Psycholinguistic Approaches: Meaning and Understanding

Psycholinguistics is truly at an exciting point. New and unobtrusive measures, innovative tasks and experimental designs, and online computational methodologies are making it increasingly possible to test insights and extend theories about the nature of language. This chapter discusses the study of meaning and understanding as approached by the product and action traditions in psycholinguistics. Then it discusses technological advances in the last two decades that have enabled psycholinguistics to develop unobtrusive methods and methodological innovations for studying language processing online or moment by moment, while it is used in communicative contexts. These advances have enabled the two disparate psycholinguistic traditions to begin to converge toward a more holistic approach to uncovering the products and processes of meaning and understanding that, we believe, characterizes the current state and future of modern psycholinguistics. The chapter focuses on interaction between live partners.