Psycholinguistics

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Psycholinguistics 11/09/2013 Psycholinguistics What do these activities have in common? What kind of process is involved in producing and understanding language? 1 11/09/2013 Questions • What is psycholinguistics? • What are the main topics of psycholinguistics? 9.1 Introduction • * Psycholinguistics is the study of the language processing mechanisms. Psycholinguistics deals with the mental processes a person uses in producing and understanding language. It is concerned with the relationship between language and the human mind, for example, how word, sentence, and discourse meaning are represented and computed in the mind. 2 11/09/2013 9.1 Introduction * As the name suggests, it is a subject which links psychology and linguistics. • Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. It is an area of study which draws insights from linguistics and psychology and focuses upon the comprehension and production of language. • The scope of psycholinguistics • The common aim of psycholinguists is to find out the structures and processes which underline a human’s ability to speak and understand language. • Psycholinguists are not necessarily interested in language interaction between people. They are trying above all to probe into what is happening within the individual. 3 11/09/2013 The scope of psycholinguistics • At its heart, psycholinguistic work consists of two questions. – What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language? – What processes are involved in the use of language? The “knowledge” question • Four broad areas of language knowledge: Semantics deals with the meanings of sentences and words. Syntax involves the grammatical arrangement of words within the sentence. Phonology concerns the system of sounds in a language. Pragmatics entails the social rules involved in language use. • It is not ordinarily productive to ask people explicitly what they know about these aspects of language. We infer linguistic knowledge from observable behavior. 4 11/09/2013 The “process” question •What cognitive processes are involved in the ordinary use of language? – “ordinary use of language”: e.g. understanding a lecture, reading a book, writing a letter, and holding a conversation, etc. – “cognitive processes”: processes like perception, memory and thinking. • Although we do few things as often or as easily as speaking and listening, we will find that considerable cognitive processing is going on during those activities. Two possible directions of study in psycholinguistics • Language as a way of explaining psycholinguistic theories and processes: language influences memory, perception, attention and learning. • The effects of psychological constraints on the use of language: how memory limitations affect language production and comprehension. 5 11/09/2013 • WhatQuestion are the main2 topics of psycholinguistics? Topics to be covered include… • General issues of psycholinguistics: • language acquisition (how human beings learn language) • language production (how we create and express meaning through language) • language comprehension (how we perceive and understand speech and written language) • The relationship between language and thought 6 11/09/2013 9.2 Language Acquisition • Psycholinguistics is interested in the acquisition of language: how children acquire their mother tongue. • The study of the acquisition of language by children is often called developmental psycholinguistics. 9.2 Language Acquisition • Many linguists feel that if we can understand the internal mechanism which enables children to learn language so quickly we shall have penetrated one of the deepest secrets of the mind. • The psycholinguist Steven Pinker makes a strong case for considering the elements of linguistic knowledge to be innate. This is consistent with the Chomskyan concept of universal grammar: the idea that there is a common underlying structure to every language, the knowledge of which we are born with. 7 11/09/2013 • Language acquisition refers to the learning and development of a person’s language. The learning of a native or first language is called first language acquisition, and the learning of a second or foreign language is called second language acquisition. Two basic notions in first language acquisition • Overgeneralization/Overextension (the extension of a rule beyond its proper limits) • Undergeneralization/Underextension (a child uses a word in a more limited way than adults do ) 8 11/09/2013 Examples of overgeneralization It is shown by psycholinguistics that children’s use of language is rule-governed. For example, children frequently say tooths and mouses, instead of teeth and mice, and holded, goed, runned and finded, instead of held, went, ran and found. Can you find more examples of overgeneralizations in your English acquisition? Examples of overgeneralization Overgeneralization is a frequent phenomenon in language development. It can be found not only in syntactic usage but also in word meanings. moons: all round objects cars: all vehicles dogs: all four-legged animals 9 11/09/2013 Examples of overgeneralization • Most psycholinguists believe that the intonational, gestural, and contextual clues make it clear that children are using single-word sentences, exactly as adults often do in a conversation. • Milk(Do you have any milk?/ I’d like some milk.) Undergeneralization • Children also undergeneralize. When a child uses a word in a more limited way than adults do (e.g. refusing to call a taxi a car), this phenomenon is called undergeneralization or underextension. • Shoes only refers to his mother’s shoes. • Hat only refers to his own hat. 10 11/09/2013 Reasons for overgeneralization and undergeneralization • On some occasions, children’s conceptual categories may actually differ from those adults. • On other occasions, they may know perfectly well that a cow is not a dog but not know what it is called. • On still other occasions, the child’s misuse of words may reflect an attempt at humor. Stages of first language acquisition • The prelinguistic stage • The one-word stage • The two-word stage • The multiword stage 11 11/09/2013 The prelinguistic stage • By the age of six months when they are able to sit up, children are heard producing a number of different vowels and consonants. • At the babbling stage, the sound and syllables that children utter are as yet meaningless. The one-word stage • At some point in the late part of the first year or the early part of the second year. • Children’s one-word utterances are also called holophrastic, because they can be used to express a concept or prediction that would be associated with an entire sentence in adult speech. 12 11/09/2013 The two-word stage • In general, the two-word stage begins roughly in the second half of the child’s second year. • Children’s two-word utterances can express a certain variety of grammatical relations indicated by word order, i.e. “Baby chair”. The multiword stage • Between two and three years old. • When a child starts stringing more than two words together, the utterances may be two, three, four, or five word or longer, e.g. Cathy build house. 13 11/09/2013 1.The9.3 Languagedefinition of productionlanguage production 2. Stages of language production Language production Language production refers to the cognitive processes that convert nonverbal communication intentions into verbal action. Language production involves two simultaneous processes 1) the thought process, which is global and holistic, involving a type of thinking in mentalese that is not yet speech. 2) the speech process, which is serial and linear assemblage of the units of language. (William James 1980) 14 11/09/2013 Language production According to Levelt (1989), language production contains four stages: 1)conceptualizing 2)formulating 3)articulating 4)self-monitoring • First, we must conceptualize what we wish to communicate; • Second, we formulate this thought into a linguistic plan; • Third, we execute the plan through the muscles in the speech system; • Finally, we monitor our speech, accessing whether it is what we intended to say and whether we said it the way we intended to. 15 11/09/2013 Conceptualization • Where do ideas come from? In what form do ideas exist before they are put into words? • These are difficult questions to answer, partly because we still don’t know enough about how language is produced, partly because they deal with mental abstractions so vague that they elude empirical investigation. • As to the second question, psycholinguists generally agree that some form of mentalese exists---a representation system which is different from language. Conceptualizing • Conceptualzing involves conceiving of an intention, selecting the relevant information to be expressed for the realization of this purpose, ordering this information for expression, the sum total of these mental activities will be called conceptualizing. • According to Levelt, conceptualizing is responsible for generating message. 16 11/09/2013 Formulating • Formulation refers to converting the thought (which is conceptualized in the first stage) into linguistic plan, to generating a framework on which to hang the units of speech. • Formulation is the second stage of speech production. • This stage consists of three phases: identifying the meaning selecting a syntactic structure generating an intonation contour. Three1. identifying phases the ofmeaning formulating • This framework begins with the thought you
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