Why Psychology (Still) Needs (Jackendoff’s) Theoretical Linguistics, Falk Huettig (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)
The influence of (theoretical) linguistics on related fields such as psychology and cognitive neuroscience has been waning in recent decades. I will take the example of prediction in language (a topic which is en vogue in psychology and neuroscience) to argue that talk about the death of linguistics in related disciplines has been greatly exaggerated. I will describe the Pre-activation Theory of prediction in language (Huettig, Audring, & Jackendoff, 2022), which is based on Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture (PA, Jackendoff, 2002; Jackendoff & Audring, 2020), and argue that it provides a better account of the empirical evidence than currently hyped theories about prediction in language in psychology and cognitive neuroscience including probabilistic and predictive coding approaches.