ABSTRACT
Historically, psycholinguistic approaches to second language (L2) pragmatics have been relatively rare. An early review of SLA and pragmatics (Kasper & Rose, 1999) noted the lack of empirical research on processes involved in production and comprehension of pragmatic meanings among L2 learners. Though the situation has improved somewhat since then, pragmatic processing (in SLA and otherwise) remains under-researched. In addition, it is only recently that the field of pragmatics itself has taken an experimental turn and begun using psycholinguistic methods to examine pragmatic phenomena (e.g., Noveck & Sperber, 2004). As a relatively new field, experimental pragmatics has dealt with only a limited range of phenomena, and there are only a handful of studies examining L2 pragmatics. Still, we argue in this chapter that a psycholinguistic approach has much to offer to L2 pragmatics, especially as a vehicle for testing theoretically grounded propositions. The purpose of this chapter is to provide a relatively broad overview of psycholinguistic research on pragmatics and SLA, describing methodological techniques and theoretical approaches, as well as some of the major findings and their theoretical implications.
