The Genetic Perspective in Psycholinguistics or Where Do Spoken Words Come From?1

The core issue in the 19-century sources of psycholinguistics was the question, "Where does language come from?' ' This genetic perspective unified the study of the ontogenesis, the phylogenesis, the microgenesis, and to some extent the neurogenesis of language. This paper makes the point that this original perspective is still a valid and attractive one. It is exemplified by a discussion of the genesis of spoken words. THE ORIGINS OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS Here is the standard story about the birth of psycholinguistics: It all started with a seminar on psycholinguistics under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council, held at Cornell University in 1951. This was followed by another seminar at Indiana University in 1953, whose proceedings, edited by Osgood and Sebeok, appeared in 1965 under the title Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems. These seminars brought to-gether leading psychologists, linguists, and anthropologists, who jointly de-fined the new interdisciplinary field. The emerging discipline soon got a new twist when young Noam Chomsky stirred up the cognitive revolution during the late 1950s. Mentalist generative grammar set the agenda for George Miller's research strategy: the experimental study of our sheer limitless pro-ductivity in understanding and producing language. ' I thank Eve Clark for comments on an earlier version of this paper