Relating structure and time in linguistics and psycholinguistics

The field of psycholinguistics advertises its mentalistic commitments in its name. The field of linguistics does not. Psycholinguistic research frequently involves ingenious experimental designs, fancy lab equipment such as eye-trackers or electroencephalograms (EEGs), large groups of experimental subjects, and detailed statistical analyses. Linguistic research typically requires no specialized equipment, no statistical analyses, and somewhere between zero and a handful of cooperative informants. Psycholinguistic research is most commonly conducted in a Department of Psychology. Linguistic research is not. Some of these differences may contribute to the widespread perception, well-represented among linguists and psychologists alike, that the concerns of psycholinguistics are somehow more psychological than those of linguistics, and that psycholinguistics can be looked to for psychological validation of the constructs proposed by linguists. Although this view of the relation between the two fields gives the impression of a neat division of labor, we find it misleading, and suspect that it may have led to unrealistic expectations, and consequently to disappointments and mutual frustration. In this commentary we focus on issues in the representation of unbounded syntactic dependencies, as a case study of what psycholinguistic methods can and cannot tell us about linguistic questions, and vice versa. This is an area where a rich linguistic literature and a sizeable body of psycholinguistic research address closely related phenomena. The most widely discussed form of unbounded dependency occurs when a noun phrase (NP) such as which voters in (1) appears in a position that is structurally distant from the verb that it is an argument of (e.g. bribe in (1)). Following standard practice, we mark the canonical position of the direct object of bribe with an underline or gap in (1), but it is a matter of great controversy whether such gap positions are a part of the mental representation of sentences like (1). After reviewing some of the competing linguistic analyses of unbounded dependency constructions in section 45.2, we discuss in section 45.3 the contributions of psycholinguistics to the question of how these dependencies are represented.