The chapter provides an overview of work that crosses the linguistics-psychology boundaries.

It presents early influential contributions/developments: Piaget and Vygotsky, Skinner’s behaviorist treatment of language acquisition (and Chomsky’s criticism), computer programming formalism, and the Chomskyan and cognitive revolutions.

It then analyzes research developments from the 1950s, reviews the tenets of generative grammar (especially Universal Grammar) and their role in sentence processing theories (garden-path theory, connectionist models) and describes models of discourse processing, e.g., mental/situation models, Construction-Integration model.

Other topics discussed are:

• - Child language acquisition: its empirical foundations and Chomskyan views about language learnability (poverty of stimulus, critical period of development).

• - Formalization of language processing with computing tools: simulation of language processes, description of representations underlying language processing (e.g., semantic networks, scripts, ACT CCREADER); computational linguistics (e.g., speech recognition, automated translation); corpus linguistics.

• - Social dimensions of language use: pragmatics (Grice’s conversational maxims, Relevance Theory); social psychology (Communication Accommodation Theory).

• - Neurolinguistics: disorders resulting from brain damage; technical advances in brain imaging methods and new insights about language processing networks.

• - Gesture and sign language: gesture-thought relationship; study of sign languages.

• - Cognitive linguistics and the claim that cognitive structures and representational schemes contribute to shaping language structure (e.g., Cognitive Grammar).