, speakers and hearers access and retrieve linguistic knowledge from memory and apply lower level and higher level cognitive abilities such as perception, attention, categorization, and inferencing while producing and comprehending utterances. For this to be possible, linguistic knowledge must be organized in maximally and immediately accessible and retrievable formats. In the wake of Chomsky’s claim in the 1960s that language is a highly specialized and largely autonomous cognitive module, linguists and psychologists lost sight of the psychological foundations shared by language and nonlinguistic cognition. Although most linguists focused their attention on the description of linguistic structures and structural principles of language, most psychologists studied behavior and its cognitive and neuronal basis without worrying too much about the potential influence of language and its representations in the mind. Over the past 20 years, this division of labor has begun to crumble. With the development of cognitive–linguistic, usage-based, and complex–adaptive models of language, linguistics has begun to emancipate itself from its self-imposed isolation and has found a foothold in the cognitive sciences alongside cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, social psychology, and other related fields. Many linguists have developed a keen interest in the role played by domain-general neurocognitive abilities and processes in the emergence and storage of linguistic knowledge. In contrast, many psychologists have not yet ventured far into linguistics, partly because what is still perceived as “mainstream” linguistics (i.e., Chomskyan autonomous linguistics) did not seem to offer much that would have made that effort worthwhile. Potential effects of the omnipresence of language and linguistic thought on human behavior, input processing, and learning are frequently not considered as falling within the remit of psychological inquiry. The notion of entrenchment epitomizes like no other the opportunity to establish a new meeting ground for psychology and linguistics. It captures the idea that linguistic knowledge is not autonomous, abstract, and stative but is instead continuously refreshed and reorganized under the influence of communicative events in social situations. Linguistic entrenchment can essentially be regarded as a lifelong cognitive reorganization process, the course and quality of which are conditioned by exposure to and use of language on one hand and by the application of domaingeneral cognitive abilities and processes to language on the other. Memory, categorization, analogy, and abstraction, as well as perception and attention, are crucially