Psycholinguistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Psycholinguistics or psychology of
language is the
study of the psychological and neurobiological
factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand 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, and information theory to study how the brain
processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for
example, as non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological
workings of the brain become more and more widespread,
neurolinguistics has 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 infants''
and children''s
ability to learn language, usually with experimental
or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic
observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the
development of children).
Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary
in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as
psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. There are several
subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the
components that make up human language.
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 together 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.
The study of word recognition and
reading examines the processes involved in the extraction of
orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information
from patterns in printed text
Theories
Theories about how language works in
the human mind attempt to account for, among other things, how we
associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of language and how we
use syntax—that is, how we manage to put words in the proper order
to produce and understand the strings of words we call "sentences."
The first of these items—associating sound with meaning—is the
least controversial and is generally held to be an area in which
animal and human communication have at least some things in common
(See animal communication). Syntax, on the other hand, is
controversial, and is the focus of the discussion that follows.
There are essentially two schools of
thought as to how we manage to create syntactic sentences: (1) syntax
is an evolutionary product of increased human intelligence over time
and social factors that encouraged the development of spoken
language; (2) language exists because humans possess an innate
ability, an access to what has been called a "universal
grammar." This view holds that the human ability for syntax is
"hard-wired" in the brain. This view claims, for example,
that complex syntactic features such as recursion are beyond even the
potential abilities of the most intelligent and social non-humans.
(Recursion, for example, includes the use of relative pronouns to
refer back to earlier parts of a sentence—"The girl whose car
is blocking my view of the tree that I planted last year is mfriend
.") The ability to use syntax like that would not exist without
an innate concept that contains the underpinnings for the grammatical
rules that produce recursion, says the "innate" view.
Children acquiring a language, thus, have a vast search space to
explore among possible human grammars, settling, logically, on the
language(s) spoken or signed in their own community of speakers. Such
syntax is, according to the second point of view, what defines human
language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated
forms of animal communication.
The first view was prevalent until
about 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of
Jean Piaget and the empiricist, Rudolf Carnap. As well, the school of
psychology known as behaviorism (see Verbal Behavior (1957) by B.F.
Skinner) puts forth the point of view that language—syntax
included— is behavior shaped by conditioned response. The second
point of view—the "innate" one— can fairly be said to
have begun with Noam Chomsky''s highly critical review of Skinner''s
book in 1959 in the pages of the journal Language <1>. That review
started what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in
psychology.
The field of psycholinguistics since
then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro and con. The pro
view still holds that the human ability to use syntax is
qualitatively different from any sort of animal communication. That
ability might have resulted from a favorable mutation (extremely
unlikely) or (more likely) from an adaptation of skills evolved for
other purposes. That is, precise syntax might, indeed, serve group
needs; better linguistic expression might produce more cohesion,
cooperation, and potential for survival, BUT precise syntax can only
have developed from rudimentary—or no—syntax, which would have
had no survival value and, thus, would not have evolved at all. Thus,
one looks for other skills, the characteristics of which might have
later been useful for syntax. In the terminology of modern
evolutionary biology, these skills would be said to be "pre-adapted"
for syntax. (Also see "exaptation".) Just what those skills
might have been is the focus of recent research—or, at least,
speculation.
The con view still holds that
language—including syntax—is an outgrowth of hundreds of
thousands of years of increasing intelligence and tens of thousands
of years of human interaction. From that view, syntax in language
gradually increased group cohesion and potential for survival.
Language—syntax and all—is a cultural artifact. This view
challenges the "innate" view as scientifically
unfalsifiable; that is to say, it can''t be tested; the fact that a
particular, conceivable syntactic structure does not exist in any of
the world''s finite repertoire of languages is an interesting
observation, but it is not proof of a genetic constraint on possible
forms, nor does it prove that such forms couldn''t exist or couldn''t
be learned.
Contemporary theorists, besides
Chomsky, working in the field of theories of psycholinguistics
include George Lakoff, Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello.
Methodologies
Much methodology in psycholinguistics
takes the form of behavioral experiments. In these types of studies,
subjects are presented with some form of linguistic input and asked
to perform a task (e.g. make a judgement, reproduce the stimulus,
read a visually presented word aloud). Reaction times (usually on the
order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the
most often employed measures of performance.
Such tasks might include, for example,
asking the subject to convert nouns into verbs; e.g., "book"
suggests "to write," "water" suggests "to
drink," and so on. Another experiment might present an active
sentence such as "Bob threw the ball to Bill" and a passive
equivalent, "The ball was thrown to Bill by Bob" and then
ask the question