(Why Psycholinguistics Must be Comparative)

Vreemd genoeg staat voor u een titel deels in het Nederlands terwijl de rede zelf geheel in het Engels wordt gesproken (behalve deze zin dan). The first part of this title was also the title of my inaugural lecture, delivered in this auditorium 16 years ago this month. At the time I had put a lot of effort into composing and delivering this inaugural address in Dutch, my new second language, and I was particularly proud of the title, simply because it could not be translated into English without the loss of a good deal of its meaning (and especially the loss of any associations with eggs which some of you may involuntarily call up). Translating it word by word (‘One-language psychology is no language psychology’) produces a superb example of steenkolenengels which would be quite opaque to English speakers with no knowledge of Germanic languages. All English titles that I could think of seemed pale in comparison to the original; the best was ‘Why psycholinguistics must be comparative’. As a translation this is highly impoverished (it even fails to stress that what we must compare across is languages!). But at least it captures the central argument of the inaugural lecture, that basing psycholinguistic research and theorizing on evidence from only a single language, as has so frequently been done, will often simply lead to a wrong conclusion or to only a partial truth. You can find a version of that argument serving as the introductory chapter in my book Native Listening, which was published just this month. Today I won’t repeat that argument, but I will give you some new examples of the importance of cross-language comparison. These examples are taken from the past 19 years, the years during which I have been fortunate enough to hold the position of director at the mpi and a chair at this university. In fact, it’s easy to make this case even by looking at the simplest examples, i.e., the building blocks of spoken language. My research focuses on listening to spoken language, as the title of the book makes clear. I regard listening to speech as an operation that is continuously influenced by one’s native language. More than that, listening is exquisitely tailored to the native language, which is the main reason why it is so extraordinarily efficient and so wonderfully flexible and adaptable