Psycholinguistics 01. Introduction Psycholinguistics: what happens in our mind when we use language

Psycholinguistics

01

Introduction

• Psycholinguistics: what happens in our mind when we use language.

Where We Are (1)

Where We Are (2)

More definition of psycholinguistics • An interdisciplinary science

• A process-oriented science

• A cognitive science

An empirical science

Cognitive Science and its Components Psychometrics

Experimental psychology

psycholinguistics

Computational linguistics

Artificial intelligence

Epistemology

Logic

Anthropology

Decision theory

Psychology

Linguistics

Computer science

Philosophy

Neuroscience

Other fields

CognitiveScience

Cognitive Process

Cognitive Process

Examples of Language Processing:

Garden path sentences

Examples of Language Processing: Indirect requests

• Look! I’m sweating.

Examples of Language Processing: Language in aphasia

Examples of Language Processing: Language in children

SLA Topics Related to Cognitive Process Theories

• Active vs. passive: Why does passive voice pose a problem for Chinese students?

• Writing: Is there anything different in the information processing between writing and speaking?

• Speaking: Why discussion is more difficult than relationship maintenance conversation?

History of Psycholinguistics: Early attempts

• 道可道，非常道。• 名可名，非常名。

History of Psycholinguistics: Early attempts

• Before 600 BC, the Egyptian king Psammetichos I ordered a shepherd to rear two newborn infants without any exposure to language. After 2 years it was found that the children uttered the sounds “becos” whenever the shepherd approached. These sounds were used by the Phrygians for “bread,” from which the Egyptian king concluded that the children must have had an innate knowledge of Phrygian and that the Phrygians were the primogenitors of mankind.

History of Psycholinguistics: Early attempts

• Language and the vocal apparatus were part of nature but precision control of the vocal apparatus was established through experience.

Modern Psycholinguistics: Early Psycholinguistics

• Wilhelm Wundt

(1832-1920)

lab work; language production: the sentence is the primary unit of language.

Modern Psycholinguistics: Early Psycholinguistics

• Edmund Huey (1908): eye-voice span, tachistoscope

Behaviorism (1920s—1050s)

• Bloomfield• The behavior of speaking correctly

was the consequence of being raised in an environment in which correct language models were present and in which children’s speech errors were corrected.

• Meaningfulness of words: the high-meaningfulness words were more easily learned than low-meaningfulness words.

Later Psycholinguistics • Noam Chomsky• A theory that stresses a simple associati

on between adjacent words is inadequate.

• Poverty of stimulus argument: there is not enough information in the language samples given to children to fully account for the richness and complexity of children’s language.

• The study of language may provide a remarkably favorable perspective for the study of human mental processes. And linguistics can be viewed as a branch of cognitive psychology.

Current Directions

• Psycholinguistics is increasingly viewed as a portion of the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science.

• Shift of the interest in syntax to other aspects of language: discourse, lexicon.