English Department FKIP UNRI

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

English Department FKIP UNRI

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PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

What is Psycholinguistics?Based on the words formation, psycholinguistics

has two words; psycho and linguistics. From this, can we assume that this discipline has something to do with Psychology?

Indeed, the word Psycholinguistics is sometimes changeable with Psychology of language.

Before defining what is psycholinguistics, let’s take a look at (again) the chart of relationship of linguistics and its interdiciplinary subjects.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Linguistics-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 structures, especially the relationships 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 the 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.

LANGUAGE UNITSLANGUAGE UNITS

PHONEMEPHONEME

MORPHEMEMORPHEME

SENTENCESENTENCE

TEXT/ DISCOURSE

TEXT/ DISCOURSE

PHONOLOGYPHONOLOGY

SYNTAXSYNTAX

MORPHOLOGYMORPHOLOGY

PRAGMATICSPRAGMATICS

LANGUAGE

SCIENCE

LANGUAGE

SCIENCE

INTERDICIPLINARY VIEW

INTERDICIPLINARY VIEW

LINGUISTICSLINGUISTICS

SEMANTICSSEMANTICS

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSPSYCHOLINGUISTICS

SOCIOLINGUISTICSSOCIOLINGUISTICS

FORM/ LOGICAL MEANING

FORM/ LOGICAL MEANING

FORMFORM

INTERPRETIVE MEANING/ FUNCTION

INTERPRETIVE MEANING/ FUNCTION

FORM, MEANING, FUNCTION

FORM, MEANING, FUNCTION

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language.

An important focus of psycholinguistics is the largely unconscious application of grammatical rules that enable people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences.

Psycholinguists investigate the relationship between language and thought. However, most problems in psycholinguistics are more concrete, involving the study of linguistic performance and language acquisition,especially in children.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

The work of Noam Chomsky and other proponents of transformational grammar have had a marked influence on the field. Neurolinguists study the brain activity involved in language use, obtaining much of their data from people whose ability to use language has been impaired due to brain damage.

Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Areas of studyPsycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field. Hence, it

is studied by researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, such as psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and speech and language pathology.

Psycholinguists study many different topics, but these topics can generally be divided into answering the following questions: (1) how do children acquire language (language

acquisition)?;(2) how do people process and comprehend language

(language comprehension)?; (3) how do people produce language (language

production)?; and (4) how do adults acquire a new language (second language

acquisition)?

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Language Acquisition


PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

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 cannot be learned, but that humans possess an innate (present from birth) language faculty, or an access to what has been called universal grammar.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSThe 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 (1957) by B.F. Skinner puts forth the point of view that language is a behavior shaped by conditioned response, hence it is learned

(more about Mentalism & Behaviourism Chap 10/group 10)

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSThe innatist perspective began with Noam

Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959. This review helped to start what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology. Chomsky posited humans possess a special, innate ability for language and that complex syntactic features.

According to Chomsky, children acquiring a language have a vast search space to explore among all possible human grammars, yet at the time there was no evidence that children receive sufficient input to learn all the rules of their language

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSThe innatist perspective began with Noam

Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959. This review helped to start what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology. Chomsky posited humans possess a special, innate ability for language and that complex syntactic features.

According to Chomsky, children acquiring a language have a vast search space to explore among all possible human grammars.

Such a language faculty is, according to the innatist theory, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication. (more in ch. 7 & 10)

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSHow do children learn to speek? One of the sub-field of psychology of language;

Developmental psycholinguistics examines how speech emerges over time and how children go about constructing the complex structures of their mother tongue.

We assume that a baby has no language but a cry. Is that a true?

The crying of a baby conveys some significant linguistic communication. Even Plato observed that the crying means whether it is comfort or discomfort.

Crying, at least in the first few months, is a kind of language without speech, because the child communicates different types of discomfort without using normal speech sound.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSCrying for an infant initially is completely

iconic or there is a direct and transparent link between the physical sound and its communicative intend. For example the hungrier a baby becomes, the louder and longer the crying.

The first month or two of the child’s development, crying become more differentiated and more symbolic. It means it is not merely related to discomfort; rather the cries are indirectly, and almost randomly assosiated with its needs.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSAfter several weeks of extensive interaction

with its caretaker (e.g. parents, brothers/sisters, etc) the child stars to coo, starting about two month age, is making soft gurgling sounds, seemingly to express satisfaction. Crying and cooing affect, and are affected by caretaker behavior.

About six months old, a child is at a babbling stage. Babbling refers to the natural tendency of children of this age to burst out in a strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters almost as a kind of vocalic play.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSSome psycholinguists distinguish between

Marginal babbling and cononical babbling.Marginal babbling refers to an early stage

similar to cooing where infants produce a few, and somewhat random, consonants

Cononical babbling, usually begins around eight months when the child’s vocalizations narrow down to syllables that start to more or less similar to the syllables of the caretaker’s language.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSEgocentric speech

After crying, cooing, and bubbling the child learn to the firsth word. This stage of vocabulary development is called egocentric speech. In this stage, children want to talk about what surrounds them; at life begins, they are the center of the universe.

HolophrasticThe stage in whice the child has already invented

and used single word sentences. Most psycholinguists believed that intonational, gestural, and contextual clues which accompany holophrases as adult.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSWatch these video and determine in what

stage or phase of language developmet the baby or the child?

A B C

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Language Production


PSYCHOLINGUISTICSThe production of speech is neurologically

and psychologically more complicated.

The psycholinguists tend to devide linguistics phenomena into stages. There are four successive stages of speech production views as a liniear progression. They are (1) Conceptualization, (2) formulation, (3) articulation, and (4) self-monitoring.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSConceptualizationIt is difficult to answer a question Where does the

very beginning of any spoken utterence come from? Beside the lack of knowledge about how language is

produced, it is also because it deals with mental abstraction (‘concept’) that it avoids empirical investigation.

However, an American psycholinguist David McNeil’s investigation on an interesting mentalistic account of how speech is first conceptualized in human mind.

Based on his theory primitive linguistic concepts are formed as two concurrent and parallel modes of thought. They are Syntactic thinking and Imagistic thinking.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSSyntactic thinking, generates the sequence

of words which we typically think of when we talk. It is segmented and linear, and creates the strings of syllables, words, phrases, and sentences that together make up speech.

Imagistic thinking, creates a more holistics and visual mode of communication. It is global and tends to develop the gestures which we naturally use to puntuate and illustrate our conversataions.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSFormulationFormulation is the process of arranging what we

want to say after we have concept in the mind.The identification of formulation process can be

seen from slips of tongue like the mistake or ‘spoonerisms (named after William Spooner) that someone have in saying or writing something.

The slips of tongue or typhographical mistakes are normal in everyday occurrences in our speaking and writing.

Spoonerisms are slips of tongue in which an actual word or phrase is created, often with a humourous twist to the meaning which was intended.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSThe phenomena of slips of tongue like

mistake and probably hesitations (e.g. uh, er, ) indicates that human brain (or mind) have tried to formulate the concept of language before producing it and by the occurrence of these we can notify that sometimes the formulation is not formulated well.

__________________________________Mistake vs error ???

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSArticulationThe articulation stage is similar to what happens

when all of information selected by word processing program go from computer to printer.

The articulation of speech sound is a vital third stage of production. The speech sound are produced in a linear, sequential fashion.

However, the speech organ like lungs, larynx, and lips may be working all at the same time that is, in the production of any single sound, a lot of anatomical effort is devoted to performing several different movements simultaneously.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSSelf-monitoringThis step is the evaluation steps of producing language

in which the speakers sometimes, in such a way, evaluate the result of the language they produce.

The self-evaluation of the language is often occur in the occurrence of slips of tongue. Almost always, however, the speakers instantly catch themselves retreat or back away a step, and make correction.1. The last I knowed about it (I mean knew about it), he had left the town.

2. She was so drank ( I mean drunk), that we decided to drive her home

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

The fact that native speakers can monitor and quickly correct any mistakes (not error for non native speaker) in linguistics output proves Chomsky’s concept of Performance and Competence.

Performance refers to the words we say or write as the manifestation of our ability in a language.

Competence describes our implicit, intuitive knowledge about the language or languages we have mastered.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Comprehension


PSYCHOLINGUISTICSWhat is Comprehesion?Simply as understanding of what we hear and

read. It is the recognition of a sequential string of linguistic symbols, although at a very rapid speed.

The range or level of comprehension is based on:The comprehension of soundsThe comprehension of wordsThe comprehension of sentence The comprehension of the text

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSThe nature of Comprehention:

Comprehention is not a the passive recording of whatever is heard or seen.

Comprehension is strongly influenced by even the slightest of changes in discourse.

Comprehension is not a simple item by item analysis of word in a linear.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Overview of detail topics


PSYCHOLINGUISTICSHow Children Learn Language ( chapter 1: group 1)

This chapter investigate in details how human learn language from the infant stage, such as the development of speech, comprehension, production and thought.

The Deaf and Langauge: Sign, Oral, Written(Chap 2 : group 2)

This part will explain the way of communication for the deaf by using sign language or language without speech.

Wild and isolated children and the critical age issue for language learning. (Chap. 4: group 4): This chapter investigates some cases of children that can’t speak human language due to lack of encounter to the society or because of abuse by the family.

PSYCHOLINGUISTICSAnimals and Language Learning (Chapter 5:

group 5)This part tells about how scientist wonders whether language is for human only or can be learned by animal. Some animals that considered to be the most high intelligent or nearly close to human’s intelligence were trained to speak human language or at least could have two-way-communication with human.

And many more topics that the groups should discuss and explain.

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English Department FKIP UNRI