Psycholinguistics: A half century of monologism

DANIEL C. O'CONNELL
Loyola University of Chicago

SABINE KOWAL
Technical University of Berlin

The contention of this article is that, since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, mainstream psycholinguistics has been monologistic, that is, has concentrated on monologue as its source of empirical material and has, largely implicitly, involved a monologistic epistemology. The article is not a comprehensive history of psycholinguistics but does attempt to establish a historical perspective. Monologism has been the historical bias of Cartesianism, positivism, behaviorism, and cognitivism. Monologism is concerned only with the person in whom cognition takes place and from whom communication proceeds. It is essentially asocial. By contrast, the merits of dialogism include an openness to the sociocultural, interactive nature of all cognition and communication and an empirical engagement of contextualized discourse situations. Dialogism is presented here not as a supplement to mainstream psycholinguistics but as a radical innovation that construes mainstream psycholinguistics as "strongly misleading if presented as a full theory of communication through spoken interaction" (Linell, 1998, p. 23). Some approaches to dialogism and research on dialogue are critically reviewed.