Las tareas conductuales en la investigación sobre el procesamiento del lenguaje

Abstract

This article presents the major behavioral tasks used in research on language processing in both comprehension and production. The article has two main goals. First, to justify the claim that psycholinguistic research can provide significant contributions to theoretical linguistics, despite a number of difficulties that complicate this endeavor. It is claimed that methodology, and particularly the choice of tasks and procedures for data collection, are useful tools to circumvent or overcome these difficulties. The second goal of the article is to describe a handful of tasks labelled behavioral by means of a few significant criteria selected for that purpose. A number of behavioral tasks commonly employed in research on language comprehension and production are described in turn, highlighting their main strengths and weaknesses. A major issue in this regard is the notion of ‘experimental paradigm’, of which two prominent examples are presented, namely the priming paradigm and the divided attention or dual-task paradigm, the former used both in comprehension and production tasks. The article ends with some remarks on the main shortcomings of behavioral tasks, and with the claim that these pitfalls are not exclusive of this kind of tasks. Be that as it may, it is finally contended that behavioral tasks are useful and necessary in empirical research on language.