Introduction to Psycholinguistics.doc

Introduction to Psycholinguistics1.What is psycholinguistics?As the word “psycholinguistics” indicates by itself, psycholinguistics is a joint area of study of psychology and linguistics. Like most areas of study, psycholinguistics, can be defined by the question that it asks and by the mysteries that it is trying to solve. Typically psycholinguists ask three basic questions: (1) how language is acquired during development: The language acquisition is a natural process. It is so natural that we rarely pay any attention to it. However, once we set our thinking upon it, we will find that it is really a miracle for a child to learn his native language so well in such a short period of time. Normally a child can have a surprising mastery of his native language until 5 years old. Comparatively the same result may need a foreign language learners many many years effort. As a result it is very necessary, and also very interesting to study the process of language acquisition.(2) how people comprehend language: When two people are talking with each other, the listener can understand the speakers speech subconsciously. However, there must be a process and (3) how people produce language. The study of language comprehension and production forms one field experimental psycholinguistics, and the study of language acquisition forms a separate field developmental psycholinguistics.As the three questions indicate, psycholinguists are concerned primarily with the mental structures and operations that make communication possible, although many psycholinguists are also interested in the act of communication itself. Those who study mental structure and processes are called cognitive psychologists; psycholinguistics is, therefore, one branch of cognitive science. Experimental Psycholinguistics Developmental PsycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics Neurolinguistics Applied Psycholinguistics Computational Psycholinguistics2.Psycholinguistics as a Inter-disciplinary ScienceCognitive science is the study of intelligence and its computational process. Its main components are shown as the following: Psychometrics Psychology Experimental Psychology Psycholinguistics Linguistics Computational Linguistics Cognitive Computer Science Science Neuro Artificial Intelligence linguis tics Epistemology Philosophy Logic Neuroscience Anthropology Others Decision TheoryFigure 1 Cognitive Science and Its ComponentsPsychology: the study of the mind and mental processes;Psychometrics:measures of intelligence and components of intelligence;Experimental Psychology:Speed and limitations of simple sensory, perceptual, motor and memory processes.Psycholinguistics:psychological study of language; language and thought;Linguistics:science of languageComputational linguistics:use of computers to process language; machine translation;Artificial Intelligence:use of computers to simulate human intelligence;Epistemology:study of theory of the origin, nature, methods and limits of knowledge;Logic:science of correct reasoning; study of abstract intelligence;Neuroscience:study of the brain and the nervous systems, the material foundation of cognition;Neurolinguistics:the relationship between language and brain;Anthropology:study of races, physical and mental characteristics of mankind;Decision Theory:models of rationality forming an important part of a normative theory of intelligence and cognitive science.Psycholinguistics is therefore one of the most exciting components of the study of language, because it combines theoretical and empirical linguistics with psychology and cognitive science.The difference between linguistics and psycholinguistics:Linguistics studies language as a formal system. Its four main branches are phonology, the study of speech sounds and their patterns; semantics, the study of meaning; syntax, the study of sentence structure; and morphology, the study of words and word formation. Linguists establish units of language; they search for rules that organize sounds into words, words into sentences, and possibly sentences into discourse; and they establish language families.The contemporary linguist Chomsky (1970) distinguish between competence, the idealized knowledge a speaker or hearer has of a particular language system, and performance, the actual use to which a speaker-hearer puts his competence. Later Chomsky (1986) distinguished I-language (inner language, the system of linguistic knowledge attained) and E-language (external language, language as an externalized object). The linguists main tool of study is the intuition of a native speaker, often the linguist himself, about his language.Psycholinguistics is the study of language behavior: how real (rather than ideal) people learn and use language to communicate ideas. Psycholinguists ask questions such as, How is language produced, perceived, and remembered? How is it used for different communicative purposes? How is it acquired? How does it go wrong? How is it represented in the mind?Sometimes psycholinguists observe people in natural settings. For example, they may record the language development of one child over a period of, say, four years. More often they experiment: they might require groups of subjects to listen, read, or remember stimuli, such as a set of sentences that might vary in length, meaningfulness, structural complexity, or communicative function. Experiments might measure the subjects response time and/or accuracy. 3. MethodologyThe task of psycholinguistics is, by doing experiments to find out what are the mechanisms that underlie linguistic competence. In order to penetrate the “black box”, it is necessary to observe the linguistic behavior or do experiment. As a joint area of psychology and linguistics, the researchers of psycholinguistics mainly come from two groups: psychologists and linguists. Psychologists study it main from a psychological point of view, and linguists study it main from a linguistic point of view.Naturalistic ObservationObserving information in a non-experimental settingSlips of the tongue Phonological switching: Crushing blow - Blushing crow semantic replacements: blond eyes for blond hairLanguage AcquisitionThe use of language over timeData from naturalistic observation: Rich, but hard to analyzeControlled experimentsGoal: test an empirical hypothesisHypothe