ABSTRACT

The above quote from Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), a German psychologist considered to be the founder of modern psychology and psycholinguistics (Blumenthal, 1970), is remarkably relevant today.Wundt considered language comprehension and production as cognitive activities, driven by the “inner” train of thought. The speaker’s verbal message starts with his or her “apperception” of the overall idea (concept or general impression) to be communicated. The speaker then organizes this mental content into structured, ordered linguistic constituents, which Wundt believed to be specific to a particular language, and prepares and articulates the phonetic detail of the message. The listener, whose aim is in turn to recover the speaker’s overall idea, uses this phonetic detail as cues to reconstruct the structural relations in the speaker’s message and to create his or her own “inner” thought.