Classics in psycholinguistics? Responses

[Nan Ratner]

We may not have chosen the best time of year to post this question (too many on mid-year break?), because we got more requests for our final list than we got votes for things to put on it. However, here are the responses that we did get. We are STILL interested in getting further "nominations", since we have not yet finalized our students' assignments, other than to include Berko, which we had already selected, and Eimas, P., Siqueland, E., Jusczyk, P. & Vigorito, J. (1971). Speech perception in infants. Science, 171, 303-306, which was another favorite of ours.

Here are the suggestions that were sent, along with the original question. 

THE ORIGINAL QUESTION:
We teach sections of an undergraduate course in Psycholinguistics. For
an article review assignment, we are interested in getting other
people's personal impressions of the "top five" (or so) most influential
psycholinguistics studies. We will try to diversify the assignment
across areas such as acquisition, speech perception, lexical access,
sentence processing, etc., so we would like people to consider multiple
areas within the field. We will be happy to post a final list back to
the group.

best wishes for a happy and healthy new year to all,

Nan Bernstein Ratner and Rochelle Newman


HERE WERE OUR RESPONSES:

1) My article suggestion would be:

Balota, David A. and James I. Chumbley (1985).  The locus of word-frequency effects in the pronunciation task.  Journal of Memory and Language, 24, 89-106.

It's readable, and the methodology is simple but cunning.  I think it 
counts as a 'classic'.  It's also very, very replicable and easy to 
implement in E-prime or psyscope.  I probably have an E-prime script around if you want to do a lab on it.

A more recent article that is short, sweet, and neat is:

Goldinger, S.D. & Azuma, T. (2004).  Episodic Memory Reflected in Printed Word Naming.  Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 11, 716-722

Benjamin Munson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences
University of Minnesota

2) You'll have a lot of fun with this project, for sure! At the top of my list is:  
George A. Miller : The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information;
The Psychological Review, 1956, vol. 63, pp. 81-97 

George D. Allen, Ph.D. <alleng at msu.edu>
Michigan State Univ. College of Nursing
A217 Life Sciences, E. Lansing, MI 48824
Voice: 517.353.5976; Fax 517.353.9553 

3) Hi Nan, I think I would vote for the Werker and Tees article on infant phoneme recognition (and loss thereof) and perhaps Slobin's old piece from the 1970 slobin and ferguson book.  but maybe i am just showing my age! I am in france without my books otherwise i would give you more complete references:
best,
judy reilly


4) I would nominate Jean Berko Gleason's original wug study:

Berko, J. (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150-177.

I may be wrong, but I've always had the impression that this study was the first to use novel linguistic forms, with the twin advantages of tapping into young children's intuitions while exerting control over the input. The influence of this study is manifest in the huge number of studies that have used novel word forms in the intervening years (almost 50 years, in fact).

Regards, Matthew Saxton.

Followed shortly that day by:

Dear Nan,
I will teach Processing next term and I would appreciate very much if you could send me back the five titles if you already have them.

I think that one of the classics (covering the field of productivity and also the experimental set) is:
Berko, J. (1958). The child's learning of English morphology. Word, 14, 150-1770.

Best regards, Prof. Dr. Leonor Scliar-Cabral

5) My top five in psychololinguistics:

1. Language acquisition - Clara und William Stern (1907) Kindersprache (Child language) Leipzig: Barth; Rodger Brown A first language
2. Psycholinguistics: theory - Karl Bühler Sprachtheorie (1934) Stuttgart: Fischer
3. Language production -  Willem JM Levelt Speaking (CUP)
4. Language comprehension - William Marslen - Wilson Cohort Theory (Article in Cognition) 

Apologies for the German language bias of my suggestions.

Best regards 
Werner Deutsch

6) Dear Nan,

I think Dan Slobin's 1973 paper on "cognitive prerequisites" was 
pathbreaking in language acquisition studies, even though he has
largely changed his perspective to much more pragmatically discourse 
oriented since then.

best
Ruth Berman

Hi, Nan - for acquisition classics, you might take a look at Barbara 
Lust's new Blackwell reader - several in there that might be 
candidates.

Best,
Katherine Demuth (others chimed in later, including Barbara Lust)

Best wishes for a wonderful 2005 and keep any suggestions coming,

Nan Bernstein Ratner & Rochelle Newman






Nan Bernstein Ratner, Ed.D.
Chairman
Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

301-405-4217
301-314-2023 (FAX)

nratner at hesp.umd.edu