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Psycholinguistic : Language and Mind - Coggle Diagram
Psycholinguistic : Language and Mind
Psycholinguistics or the psychology of language is a study that discusses the processes of acquiring and using language in terms of psychology.
Psycholingusitic is often defined as the study of language and the mind.
Psycholinguistic evidence
Spontaneous utterances which deviate from the norm in
some way are the most informative.
However, ordinary speech is somewhat messy, in that there are dozens of different factors which have to be taken into account when utterances are analysed
Ideally, major topics should be tackled both by observing
spontaneous speech and by devising experiments.
Acquiring language
It used to be thought that animal behaviour could be divided into two types: that which was inborn and natural (for example, dogs naturally bark), and that which was learned and unnatural (dogs may be taught to beg).
Human infants pay attention to language from birth. They produce recognizable words at around 12–15 months, and start putting words together at around 18 months.
The content–process controversy
Most psycholinguists now agree that human beings are
innately programmed to speak.
All researchers agree that there is extraordinary similarity in
the speech development of English-speaking children.
On the other hand, there are those who support a process approach, and argue that children could not possibly contain specific language universals.
The rule-governed nature of child
language
Children are not simply imitating what they hear going
on around them as if they were parrots.
Every child at every stage possesses a grammar with rules of its own even though the system will be simpler than that of an adult.
A rather more obvious example of the rule-governed nature children produce frequently of child language are forms such as mans, foots, gooses, which
Children do not, however, formulate a new rule overnight,
and suddenly replace the old one with a new one
Different children use different strategies for acquiring speech. For example, some seem to concentrate on the overall rhythm, and slot in words with the same general sound pattern, whereas others prefer to deal with more abstract slots.
Learning the meaning of words
Children have to learn not only the syntax and sounds of
their language, but also the meaning of words.
At first, children may use a word only in a particular
context.
it probably takes some time for children to discover that words can refer to separate things.
This tendency to undergeneralize often passes unnoticed. But it is probably commoner than overgeneralization, which attracts much more attention.
Recognizing words
The human mind, it appears, prefers the second method, that of parallel processing, so much so that even unlikely possibilities are probably considered subconsciously.
Understanding speech is not the simple matter it appears
to be at first sight
This assumption turns out to be quite wrong. For a start, it is physically impossible to recognize each separate sound, speech is just too fast.
Understanding syntax
To some extent, the process is similar to word recognition, in that people look for outline clues, and then actively reconstruct the probable message from them.
Speech production
Slips of the tongue – cases in which the speaker accidentally says something such as par cark instead of ‘car park’ – provide useful clues to these processes, and so do pauses: they can tell us where a speaker stops to think – though it is difficult 84 linguistics made easy to out pauses caused by searching for lexical items, and pauses due to syntactic planning.
Speech production involves at least two types of process. On the one hand, words have to be selected. On the other, they have to be integrated into the syntax.
There are two main kinds of slip: on the one hand, there are selection errors, cases in which a speaker has picked out the wrong item
On the other hand, there are assemblage errors, cases in which a correct choice has been made, but the utterance has been wrongly assembled
Whereas selection errors tell us how individual words are stored and selected, assemblage errors indicate how whole sequences are organized ready for production.
BY : FILIPUS NERI ANDERSON PILAR
191214072