Professor Gui Shichun was invited to give a talk to researchers and students of psycholinguistics at the lecture hall of Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics on the 26thof November. In his talk,Beyond Psycholinguistics, Professor Gui first briefly reviewed and critically commented on the classical approach to psycholinguistics, and then introduced the later developments which mainly included four schools of thought. In the final part, he pointed out some trends and possible topics for future studies inpsycholinguistics.
Professor Gui began his talk by reviewing some problems of the classical approach to psycholinguistics, such as language dichotomy (competence versus performance; Language/Speech) and the information theory. In response to these problems, several sets of theories were developed with the advance of technology: the invisible hand in language, language as a complex adaptive system, language as signal, and big data in language research. Each set of theory might bring great changes to psycholinguistic research, both in terms of research method and in terms of research subject. At the end of his talk, Professor Gui raised some thought provoking questions:
What is the central theme of psycholinguistics? What do you think if you take a cognitive-functional approach and take your object of study all aspects of natural language understanding and use, including unruly idioms, metaphors, and irregularities?
What are the implications of basic variety for L2, especially adult L2?
What do you think of adapting the experimental methods of psycholinguistics to the ideas behind the Big Data approach?
These questions triggered a spirited discussion among the audience, which included members of Bilingual Cognition and Education Lab, teachers from Faculty of English Language and Culture, School of English and Education, Pingdingshan College, Northwest Normal University, and graduate students from Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics.
