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Psycholinguistics

What do these activities have in common?What kind of process is involved in producing and understandinglanguage?

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Questions

• What is psycholinguistics?• What are the main topics of

psycholinguistics?

9.1 Introduction

• * Psycholinguistics is the study of the languageprocessing mechanisms. Psycholinguistics dealswith the mental processes a person uses inproducing and understanding language.It is concerned with the relationship betweenlanguage and the human mind, for example, howword, sentence, and discourse meaning arerepresented and computed in the mind.

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9.1 Introduction* As the name suggests, it is a subject which links

psychology and linguistics.• Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature

and is studied by people in a variety of fields,such as psychology, cognitive science, andlinguistics. It is an area of study which drawsinsights from linguistics and psychology andfocuses upon the comprehension andproduction of language.

• The scope of psycholinguistics• The common aim of psycholinguists is to find out the

structures and processes which underline a human’sability to speak and understand language.

• Psycholinguists are not necessarily interested in languageinteraction between people. They are trying above all toprobe into what is happening within the individual.

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The scope of psycholinguistics

• At its heart, psycholinguistic work consists of two questions.– What knowledge of language is needed for us to use

language?– What processes are involved in the use of language?

The “knowledge” question

• Four broad areas of language knowledge:Semantics deals with the meanings of sentences and words.Syntax involves the grammatical arrangement of words within the

sentence.Phonology concerns the system of sounds in a language.Pragmatics entails the social rules involved in language use.

• It is not ordinarily productive to ask people explicitly whatthey know about these aspects of language. We inferlinguistic knowledge from observable behavior.

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The “process” question

– “ordinary use of language”: e.g. understanding alecture, reading a book, writing a letter, andholding a conversation, etc.

– “cognitive processes”: processes like perception,memory and thinking.

• Although we do few things as often or as easily asspeaking and listening, we will find thatconsiderable cognitive processing is going onduring those activities.

•What cognitive processes are involved inthe ordinary use of language?

Two possible directions of study inpsycholinguistics

• Language as a way of explaining psycholinguistic theoriesand processes: language influences memory, perception,attention and learning.

• The effects of psychological constraints on the use oflanguage: how memory limitations affect languageproduction and comprehension.

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Question 2• What are the main topics of psycholinguistics?

Topics to be covered include…

• General issues of psycholinguistics:• language acquisition (how human beings learn

language)• language production (how we create and

express meaning through language)• language comprehension (how we perceive and

understand speech and written language)• The relationship between language and thought

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• Psycholinguistics is interested in the acquisition oflanguage: how children acquire their mother tongue.

• The study of the acquisition of language by children isoften called developmental psycholinguistics.

9.2 Language Acquisition

9.2 Language Acquisition

• The psycholinguist Steven Pinker makes a strong case forconsidering the elements of linguistic knowledge to beinnate. This is consistent with the Chomskyan concept ofuniversal grammar: the idea that there is a commonunderlying structure to every language, the knowledge ofwhich we are born with.

• Many linguists feel that if we can understand theinternal mechanism which enables children tolearn language so quickly we shall havepenetrated one of the deepest secrets of themind.

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• Language acquisition refers to the learning anddevelopment of a person’s language. The learningof a native or first language is called first languageacquisition, and the learning of a second or foreignlanguage is called second language acquisition.

• Overgeneralization/Overextension (theextension of a rule beyond its proper limits)

• Undergeneralization/Underextension (achild uses a word in a more limited waythan adults do )

Two basic notions in first languageacquisition

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It is shown by psycholinguistics that children’s useof language is rule-governed. For example, childrenfrequently say tooths and mouses, instead of teethand mice, and holded, goed, runned and finded,instead of held, went, ran and found.Can you find more examples of overgeneralizationsin your English acquisition?

Examples of overgeneralization

Overgeneralization is a frequent phenomenon inlanguage development. It can be found not onlyin syntactic usage but also in word meanings.moons: all round objectscars: all vehiclesdogs: all four-legged animals

Examples of overgeneralization

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• Most psycholinguists believe that theintonational, gestural, and contextual clues makeit clear that children are using single-wordsentences, exactly as adults often do in aconversation.

• Milk(Do you have any milk?/ I’d like some milk.)

Examples of overgeneralization

• Children also undergeneralize. When achild uses a word in a more limited waythan adults do (e.g. refusing to call a taxi acar), this phenomenon is calledundergeneralization or underextension.

• Shoes only refers to his mother’s shoes.• Hat only refers to his own hat.

Undergeneralization

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• On some occasions, children’s conceptualcategories may actually differ from those adults.

• On other occasions, they may know perfectly wellthat a cow is not a dog but not know what it iscalled.

• On still other occasions, the child’s misuse ofwords may reflect an attempt at humor.

Reasons for overgeneralizationand undergeneralization

Stages of first language acquisition• The prelinguistic stage• The one-word stage• The two-word stage• The multiword stage

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The prelinguistic stage

• By the age of six months when they are able to sit up,children are heard producing a number of differentvowels and consonants.

• At the babbling stage, the sound and syllables thatchildren utter are as yet meaningless.

The one-word stage• At some point in the late part of the first year or

the early part of the second year.• Children’s one-word utterances are also called

holophrastic, because they can be used toexpress a concept or prediction that would beassociated with an entire sentence in adultspeech.

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The two-word stage• In general, the two-word stage begins roughly in

the second half of the child’s second year.• Children’s two-word utterances can express a

certain variety of grammatical relations indicatedby word order, i.e. “Baby chair”.

The multiword stage

• Between two and three years old.• When a child starts stringing more than

two words together, the utterances maybe two, three, four, or five word or longer,e.g. Cathy build house.

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9.3 Language production1.The definition of language production

2. Stages of language production

Language production

Language production refers to the cognitiveprocesses that convert nonverbal communicationintentions into verbal action.

Language production involves two simultaneousprocesses1) the thought process, which is global and holistic,involving a type of thinking in mentalese that isnot yet speech.2) the speech process, which is serial and linearassemblage of the units of language.(William James 1980)

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Language production

According to Levelt (1989), language productioncontains four stages:

1)conceptualizing

2)formulating

3)articulating

4)self-monitoring

• First, we must conceptualize what we wish tocommunicate;

• Second, we formulate this thought into a linguisticplan;

• Third, we execute the plan through the muscles inthe speech system;

• Finally, we monitor our speech, accessing whether itis what we intended to say and whether we said itthe way we intended to.

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Conceptualization

• Where do ideas come from? In what form do ideas existbefore they are put into words?

• These are difficult questions to answer, partly because westill don’t know enough about how language is produced,partly because they deal with mental abstractions so vaguethat they elude empirical investigation.

• As to the second question, psycholinguists generally agreethat some form of mentalese exists---a representationsystem which is different from language.

Conceptualizing

• Conceptualzing involves conceiving of anintention, selecting the relevant information tobe expressed for the realization of this purpose,ordering this information for expression, thesum total of these mental activities will becalled conceptualizing.

• According to Levelt, conceptualizing isresponsible for generating message.

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Formulating• Formulation refers to converting the thought

(which is conceptualized in the first stage) intolinguistic plan, to generating a framework onwhich to hang the units of speech.

• Formulation is the second stage of speechproduction.

• This stage consists of three phases:identifying the meaningselecting a syntactic structuregenerating an intonation contour.

Three phases of formulating1. identifying the meaning• This framework begins with the thought you

want to express and the searches for definitionthat best match the thought, like consulting adictionary in reverse-----defining the meaningand then finding the word to match it.

words meaning

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Three phases of formulating• 2.selecting a syntactic structure

This step involves finding the appropriatesyntactic structure, three models could be used.

1) tree diagram

2) semantics-based framework

3) the connectionist model

2.selecting a syntactic structure1)Similar to use tree diagrams to parse sentences with aphrase structure grammar, here we can use treediagram to generate sentences, starting with a sentence-level representation (S), and flesh out the phrases(NP+VP), then the constituents within phrases (N, V,etc.)

e.g. S

NP VP

det N V NP

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• 2) Semantics-based framework: using not treediagrams but cases, themes, or roles assigned tothe main verbs and nouns in the sentence. Wewould find the appropriate nouns and verbs thatdescribe the actions, actors and objects in theconceptualization.

For instance, the word “stab” would activateagent, patient, and instrument roles.

2.selecting a syntactic structure

2. selecting a syntactic structure

• 3)The connectionist model: a sentence to bespoken would be represented by spreadingactivation through a network of nodesrepresenting phonological, lexical, andmorphological levels.

• Finding the syntactic frame could be using any ofthese three models.

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Three phases of formulating

• 3 Generating an intonation contour ['kɔntuə]Whether you are going to ask a question or

make a statement, and the constituents in theutterance that need to be emphasized or stressedhave to be tagged at this point. Here is where welayout the stress pattern in the sentence to beproduced.

e.g.Mike like baby .(to emphasize object )Mike like baby. (to emphasize subject )

Formulation

• Speech errors are made by speakersunintentionally. In formulating speech, we areoften influenced by the sound system oflanguage.

• The scientific study of speech errors, commonlycalled slips of the tongue or tongue-slips, canprovide useful clues to the processes of languageproduction.

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Table: major types of slips of the tongueType ExamplesShift That’s so she’ll be ready in case she decide to hits it

(decides to hit it).Exchange Fancy getting your model renosed (getting your nose

remodeled).Anticipation Bake my bike (take my bike).

perseveration He pulled a pantrum (tantrum).

Addition I didn’t explain this clarefully enough (carefully enough).

Deletion I’ll just get up and mutter intelligibly (unintenlligibly).

Substitution At slow speeds it’s too light (heavy).

Blend That child is looking to be spaddled（spanked/paddled).

Articulation

• Articulation of speech sounds is the third and a veryimportant stages of production.

• Once we have organized our thoughts into a linguisticplan, this information must be sent from the brain to themuscles in the speech system so that they can thenexecute the required movements and produce thedesired sounds.

• We depend on vocal organs to produce speech sounds soas to express ourselves. In the production of speechsounds, the lungs, larynx and lips may work at the sametime and thus form co-articulation.

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Self-regulation• Self-regulation is the last stage of speech production. To

err is human. So each person would do some self-correction over and over again while conversing.

• According to some psycholinguists, errors arecommitted only by non-native speakers. Nativespeakers often make “mistakes” and correct themselvesimmediately.

• Native speakers often use different ways to edit theirlinguistic performance.

• Speech production or written production is not a one-way linear process; it is a parallel, two-way systeminvolving production and self-regulation in theproduction.

9.4 Language Comprehension• Understanding language, like producing it, is such an

automatic task that it seems to be a relativelystraightforward process.

• What is apparent from the vast research into thecomprehension of spoken and written language is thatpeople do not process linguistic information in a neat,linear fashion; they do not move smoothly from onelinguistic level to another.

• The research shows that in most situations, listenersand readers use a great deal of information other thanthe actual language being produced to help them findthe meaning of the linguistic symbols they hear or see.

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1 Sound Comprehension• Sound comprehension is not a passive process. It often

depends on the context from which listeners expect tohear. People understand the meaning as a whole. They donot listen to each word individually.

• Distinguishing similar sounds, such as /b/ and /p/, /t/ and/d/ in English, is another type of sound comprehension.People often recognize the differences of sounds basedon the length of producing time.

• In a word, the successful comprehension of speechsounds is a combination of the innate ability of humans todistinguish minute differences between speech sounds,and the ability to adjust to the acoustic categories of thelanguage they are exposed to.

2 Word Comprehension• Word comprehension is a very complex psycholinguistic

process and is much more complex than the processing ofspeech sounds. That is because there are mountains ofwords in the vocabulary which not only consist of sounds,but also convey meanings.

• Psycholinguists use parallel distributed processing (PDP) toexplain the complex process of word understanding.

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• PDP is a model of cognition developed fromneurology, computer science and psychology. It is away in which people use several seperate andparalell processes at the same time to understandspoken or written language.

• For example, understanding a word involves:remember the word;search the meaning of the word;spell wordpronounce the word

• The PDP approach is able to explain tip-of-the-tongue(TOT) phenomenon. In our daily life many of us have hadthe experience that we knew the word, but could notaccess the whole word. For many times, we could notonly get part of the words vaguely, such as the beginningor the ending of the words. This is called bathtub effectbecause when we submerge ourselves in a bathtub, wecan only see our head and feet.

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3 Sentence comprehension• Besides decoding sounds and lexical meanings,

comprehension also includes untangling the meaning ofsentences. The greatest influence on sentencecomprehension is meaning.

• There are a few factors influencing thecomprehension of sentences. The first is that theambiguity of word meaning leads to difficulties insentence understanding. The more complexinformation the word has, the more difficult thesentence is to understand.

Ambiguities

• Lexical ambiguity

• bank financial institution where you deposit yourmoney slope of land along a river

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Ambiguities

The act of flying planes can be dangerous. Planes that are flying can be dangerous.

e.g.They are playing cards.

Those people, they are performing the act of playingcards. Those cards, they are not greeting cards but playingcards.

Lexical ambiguity

e.g. Flying planes can be dangerous.

3 Sentence comprehension• The second factor is that the linguistic structure of the

sentence affects the processing time.• Garden-pathing• The horse raced past the barn fell.• The evidence examined by the witness was forged.• The horse that was raced past the barn fell.• These are garden-path sentences: they mislead you part-

way through.• The ambiguity is between main-verb and reduced relative

interpretations of the verb raced, examined.

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• If the sentence structure is what readers or hearersexpected to read or hear, the processing time is short,and the sentence is easy to understand. If the sentencestructure is not what readers or hearers expect, thecomprehension is disrupted and sentence comprehensionbecome slow. This is so-called garden-pathing, a naturalcomprehension of strategy. In understanding sentences,the point is whether readers or hearers choose the rightpath or wrong path.

4 Text comprehension• Text comprehension is the largest unit compared with the

comprehension of sounds, words and sentences.According to research on text understanding, people tendto comprehend or memorize the content but not thestructure.

• Therefore in the process of understanding texts,background information plays a very important part, andgreatly affects the way in which people remember a pieceof discourse. Background knowledge can active people’smental association which can help the comprehension oftexts.

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9.5 Language and Thought• The relationship between language and thought has long

been a subject of discussion. There are a wide range ofopinions about the general nature of the relationship. It isprobably true to say that every possible relation betweenthe two has been proposed by some theorists.

• At the risk of oversimplification, we can still say that thereare mainly two groups: those who believe that languagedetermines thought and those who think that thoughtdetermines language.

• So the whole question we are concerned with here iswhether our thoughts are formed in advance of the wordsthat we utter or whether our ideas are formed in terms ofthe words themselves.

1 Language determines thought• There are dramatic vocabulary differences from language

to language. In some languages, there may be only asingle word for a certain object, creature or concept,whereas in another language, there may be several words,even quite a large number.

• In Chinese, there is only a single term luotuo in Englishthere is camel (or dromedary for the one-humped camel,and Bactrain camel for the two-humped animal). But inArabic, it is said that there are more than 400 words forthe animal. The camel is of far greater importance as ameans of travel with most Arabic-speaking people. Thegreater number of words relating to the camel is anobvious reflection of this.

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• According to E. Spair and B. Lee Whorf, the child’s cognitivesystem is determined by the structure of the language heacquires. Since linguistic structures are different, theassociated cognitive systems are also different.

• Spair-Whorf Hypothesis has two parts: the first is calledlinguistic determinism, which says that linguistic structuredetermines cognitive structure. That is, learning a languagechanges the way a person thinks. The second part is calledlinguistic relativity, which says that the resulting cognitivesystems are different in speakers of different languages.

• Certain aspects of language behavior challenge Whorf’sthesis, that the absence or presence of a lexicaldistinction can be taken as an indicator of acorresponding perceptual or conceptual distinction.Secondly, there are bilinguals among the generalpopulation in most communities who can express theirideas freely in two or more languages. Thirdly, languagesborrow words from each other fairly frequently, whichdemonstrate that existing vocabulary does not exhaustthe discrimination of which the language users arecapable.

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• So a more acceptable conclusion might be that“language differ not so much as to what can be said inthem, but rather as to what it is relatively easy to say”. Itseems clear that a strong version of the WhorfianHypothesis---language determines thought---cannot besupported. However, it is equally clear that a weakversion of the hypothesis---language influences thought---is reasonable and supportable.

2 Thought determines language

• Those who believe that thought determines languagewould say that cognitive development comes earlier in thelife of children and that cognitive categories they developdetermine the linguistic categories that they will acquire.

• Many experiments have been carried out to test thevalidity of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The results of someexperiments turned out to argue against it. B. Berlin and P.Kay’s experiment in 1969 is a case in point. It wasconcerned with how speakers of different languagesdivided up the color spectrum.

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• For our purpose, the importance of Berlin andKay’s work is that it strongly argues against thehypothesis that languages are free to divide theworld of experience in any convenient way. Inthe realm of colors, at least, there appear to besome basic constraints that limit the way inwhich this aspect of our experience is coded inthe language. This conclusion is directly contraryto the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

• If the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis isaccepted, there will be no thought without language. Ifthere are no constraints on the variation to be foundbetween people in the way they think, speakers ofdifferent languages will never see the world in the sameway. It also follows that if one can find a way to control thelanguage that people learn, one would thereby be able tocontrol their thoughts.

• Therefore, if the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is true, then weare helplessly trapped by the language we speak. We couldnot escape from it and even if we could, we would fall intothe framework of another language which woulddetermine what we think, what we perceive and what wesay.

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• What is more, if language determines thought,people speaking diverse languages would neverunderstand each other. The fact is that people ofthe world have been communicating over thecenturies and that there have been radicalchanges of world-views within languages.

Thank you!!!