Psycholinguistics

1. Psycholinguistics • The action of mind always occurs in some language. • Of course, in the process of thinking in mind, language may not require grammatical structure, but when it is exposed through speech, it should have some grammatical structure. • The speaker thinks whether the participants understand it or not. • In the mind, the concept of anger, emotion, surprise and joy generates through foreign information which may be expressed either in speech or in writing.

2. Psycholinguistics • The language finds sources to be expressed from the mind, but the mind cannot expose its feeling without the help of language. • Steinberg and Sciarini (2006: 181) described certain theories to prove that thinking is not dependent on speech. • According to them, ‘… persons without the ability to speak can think. The notion that speech production is necessary in order to think is clearly false.’ • But they also accept this fact that to express one’s feelings or thoughts language is necessary.

3. Psycholinguistics • According to Clark and Hecht (1983) language acquisition’ in Annual Review of Psychology, 34, 325-49, in their “ Comprehension, production, and ‘The comprehension and production processes develop in a parallel mode with production always trying to keep up with comprehension. As the child acquires an aspect of language in comprehension, the child can then try to figure out how to use it in production. The child attempts to co-ordinate production with respect to the system that has been developed for understanding”.

4. Psycholinguistics • Huttenlocher (1974) normal children as well as for mute hearing children, speech comprehension is the basis for speech production in the mind. • Since the ability to comprehend speech implies the existence of thought, it therefore must be concluded that speech production is not necessary for thought. • They take another example of hearing impaired children who have hearing loss of over 90 decibels and are unable to receive speech, and whose parents (usually hearing) do not know sign language.

5. Psycholinguistics • Hearing impaired children behave as intelligently and rationally as other children with normal hearing when they play. • If one thinks that language is the basis of thought, how do these children act intelligently and rationally like other children? • Steinberg and Sciarini (2006) have never even noted that hearing impaired children devoid of total speech behave differently in comparison with those who do have language and grammar.

6. Psycholinguistics • It has also not been observed that hearing impaired children who acquire language late undergo radical change of perception. • Furth (1996) provides research data that shows no difference in intelligence between normal and hearing impaired persons, even though the language knowledge of the hearing impaired is far below than that of people with normal hearing. • The case of Helen Keller, whose language knowledge was minimal until she was 7 years old, is also relevant to this issue.

7. Psycholinguistics • Keller records in her book, “The Story of My Life (1903),” many memories of the period in which she was without language. • For example, she became angry and threw the doll at her pre-language stage when her teacher wanted to teach her the words ‘doll’ and ‘mug’. • A more recent example is of a 27-year-old hearing impaired man (Schaler, 1991) who demonstrated that he understood objects, situations, and events even though he had no language for them.

8. Psycholinguistics • When he later acquired sign language, he was able to describe experiences of his life that had occurred before the acquisition of sign language. • The man was a thinking human being even before he had acquired language. • Such a fact cannot be explained by the theory that thought comes to existence through language. • If thought comes to existence through language, then different languages may form different thoughts.

9. Psycholinguistics • If a person who is proficient in two or more languages, he might have different concepts or opposing concepts derived from the different languages. • Thus, we come to the conclusion that of course language and thought are inter-related, but we cannot ignore the fact that thoughts are generated in mind and language is simply a means to communicate them.

10. Psycholinguistics • Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire , use , comprehend and produce language. • Modern research makes use of biology,neurosciences,cognitive science,linguistics,and information n theory to study how the brain processes language.

11. Psycholinguistics • Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances , words, text , etc. • Developmental psycholinguistics studies children’s ability to learn language.

12. PsycholinguisticsAreas of Study • Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field. Hence,it is studied by researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, such as psychology, cognitive sciences ,linguistics ,and speech and language pathology. • Psycholinguists study many different topics, but these topics can generally be divided into answering the following questions: • How do children acquire language(language acquisition)? • How do people process and comprehend language (language comprehension)? • how do people produce language (language production)? • How do adults acquire a new language (second language acquisition)?

13. PsycholinguisticsLinguistics-related areas • Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics , research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these sounds. • Morphology is the study of word structure, especially the relationship between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation).

14. Psycholinguistics • Syntax is the study of patterns which dictate how words are combined to form sentences. • Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. • Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of sentences. • Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.

15. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Acquisition • There are essentially two schools of thought as to how children acquire or learn language , and there is still much debate as to which theory is the correct one. • The first theory states that all language must be learned by the child. • The second view states that the abstract system of language can not be learned, but the human processes an innate language faculty, or an access to what has been called universal grammar.

16. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Acquisition • The view that language must be learned was especially popular before 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. • Likewise, the school of psychology known as behaviorism by B.F. Skinner puts forth the point of view that language is a behavior shaped by conditioned response hence it is learned.

17. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Acquisition • The innatist perspective began with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner’s book in 1959.This review helped to start what has been turned ‘’T he cognitive revolution "in Psychology. • Chomsky posited humans possess a special, innate ability for language and that complex syntactics features, such as recursion, are “hard wired” in the brain.

18. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Acquisition • These abilities are thought to be beyond the grasp of the most intelligent and social non-human. • According to Chomsky,childern acquiring a language have vast search space to explore among all possible human grammars, yet at the time there was no evidence that children receive sufficient in put to learn all the rules of their language.

19. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Acquisition • Hence, there must be some other innate mechanism that endows a language ability to humans. • Such a language faculty is, according to the innatists theory, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication..

20. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Acquisition • The field of linguistics and psycholinguistics since then has been defined by the reaction to Chomsky, pro and con. • The Pro view still holds that the human ability to use language (specially the ability to use recursion) is qualitatively different from any sort of animal ability. • This ability may have resulted from a favorable mutation or from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes.

21. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Acquisition • The view that language can be learned has had a recent resurgence inspired by emergentism. • This view challenges the “innate” view as scientifically unfalsifiable; that is to say , it can be tested . • With the amount of computer power increasing since the 1980’s , researchers have been able to assimilate language acquisition using neural network models.

22. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Acquisition • These models provide evidence that there may, in fact , be sufficient information contained in the input to learn language , even syntax. • If this is true , then the innate mechanism is no longer necessary to explain language acquisition.

23. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Comprehension • One question in the realm of language comprehension is how people understand sentences as they read (also known as sentence processing). • Experimental research has spawned a number of theories about the architecture and mechanism of sentence comprehension.

24. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Comprehension • Typically these theories are concerned with what types in formation contained in the sentence the reader can use to build meaning, and at what point in reading does that information become available to the reader. • Issues such as”moduler “versus, "interactive” processing have been theoretical divides in the field.

25. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Comprehension • A modular view of sentence processing assumes that the stages involved in reading a sentence function independently in separate modules. • These modulates have limited interaction with one another. for example, one influential theory of sentence proccesing,the garden path theroy,states that syntactic analysis takes place first.Unde r this theory as the reader is reading a sentence, he or she creates the simplest structure possible in order to minimize effort and cognitive load. This is done without any input from semantic analysis or context dependent information.

26. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Comprehension • Hence , in the sentence “the evidence examined by lawyer turned out to be unreliable,” by the time the reader gets to the word “examined” he or she has committed to a reading of the sentence in which the evidence is examining something because it is the simplest parse . • This commitment is made despite the fact that it results in an implausible situation; we know that experience that evidence can rarely if ever examined something.

27. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Comprehension • Under this “syntax first” theory semantic information is processed at a large stage. • It is only later that the reader will recognize that he or she needs to revise the initial parse into one in which “the evidence” is being examined. • In this example, readers typically recognize their misparse by the time they reach “by the lawyer” and must go back and re-parse the sentence. • This analysis is costly and contributes to slow reading times.

28. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Comprehension • In contrast to a modular account, an interactive theory of sentence processing, such as the constraint-based lexical approach assumes that all available information contained within a sentence can be processed at any time. • Under an interactive account e.g. , the semantics of sentence (such as plausibility) can come into play early on in order to help determine the structure of a sentence.

29. PsycholinguisticsLanguage Comprehension • Hence, in the sentence above, the reader would be able to make use of plausibility information in order to assume that “the evidence” is being examined instead of doing the examining. • There are data to support both modular and interactive accounts, which account is the correct one is still up for debate.