Psycholinguistics

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Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects.

1. language acquisition: how do children acquire language?
2. language comprehension
   : how do people comprehend language?
3. language production: how do people produce language?
4. second language acquisition
   : how do people who already know one language acquire another one?

A researcher interested in language comprehension may study

Psycholinguistics further divide their studies according to the different components that make up human language.

Linguistics-related areas include:

• Phonetics and phonology are the study of speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these sounds.
• Morphology is the study of word structures, especially between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation).
• Syntax is the study of how words are combined to form sentences.
• meaning
  of words and sentences. Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of sentences.
• context
  in the interpretation of meaning.
• Linguistic relativity is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world.

History

In seeking to understand the properties of language acquisition, psycholinguistics has roots in debates regarding innate versus acquired behaviors (both in biology and psychology). For some time, the concept of an innate trait was something that was not recognized in studying the psychology of the individual.

Though there is still much debate, there are two primary theories on childhood language acquisition:

• the behaviorist perspective, whereby all language must be learned by the child; and
• the
  innatist perspective, which believes that the abstract system of language cannot be learned, but that humans possess an innate language faculty or access to what has been called "universal grammar
  ".

The field of linguistics and psycholinguistics has since been defined by pro-and-con reactions to Chomsky. The view in favor of Chomsky still holds that the human ability to use language (specifically the ability to use recursion) is qualitatively different from any sort of animal ability.[10] This ability may have resulted from a favorable mutation or from an adaptation of skills that originally evolved for other purposes.^{[citation needed]}

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 behaviorist school of psychology puts forth the point of view that language is a behavior shaped by conditioned response; hence it is learned. 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 cannot be tested. With the increase in computer technology since the 1980s, researchers have been able to simulate language acquisition using neural network models.^[11]

Language comprehension

The structures and uses of language are related to the formation of ontological insights.^[12] Some see this system as "structured cooperation between language-users" who use conceptual and semantic difference in order to exchange meaning and knowledge, as well as give meaning to language, thereby examining and describing "semantic processes bound by a 'stopping' constraint which are not cases of ordinary deferring." Deferring is normally done for a reason, and a rational person is always disposed to defer if there is good reason.^[13]

The theory of the "semantic differential" supposes universal distinctions, such as:^[14]

• Typicality: that included scales such as "regular–rare", "typical–exclusive";
• Reality: "imaginary–real", "evident–fantastic", "abstract–concrete";
• Complexity: "complex–simple", "unlimited–limited", "mysterious–usual";
• Improvement or Organization: "regular–spasmodic", "constant–changeable", "organized–disorganized", "precise–indefinite";
• Stimulation: "interesting–boring", "trivial–new".

Reading

One question in the realm of language comprehension is how people understand sentences as they read (i.e., sentence processing). Experimental research has spawned several theories about the architecture and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. These theories are typically concerned with the types of information, contained in the sentence, that the reader can use to build meaning, and at what point in reading does that information becomes available to the reader. Issues such as "modular" versus "interactive" processing have been theoretical divides in the field.

A modular view of sentence processing assumes that the stages involved in reading a sentence function independently as separate modules. These modules have limited interaction with one another. For example, one influential theory of sentence processing, the "garden-path theory", states that syntactic analysis takes place first. Under this theory, as the reader is reading a sentence, he or she creates the simplest structure possible, to minimize effort and cognitive load.^[15] This is done without any input from semantic analysis or context-dependent information. Hence, in the sentence "The evidence examined by the 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 parsing. This commitment is made even though it results in an implausible situation: evidence cannot examine something. Under this "syntax first" theory, semantic information is processed at a later stage. It is only later that the reader will recognize that he or she needs to revise the initial parsing into one in which "the evidence" is being examined. In this example, readers typically recognize their mistake by the time they reach "by the lawyer" and must go back and reevaluate the sentence.^[16] This reanalysis is costly and contributes to slower reading times.

In contrast to the modular view, an interactive theory of sentence processing, such as a

When reading, saccades can cause the mind to skip over words because it does not see them as important to the sentence, and the mind completely omits it from the sentence or supplies the wrong word in its stead. This can be seen in "Paris in the the Spring". This is a common psychological test, where the mind will often skip the second "the", especially when there is a line break in between the two.^[18]

Language production

Language production refers to how people produce language, either in written or spoken form, in a way that conveys meanings comprehensible to others. One of the most effective ways to explain the way people represent meanings using rule-governed languages is by observing and analyzing instances of

These speech errors have significant implications for understanding how language is produced, in that they reflect that:[19]

1. Speech is not planned in advance: speech errors such as substitution and exchanges show that one does not plan their entire sentence before they speak. Rather, their language faculty is constantly tapped during the speech production process. This is accounted for by the limitation of working memory. In particular, errors involving exchanges imply that one plans one's sentence ahead but only with regard to its significant ideas (e.g. the words that constitute the core meaning) and only to a certain extent.
2. Lexicon is organized semantically and phonologically: substitution and pronunciation errors show that lexicon is organized not only by its meaning, but also its form.
3. Morphologically complex words are assembled: errors involving blending within a word reflect that there seems to be a rule governing the construction of words in production (and also likely in mental lexicon). In other words, speakers generate the morphologically complex words by merging morphemes rather than retrieving them as chunks.

It is useful to differentiate between three separate phases of language production:^[20]

1. conceptualization: "determining what to say";
2. formulation: "translating the intention to say something into linguistic form";
3. execution: "the detailed articulatory planning and articulation itself".

Psycholinguistic research has largely concerned itself with the study of formulation because the conceptualization phase remains largely elusive and mysterious.^[20]

Methodologies

Behavioral tasks

Many of the experiments conducted in psycholinguistics, especially early on, are behavioral in nature. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with linguistic stimuli and asked to respond. For example, they may be asked to make a judgment about a word (lexical decision), reproduce the stimulus, or say a visually presented word aloud. Reaction times to respond to the stimuli (usually on the order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the most often employed measures of performance in behavioral tasks. Such experiments often take advantage of priming effects, whereby a "priming" word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related "target" word later.^[21]

As an example of how behavioral methods can be used in psycholinguistics research, Fischler (1977) investigated word encoding, using a lexical-decision task.^[22] He asked participants to make decisions about whether two strings of letters were English words. Sometimes the strings would be actual English words requiring a "yes" response, and other times they would be non-words requiring a "no" response. A subset of the licit words were related semantically (e.g., cat–dog) while others were unrelated (e.g., bread–stem). Fischler found that related word pairs were responded to faster, compared to unrelated word pairs, which suggests that semantic relatedness can facilitate word encoding.^[22]

Eye-movements

Recently,

The analysis of systematic errors in speech, as well as the writing and typing of language, can provide evidence of the process that has generated it. Errors of speech, in particular, grant insight into how the mind produces language while a speaker is mid-utterance. Speech errors tend to occur in the lexical, morpheme, and phoneme encoding steps of language production, as seen by the ways errors can manifest themselves.^[25] 

The types of speech errors, with some examples, include:^[25][26][27]

• Substitutions (phoneme and lexical) — replacing a sound with an unrelated sound, or a word with its antonym, saying such as "verbal outfit" instead of "verbal output", or "He rode his bike tomorrow" instead of "...yesterday", respectively;
• Blends — mixing two synonyms and saying "my stummy hurts" in place of either "stomach" or "tummy";
• Exchanges (phoneme [aka spoonerisms] and morpheme) — swapping two onset sounds or two root words, and saying "You hissed my mystery lectures" instead of "You missed my history lectures", or "They're Turking talkish" instead of "They're talking Turkish", respectively;
• Morpheme shifts — moving a function morpheme such as "-ly" or "-ed" to a different word and saying "easy enoughly" instead of "easily enough",
• Perseveration — incorrectly starting a word with a sound that was a part of the previous utterance, such as saying "John gave the goy a ball" instead of "John gave the boy a ball";
• Anticipation — replacing a sound with one that belongs later in the utterance, such as saying "She drank a cot cup of tea" instead of "She drank a hot cup of tea".

Speech errors will usually occur in the stages that involve lexical, morpheme, or phoneme encoding, and usually not in the first step of semantic encoding.^[28] This can be attributed to a speaker still conjuring the idea of what to say; and unless he changes his mind, can not be mistaken for what he wanted to say.

Neuroimaging

Until the recent advent of

The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of brain damage. Studies in aphasiology can offer both advances in therapy for individuals suffering from aphasia and further insight into how the brain processes language.

See also

References

Further reading

A short list of books that deal with psycholinguistics, written in language accessible to the non-expert, includes:

• Belyanin VP [in Russian] (2000). Foundations of Psycholinguistic Diagnostics (Models of the World) (in Russian). Moscow. Archived from the original on 2005-11-11.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
• Chomsky N (2000). New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Harley T (2008). The Psychology of Language: From data to theory (3rd ed.). Hove: Psychology Press. Archived from the original on 2008-09-14.
• Harley T (2009). Talking the talk: Language, psychology and science. Hove: Psychology Press.
• Lakoff G (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: what categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  ISBN 9780226468037
  .
• Piattelli-Palmarini M (1980). Language and learning: the debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
• Pinker S (1994). The Language Instinct. New York: William Morrow.
• Rayner K, Pollatsek A (1989). The Psychology of Reading. New York: Prentice Hall.
  ISBN 9780137330072
  .
• Steinberg DD, Nagata H, Aline DP (2001). Psycholinguistics: Language, Mind and World (2nd ed.). Longman. Archived from the original on 2006-06-26. Retrieved 2005-12-21.
• Aitchison J (1998). The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Routledge.
• Scovel T (1998). Psycholinguistics. Oxford University Press.

External links

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