Good morning everybody..nice too meet you in my simple blog..
Today I want continue my article before..other time, we have discuss about my research proposal and now I want try share a little my assignment in my college.. we will talk about..psycholinguistic.. so if you interested read it..i said thank you guys..
PSYCHOLINGUISTIC
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiologicalfactors 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, neurolinguisticshas become a field in its own right.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies children's ability to learn language.
Areas of study
Psycholinguistics 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)?
Subdivisions in psycholinguistics are also made based on the different components that make up human language.
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.
A researcher interested in language comprehension may study wordrecognition during reading to examine the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semanticinformation from patterns in printed text. A researcher interested in language production might study how words are prepared to be spoken starting from the conceptual or semantic level. Developmental psycholinguistics study infants' and children's ability to learn and process language.
Theories
In this section, some influential theories are discussed for each of the fundamental questions listed in the section above.
Language acquisition
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 language faculty, or an access to what has been called universal grammar. 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 school of psychology known as behaviorism (see Verbal Behavior(1957) by B.F. Skinner) puts forth the point of view that language is a behavior shaped by conditioned response, hence it is learned.
The innatist perspective began with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959.[1] 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, such as recursion, are "hard-wired" in the brain. These abilities are thought to be beyond the grasp of the most intelligent and social non-humans. 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 (see poverty of the stimulus). Hence, there must be some other innate mechanism that endows a language ability to humans. 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.
The field of linguistics and psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro and con. The pro view still holds that the human ability to use language (specifically the ability to use recursion) is qualitatively different from any sort of animal ability.[2] This ability may have resulted from a favorable mutation or from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes. 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 can't be tested. With the amount of computer power increasing since the 1980’s, researchers have been able to simulate language acquisition using neural network models.[3] These models provide evidence that there may, in fact, be sufficient information contained in the input to learn language, even syntax. If this is true, then an innate mechanism is no longer necessary to explain language acquisition.
Language comprehension
One question in the realm of language comprehension is how people understand sentences as they read (also known as sentence processing). Experimental research has spawned a number of theories about the architecture and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. Typically these theories are concerned with what types of information contained in the sentence the reader can use to build meaning, and at what point in reading does that information become 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 in separate modules. These modulates have limited interaction with one another. For example, one influential theory of sentence processing, the garden-path theory[4], 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 in order to minimize effort and cognitive load. 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 parse. This commitment is made despite the fact that it results in an implausible situation; we know that experience that evidence can rarely if ever 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 her or she needs to revise the initial parse into one in which "the evidence" is being examined. In this example, readers typically recognize their misparse by the time they reach "by the lawyer" and must go back and re-parse the sentence.[5] This reanalysis is costly and contributes to slower reading times.
In contrast to a modular account, an interactive theory of sentence processing, such as a constraint-based lexical approach[6] assumes that all available information contained within a sentence can be processed at any time. Under an interactive account, for example, the semantics of a sentence (such as plausibility) can come into play early on in order to help determine the structure of a sentence. Hence, in the sentence above, the reader would be able to make use of plausibility information in order to assume that "the evidence" is being examined instead of doing the examining. There are data to support both modular and interactive accounts; which account is the correct one is still up for debate.
Methodologies
Many of the experiments conducted in psycholinguistics, especially earlier on, are behavioral in nature. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with linguistic stimuli and asked to perform an action. For example, they may be asked to make a judgment about a word (lexical decision), reproduce the stimulus, or name 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.[7]
As an example of how behavioral methods can be used in psycholinguistics research, Fischler (1977) investigated word encoding using the lexical decision task. She 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 nonwords 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 when compared to unrelated word pairs. This facilitation suggests that semantic relatedness can facilitate word encoding.[8]
Issues and areas of research
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the computations and processes that the brain undergoes to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input.[7][13]
Recent research using new non-invasiveimaging techniques seeks to shed light on just where certain language processes occur in the brain.
There are a number of unanswered questions in psycholinguistics, such as whether the human ability to use syntax is based on innate mental structures or emerges from interaction with other humans, and whether some animals can be taught the syntax of human language.
Two other major subfields of psycholinguistics investigate first language acquisition, the process by which infants acquire language, and second language acquisition. In addition, it is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languagesthan it is for infants to learn their first language (bilingual infants are able to learn both of their native languages easily). Thus, sensitive periodsmay exist during which language can be learned readily.[14] A great deal of research in psycholinguistics focuses on how this ability develops and diminishes over time. It also seems to be the case that the more languages one knows, the easier it is to learn more.[15]
The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of brain damage. Studies in aphasiology can both offer advances in therapy for individuals suffering from aphasia, and further insight into how the brain processes language.
In general, psycholinguistic studies have revealed that many of the concepts employed in the analysis of sound structure, word structure, and sentence structure also play a role in language processing. However, an account of language processing also requires that we understand how these linguistic concepts interact with other aspects of human processing to enable language production and comprehension."
(William O'Grady, et al., Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Bedford/St. Martin's, 2001)
Psycholinguistics . . . draws on ideas and knowledge from a number of associated areas, such as phonetics, semantics and pure linguistics. There is a constant exchange of information between psycholinguists and those working in neurolinguistics, who study how language is represented in the brain. There are also close links with studies in artificial intelligence. Indeed, much of the early interest in language processing derived from the AI goals of designing computer programs that can turn speech into writing and programs that can recognize the human voice."
(John Field, Psycholinguistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2003)
(John Field, Psycholinguistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2003)
Psycholinguistics is a branch of study which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. It is concerned with the relationship between the human mind and the language as it examines the processes that occur in brain while producing and perceiving both written and spoken discourse. What is more, it is interested in the ways of storing lexical items and syntactic rules in mind, as well as the processes of memory involved in perception and interpretation of texts. Also, the processes of speaking and listening are analyzed, along with language acquisition and language disorders.
Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s as a result of Chomskyan revolution. The ideas presented by Chomsky became so important that they quickly gained a lot of publicity and had a big impact on a large number of contemporary views on language. Consequently also psycholinguists started investigating such matters as the processing of deep and surface structure of sentences. In the early years of development of psycholinguistics special experiments were designed in order to examine if the focus of processing is the deep syntactic structure. On the basis of transformation of sentences it was initially discovered that the ease of processing was connected with syntactic complexity. However, later on it became clear that not only syntactic complexity adds to the difficulty of processing, but also semantic factors have a strong influence on it.
All the same, certain principles of sentence processing that were formulated at that time are still valid. One of them, namely the principle of minimal attachmentmeans that when processing a sentence which could have multiple meanings people most frequently tend to choose the simplest meaning, or the meaning that in syntactic analysis would present the simplest parse tree with fewest nodes. Thus, a sentence ‘Mary watched the man with the binoculars’ by most language users would be interpreted that it was Mary, and not the man, who was using binoculars. One other principle worth noting is the principle of late closurewhich states that there is a tendency to join the new information to the current phrase, or clause, which explains why in a sentence such as ‘John said he will leave this morning’ the phrase ‘this morning’ would be understood as relating to the verb ‘leave’ and not to ‘said’.
Other psycholinguistic investigations into how processing of texts occurs led to conclusions that complex sentences with multiple clauses are interpreted faster and with less mental effort when the clauses are not reduced. When it comes to speech the experiments show that the interpretation of sentences can vary depending on the placing of pauses, or disfluencies. Additionally, is has been proven that visual contact between speakers also has a strong influence on the ease, or difficulty of processing texts. During experiments subjects were listening to some sentences and those who saw the speaker could understand what the speech was about better, while those who did not see him often had difficulties with it.
The recent tendencies in psycholinguistics show increasing interest in discourse processing, and in particular in the ways readers create a mental representation of the narrative world. The focus of interest is on the role of readers’ schemata and the problem of inferences about the read subject matter. It has been proved that certain inferences are made in the very process of reading, while others are made later in order to resolve some problems or inconsistencies. The issues of background knowledge and automaticity of drawing inferences are still being investigated.
References
1. ^ Chomsky, N; Skinner, B. F. (1959). "A Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior". Language(Linguistic Society of America) 35 (1): 26–58. doi:10.2307/411334. ISSN 0097-8507. JSTOR 411334.
2. ^ Hauser M.D., Chomsky N., Fitch W. (2002). Science 298 (5598): 1569–79. doi:10.1126/science.298.5598.1569. PMID 12446899.
3. ^ Elman, Jeffrey; Bates Elizabeth, Johnson Mark, Karmiloff-Smith Annette, Parisi Domenico, Plunkett Kim (1998). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. The MIT Press.
4. ^ Frazier L., Rayner, K. (1982). "Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences". Cognitive psychology 14 (2): 178–210.
5. ^ Rayner K., Carlson M., Frazier L. (1983). "The interaction of syntax and semantics during sentence processing: Eye movements in the analysis of semantically biased sentences". Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior 22(3): 358–374.
6. ^ Trueswell J., Tanenhaus M. (1994). "Toward a lexical framework of constraint-based syntactic ambiguity resolution". Perspectives on sentence processing: 155–179.
7. ^ a b Packard, Jerome L(2000). "Chinese words and the lexicon." The Morphology of Chinese: A Linguistic and Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 284-309.
8. ^ {Fischler I. (1977). "Semantic facilitation without association in a lexical decision task". Memory & Cognition5 (3): 335-339.
9. ^ Rayner K. (1978). "Eye movements in reading and information processing". Psychological Bulletin 85(3): 618–660. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.85.3.618. PMID 353867.
10. ^ Tanenhaus M. K., Spivey-Knowlton M. J., Eberhard K. M., Sedivy J. E. (1995). "Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension". Science 268(5217): 1632–1634. doi:10.1126/science.7777863. PMID 7777863.
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