| Abstract: | Advances in the study of cognition and psycholinguistics have been hampered (1) by the mistaken insistence that psychology is the science of behavior, and (2) by adherence to an independent-dependent variable model of experimental psychology, 1 derived from physical sciences but inappropriate to all but a minority of psychological problems. It is stated that certain concepts which have no behavioral status at all, e.g., understanding, are critical to a nontrivial account of cognitive and psycholinguistic problems. By way of illustration, understanding is shown to be different from interpretation and even more fundamental to linguistic processing. It leads to interpretation, which concerning language, has a semantic component different in nature from syntactic and other linguistic components. It is argued that the semantic component in interpretation consists of the application of certain fundamental structures, called categories after the Kantian model, to linguistic information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
