Psycholinguïstiek: een kwantitatieve wetenschap

Samenvatting

In psycholinguistics as a quantitative science the processes of language production and comprehension are examined within an experimental paradigm: Measurements of language behaviour are compared under well-controlled conditions. The article introduces the reader into major issues and research techniques, and illustrates somepsycholinguistic methods in experiments regarding language comprehension which test anaphor resolution in sentences with verb-based implicit causality. In one off-line and two on-line language processing studies it is shown how syntactic and semantic information and knowledge of the external world affects the focus on a protagonist as the referent of a pronoun.