Since their onset more than 50 years ago, both psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics have
provided crucial breakthroughs for understanding the cognitive bases of language. Despite
their major contributions, however, both fields have been undermined by a tradeoff between
ecological validity (i.e., the degree to which tasks reflect the conditions of everyday
communication) and experimental control (the manipulation of fine-grained variables,
which is typically achieved by matching lists of decontextualized words and sentences).
Specifically, most extant research sacrifices the former requisite in pursuit of the latter, or
vice versa, but both are rarely met in combination. To overcome this problem, we have
relied on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and designed a protocol for constructing
carefully matched but fully naturalistic narratives usable in experimental settings. First, we
describe the limitations of mainstream language experiments and their poor ecological
validity. Second, we introduce an SFL-based protocol that allows constructing naturalistic
stories that differ in one critical target variable while guaranteeing statistical comparability
in multiple other factors. Third, we illustrate how the protocol has been successfully
implemented in two groundbreaking studies exploring the links between biological motor
systems and lexico-semantic processing. Finally, we discuss the potential gains springing
from future collaborations between SFL and experimental language research.
