beginning concepts in psycholinguistics

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Beginning Concepts in Psycholinguistics

Ahmed Qadoury AbedPH D CandidateBagdad University-College of ArtsEnglish Dept2012/2013

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Definition of psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study:

How do people acquire language? How do people use language to speak and

understand one another? How is language presented and processed in

the brain? Brain vs mind

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Psycholinguistics and other disciplines

Psycholinguistics is a sub-field of psychology and linguistics

It is related to: Developmental psychology Cognitive psychology Neurolinguistics Speech science

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Creativity 1

Creativity is the nost important feature people have.

Creativity and other types:prose,poetry.. Linguistic creativity All people have it since they know language Know ≠ speak

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Human language creativity vs animal communication 2

1- Speakers of a language can create ,understand, and process novel sentences for an entire lifetime

- Both children and adults- Unconscious process (depends on interlocutors)- True for sign language- Possibility of creating infinite set out of finite set

Chomskyan orientation

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Creativity 3

2- the kind of creativity we have is the ability of communicating:

Whatever , wherever , Animals have a little range of topics Human language is flexible: i- diffeent purposes Ii- social interaction Dominating the planet

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Language & Speech

Speech is the most frequent mode for transmitting language (linguistic information)

-sign language is creative ,transmitted by gestures Graphics The crucial differences: Human is articulatory and auditory It is based on knowledge of language as a finite

system to yield infinite set of possible

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Language & Writing

Writing is materially based compared with speaking or signing are biological

Writing is cultural artifact Letter referring to sounds or symbolic Writing is for formal ,history recording,court Children learn to speak before to write (unconscious

vs conscious) The complexity or sophistication of human lang is

independent of writing

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Language & Thought

Thought is verbalized through lang People can think but not speak like infants , children with Specific Language impairment SLI People with neurological pathologies Animals can think but expressed by movements , cries,.. Bilinguals can express one thought in two langs Translation as a means for thought transmission Fordor (1975) The Language of Thought Hypothesis

(LOTH):intelligence responsible for generating the language of thought

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Language & Communication

Language is the primary communication system:

Logic, mathematical, graphic, programming,visual arts traffic lights gestures

Verbal vs non verbal Psycholinguists concerned with language as

a biologically- based characteristic of human

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Some Characteristics of the Linguistic System

Language is a formal system for pairing signals and meanings: Encoding vs Deccoding Both speaker /listener have the same linguistic form for pairing

sound and meaning Their linguistic system enables sounds and meanings to be

paired,and this is done by a complex and highly organized set of principles and rules (grammar and lexicon)

Knowledge of such system is an implicit or tacit Explicit knowledge is temporary and artificial like telephone

numbers Tacit knowledge in the brain /mind and unconscious

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Descriptive vs Prescriptive 1

‘Grammar’ refers differently to teachers and linguists.

Teachers are concerned with a standardized set of rules.Prescriptive

Linguists are concerned with studying the language system that underlies ordinary use.Descriptive

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Examples of Prescriptive grammar: 1-The use of pronouns like me,her initially -Me and Mary went to the movie. /mary and me went to the movie. In descriptive terms, these sentences are generated

by the speaker’s internalized grammar . Members of one language community acquire

colloquial form of this internalized grammar Prescriptive rules are tedious ,difficult ,conscious

learning is needed.

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2-the notion of correctness The bulk of linguistic ability acquired is not influenced or associated by linguistic correctness.

There are differences between acquired colloquial internalized grammar and prescriptive rules.

This notion is related to dialect variations: Geographic Ethnic Community These all can result in systematic , lexical ,and syntactic

differences from the transitional standard version of the acquired language

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Which is more important: Standard English or colloquial English 1- standard is used by few 2-Colloquial acquired naturally (the fruit of

psycholinguists) 3- linguists and psycholinguists are interested in

understanding how these internalized grammars are acquired and then put into use

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The Universality of Human Language 1

We have thousands of languages or versions spoken by different language communities ,all treated as a single entity by linguists

This is justified by all have an organization of grammar and lexicon

Chomskyan finite into infinite

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Universality 2

Universality has profound consequences for the way psycholinguists analyze the human use of language

Psycholinguists state that all languages are cut from the same mold because the organization of lexicons and the formal properties of grammatical systems are similar in all human languages

. What is specific and what is universal about

knowledge of the language the mechanisms that put the knowledge of language to use.

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The Implication for the Acquisition of Language

Language acquisition is an important area in psycholinguistics.

Children in every culture acquire the formal properties and lexicon of their languages (competence)

This competence or ability will be developed into natural performance

This is the story behind the profound similarity in child acquisition

Other skills like riding a bike are learned behaviours.

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Language acquisition 2

The story is completely different and complicated with L2 acquisition after childhood.

Children acquire another language/dialect naturally vs conscious learning of adults

Certain aspects (pronunciation) are difficult to master.

Exceptions are those who be native-like Research now focus on psych- social factors:

proximity of exposure to L2 ,and now on age effects in L2 acquisition( as memory ability).

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How Language Pairs Sound to Meaning 1

The grammar of any language has three kinds of rules:

1- phonological rules

i - they describe the sound patterns of the language

ii- they are used to create individual words with the appropriate rhthem and intonation.

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2- Morphological rules 3- syntactic rules These are responsible creating the structural

organization of words and sentences The word –phrase relationships indicate: - the basic operation of these various rules -The organization of the lexiconA fundamental concept in psycholinguistics is that the

meaning is the resullt of the function of individual words and how they organized stuturally.

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People aware of sentence individuals: consonants, vowels, syllables ,words which can be identified acoustically.

Sentence structure is not since it is regarded an abstract unit, or has no actual physical reality.

Sentence structure has a psychological reality : it must be represented by the speaker and then recovered by the hearer in order for the meaning to be conveyed.

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Learning a new language is not memorizing new vocabulary ,but how these vocabularies are structured for meaningful sentences.

Bilinguals are more aware, sensitive conscious towards this mechanisms than monolinguals:

-issues related to ambiguity are easily identified Word-for-word translation is not working

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-The senators objected to the plans proposed by the generals.

-The senators proposed the plans objected by the generals. -*The to plans senators objected proposed the by gerenals the.

Thus a person with good knowledge of the lexicon of a language with no sufficient proficiency in combining these vocabulary into meaning structures, will not be able to have solid idea representation.

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Another instance of how meaning depends upon sentence structure is ambigious sentences:

-The man saw the boy with the binaculars.

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Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance 1

The formal properties of grammar ana a lexicon = internalized grammar= linguistic competence

Linguistic competence is a technical term to refer to the use of the knowledge of language resorted in person’s mind in the actual processing of sentences (production and understanding)

Linguistic performance is the use of such knowledge in the actual processing of sentences ( production and understanding)

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Linguistic competence is the fruit basket of linguistics

Linguistic performance is the fruit basket of psycholinguistics.

Pragmatics is the description of how language is actually used.

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Grammatical aspects vs pragmatic aspects The man saw the boy with the binaculars. - identical grammatical aspects - different meanings or interpretation - one conveyed message by speaker

(intention) and hearer (recovery) - if the message is conveyed differently , a

case of misunderstanding.

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Encoding vs decoding process

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Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance 5 Encoding vs Decoding Process is so common (unconscious) so that people never think of its complex cognitive activity.

No one can tackle even a part of the whole process. Recently psycholinguists have developed experimental

procedures which had led them to understand a great deal about this unconscious , complex process.

Why complex to be observed? Any abstract idea must have a physical representation deep in the neurological connections of the brain, while the hearer has no such representation.

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The Speech Signal and Linguistic Representation 1

The signal is the only physical link between the speaker and the hearer.

This is a critical psycholinguistic point. This signal must contain enough information for the

hearer to help him reconstruct the abstract structures into abstract ideas.

Understanding the relationship between the signal and its decoded linguistic representation is necessary

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What is the relationship between the phonological representation and the physical speech signal?

The phonological representation can be thought of as an idealization of the physical signal.

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Are the physical speech signal and abstract phonological representation similar or different?

They are different. The abstract phonological representation is made up

of discrete phonological units (consonants, vowels , syllables, rhythmic units, words with varied vocal effects) whereas their corresponding portions in the physical signals overlap and the therefore the utterance is continuous

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Is the relationship between the continuous physical signal the hearer receives its idealized phonological representation direct ?

Not always. This continuous physical signal is subject to other linguistic and

extralinguistic factors: Noise - chewing- radio- driving What will be done in the hearer’s mind? A set of complex mental processing mechanisms must consult the

hearer’s grammar and lexicon in order to reconstruct the linguistic representation of the speaker’s meaning. This is the result of neurophysiological operations specialized for speech perception as a linguistic object.

A process done unconsciously since the actual stimulus (the physical signal) is not available to us.

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Perception requires that the hearer should have linguistic competence or knowledge .

Otherwise , what he perceives is just a jumble of disorganized sounds.

Animal knowledge is a matter of a set of acoustic signals associated with their names and commands.

For human , understanding a message involves different processes related to sounds, words, sentences takes the form of mental representation reconstructed from the physical speech signal.

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Origins of Contemporary Psycholinguistics 1

The modern era of psycholinguistics started with the two seminars sponsored by the Social Science Research Councils (1951,1953) and then the subsequent publishing of Osgood and Sebeek’s Psycholinguistics (1965).

Taxonomic analysis was dominating where their method of analysis was to listen to the speaker of the language, figure out the phonological units, and then classify them into higher –level categories.

This was adopted by the behaviourist psychologists who believed that all behaviours (language is one of them) could be associated linked chains of smaller behaviours.

The thread that bound linguists and psychologists was the view that everything interesting about language is directly observable in the physical speech signal.

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Origins of Contemporary Psycholinguistics 2

Sapir (1949) didn’t satisfied with this traditional view stating, in his paper The Psychological Reality of Phonemes, that the mental representation of language should be addressed rather than its physical representation.

Chomsky opened the door for a new way to study the human language stating that speech shouldn’t be the object of the study, instead the rules in the mind that create sentences and underlie observable speech .

George Miller (1965) supported this Chomskyan view , and their papers published in the second book of the Social Science Research Council (Saporta1965).

The adaptation of Chomsky’s ideas in this 2010 book indicates clear their domination nature.

beginning concepts in psycholinguistics

Documents

continuous

language pairs

physical speech

phonological

speech signal

psychological

actual processing

l2 acquisition