Pieces of Minds in Psycholinguistics

This is the first of a series of three interviews featuring Steven Pinker, Kenneth Wexler, and Noam Chornsky, three giant figures in the fields of Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Cognitive Science. The three scientists teach at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States. The fiTst interview is with Professor Steven Pinker, The other two interviews will appear in subsequent issues of this Journal. The contents of the interviews bear on issues related with the evolution of psycholinguistics (past and present), the very notion of language and its acquisition and development in children, the contribution of recent linguistic theories to psycholinguistics and particularly developmental psycholinguistics. Some more personal questions and answers concern the personal contributions of Pinker, Wexler, and Chomsky to the movement of ideas in linguistics and psycholinguistics as they see it, as well as their own professional formation and development. Steven Pinker, ...