Psycholinguistic
Psychology and Linguistic
the study of language
and the mind
How it works?
observation of spontaneous
utterances
psycholinguistic experiments
language might be acquired by simple learning mechanism
How human producce speech?
learning by imitation
learning by association
learning by condiitioning
The rule-governed nature of child
Children are not simply imitating what they hear going on around them
Child language is never at any time a haphazard conglomeration of random words
every child at every stage possesses a grammar with rules of its own
Learning the meaning of words
Children may be able to use words only in a particular context
Recognizing words
Hearers jump to conclusions on the basis
of partial information
Words have to be selected
have to be integrated into the syntax
knowing how it's pronounced
knowing the meaning
knowing the relation with other words
Slips of the tongue
selection errors
assemblage errors
cases in which a speaker has picked out the
wrong item
Selection errors usually involve lexical items, so they can tell us which words are closely associated in the mind.
cases in
which a correct choice has been made, but the utterance has been wrongly assembled
For example, people tend to say knives for ‘forks’,oranges for ‘lemons’, left for ‘right’