What Is Psycholinguistics?
According to Wikipedia, Psycholinguistics or psychology
of language can be defined as “the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors
that enable humans to
acquire, use, comprehend and produce language.
Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due
mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern
research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics and information theory to study how the brain
processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines with non-invasive
techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain; for example, neurolinguistics has
become a field in its own right.”
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| Source: americantesol.com |
What can we understand from this course is that Psycholinguistics is a branch of study which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. It's concern with the relationship between human mind and the language, as it examines the processes that occur in brain while producing and perceiving both written and spoken discourse.
Psycholinguistics areas of study;
1) Phonetics and Phonology
- Study of speech sounds.
- Research focuses on how the brain processes and understand these sounds.
2) Morphology
- Study of words structures, and the formation of words based on rules.
3) Syntax
- Study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined together to form sentences.
4) Semantics
- deals with the meaning of words and sentences.
5) Pragmatics
- concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.
6) The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the extraction oforthographic, morphological, phonological and semantics information from patterns in printed text.
Source: http://cogling.wikia.com/wiki/Psycholinguistics
1) Phonetics and Phonology
- Study of speech sounds.
- Research focuses on how the brain processes and understand these sounds.
2) Morphology
- Study of words structures, and the formation of words based on rules.
3) Syntax
- Study of the patterns which dictate how words are combined together to form sentences.
4) Semantics
- deals with the meaning of words and sentences.
5) Pragmatics
- concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning.
6) The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the extraction oforthographic, morphological, phonological and semantics information from patterns in printed text.
Source: http://cogling.wikia.com/wiki/Psycholinguistics
There are three primary processes investigated in Psycholinguistics which are language comprehension, language production and language acquisition that we will be explaining in details in the next section.
Language Comprehension
Understanding what other people say and write (i.e., language comprehension) is more complicated than it might at first appear. Comprehending language involves a variety of capacities, skills, processes, knowledge, and dispositions that are used to derive meaning from spoken, written, and signed language. Comprehension is mainly thought to occur in the Wernicke’s area of the brain which is located in the left temporal lobe. Language comprehension is a complex process that occurs easily and effortlessly by humans. It develops along with the brain and is able to be enhanced with the use of gesture. Though it is unknown exactly how early comprehension is fully developed in children, gestures are undoubtedly useful for understanding the language around us.
Language Production
Language production is the production of spoken or written language. It describes all of the stages between having a concept, and translating that concept into linguistic form. The basic loop occurring in the creation of language consists of the following stages:
1) Intended message
2) Encode message into linguistic form
3) Encode linguistic form into speech [motor system]
4) Sound goes from speaker's mouth to hearer's ear [auditory system]
5) Speech is decoded into linguistic form
6)Linguistic form is decoded into meaning
Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language, as well as to produce and use words and sentences to communicate. Language acquisition usually refers to first-language acquisition, which studies infants' acquisition of their native language. This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of additional languages. Language acquisition is just one strand of psycholinguistics which is all about how people learn to speak and the mental processes involved.
Recommended book:
An Introduction to Psycholinguistics: Second Edition
by Danny D.Steinberg and Natalia V.Sciarini
*This is the texbook that we used during our Psycholinguistics class with Dr. ismail. We found that this texbook had helped us a lot to get better understanding on this subject :)
Recommended book:
An Introduction to Psycholinguistics: Second Edition
by Danny D.Steinberg and Natalia V.Sciarini
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| Source: www.uni-due.de |
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| Source: www.education.com |
We also provide links to some of the exercises related to this subject.
http://quiz.thefullwiki.org/Psycholinguistics
http://www.linguisticsnet.com/index.php?option=com_joomlaquiz&view=category&Itemid=338
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| source: www.nature.com |
