Psycholinguistics: Competence, Performance and Acquisition

1. Psycholinguistics: Competence, Performance and Acquisition • Noam Chomsky proposes three models to reflect what a fluent speaker of a language uses in producing language: 1.    Linguistic competence: what a speaker knows about his language • 2.    Performance model: the actual processes of producing the language

2. 3. Acquisition model (device): reflects the changes in linguistic competence and performance during a child's growth.

3. 10.2 Speech Production • Conceiving a message: • Cognitive background • The speaker has a variety of beliefs and desires concerning such factors as:

4. a.the nature and direction of the talk-exchange • b.the social and physical context of the utterance • c.the hearer's beliefs in general, beliefs pertinent to the speaker's impending remark in particular and whatever contextual beliefs the hearer shares with the speaker

5. Next, the speaker must formulate the beginnings of the message to be communicated, as well as the manner in which it is to be communicated. We call this the speaker's pragmatic intentions:

6. a.referring to the something (referential intent) • b.performing some communicative act(s) (communicative intent) • c.performing these acts literally, non-literally, directly or indirectly • d.having various effects on the hearer (perlocutionary intent).

7. How does a speaker put these intentions together into words and meaningful talk-exchange? • The message model suggests that we put messages together word by word. However, the presence of speech errors, seems to defy that notion, suggesting instead that we employ more complex encoding mechanisms.

8. Speech errors are interesting (linguistically and socially) since they happened relatively rarely (about 1/1000 words).

9. The most famous speech error maker of all time was the Reverend William A. Spooner, who lent his name (spoonerisms) to such classics as these: • "Work is the curse of the drinking class" • "Noble tons of soil" • "You have hissed all my mystery lectures. I saw you fight a liar in the back quad; in fact you have tasted the whole worm."

10.  -and one not from Spooner: "The French eat with their hamburgers with a fike and norf."

11.  At first glance, these errors may merely seem random, but careful studies have shown that certain types of errors predominate: • a: Exchange errors • hissed all my mystery lectures • b: Anticipation errors • a leading list (a reading list) • c: Perseveration errors • phonological fool (phonological rule)

12.  d: Blends • moinly (mainly, mainly) impostinator (imposter, impersonator) • e: Shifts • Mermaid moves (mermaids move) • f: Substitutions: sympathy for symphony sometimes called a Freudian Slip) • g: Phonetic features (voicing) • glear plue sky (clear blue sky)

13.  h: Stress • Stop beating your BRICK against a head wall. • i: Syntactic features • (indefinite) a meeting marathon (an eating marathon. • (past tense) Rosa always date shranks (dated shrinks).

14.  j. Stem and affix • He favors pushing busters (busting pushers). • k. Negation • I disregard this as precise (I regard this as imprecises)

15. These categories of errors suggest that speech is encoded in linguistic units, not in words or sounds. • Speech errors can be summarized in the following way: • 1.Word exchange errors are predominately between phrases, and in fact, between words of the same syntactic category (noun, verb, etc.)

16. 2.Sound exchange errors are predominately within phrases and do not respect syntactic categories. • 3.Morpheme errors are of both types. If they can occur between phrases, then the morphemes are from words of the same category occur within phrases, then the morphemes are rarely from words of the same category.

17. 4.Exchange errors for words, morphemes and sounds are restricted mainly to major (open, content) categories, such as noun, verb, adjective. • 5.Shift errors are restricted mainly to minor (closed function) categories. • 6.Substitution errors can be either form related or meaning related.