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Introduction To Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental representations and processes involved in language use, including how language is produced, comprehended, and stored. It explores the relationship between the human mind and language by examining how individuals perceive, produce, and store language. The main concerns of psycholinguistics are to understand the stages of language processing, how language is stored and accessed in the mind, theories of comprehension, and the neurological basis of language.

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Amad Strongman
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302 views7 pages

Introduction To Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental representations and processes involved in language use, including how language is produced, comprehended, and stored. It explores the relationship between the human mind and language by examining how individuals perceive, produce, and store language. The main concerns of psycholinguistics are to understand the stages of language processing, how language is stored and accessed in the mind, theories of comprehension, and the neurological basis of language.

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Amad Strongman
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Psycholinguistics

S5
2021-2022
Pr. Bouyahi
What is psycholinguistics?
⚫ The study of the mental representations and
processes involved in language use, including the
production, comprehension and storage of
spoken and written language (Warren, 2013)
⚫ It explores the relationship between the human
mind and language.
⚫ It treats the language user as an individual rather
than a representative of a society
⚫ An individual whose linguistic performance is
determined by the strengths and limitations of the
mental apparatus which we all share (Field 2003)
⚫ It traces similar patterns of linguistic behaviour
across large groups of individual speakers of a
particular language or of all languages.
How do we perceive language?
⚫ How do we recognize words so effortlessly?
⚫ Do we analyze the speech signal
phoneme-by-phoneme, or do we identify
complete syllables or even larger units?
⚫ Do we recognize ‘government’ as a complete
form, or do we have to construct it from
‘govern’+‘ment’?
⚫ How are words stored in the mental lexicon, i.e.
the dictionary in our heads? Is the mental
lexicon like a dictionary, or more like a
thesaurus?
⚫ For instance, is ‘cat’ listed near the similar
sounding word ‘catch’ or near the meaning-related
word ‘dog’? Or neither? Or both?
⚫ Do we store cats or cat+s? If ‘cats’ is not
How do we produce Utterances?
⚫ When we speak, how do we convert an idea
into an utterance?
⚫ What stages do we have to go through during
the construction of utterances?
⚫ Do we first generate a sentence structure and only
then populate it with words from our mental
lexicon?
⚫ Do we first choose words then build a structure
around those words?
⚫ Do the processes involved in language
production and comprehension influence one
another, and if so in what ways?
⚫ As listeners, how do we get from hearing an
utterance to developing our own
Main concerns of Psycholinguistics
⚫ Language processing: What precisely goes on when we
are listening, speaking, reading and writing? What stages
do we go through when engaging in these skills? How do
we manage to turn a grammatical structure into a piece of
information?
⚫ Language storage and access: How is vocabulary stored in
our mind? How do we manage to find it when we need it?
What form do grammar rules take?
⚫ Comprehension theory: How do we manage to bring
world knowledge to bear upon new information that is
presented to us? How do we manage to construct a global
meaning representation from words that we hear or read?
⚫ Language and the brain: What neurological activity
corresponds to reading or listening? Where does the brain
store linguistic knowledge and semantic concepts? What
neurological and muscular activity is involved in speech?
Can differences in the human brain account for the fact
that our species has developed language?
⚫ Exceptional circumstances: Why do some infants grow
up with language impairments such as dyslexia or
stuttering? How does brain damage or age affect language?
Linguistics Vs. Psycholinguistics?
⚫ linguistics describes languages, dialects and speech styles
accurately and in detail: the different kinds of speech
sounds, how the sentences are put together, the kinds of
meanings the words have, how the speakers make new
words.
⚫ Linguistics also gives us the concepts and vocabulary that
we need to describe language problems accurately. It also
lets us catalogue the differences and similarities between
languages or dialects in ways that don’t make (or thinly
conceal) value judgments.
⚫ Psycholinguistics: tries to discover how we manage to
actually DO all the things that go into speaking and
understanding, reading and writing.
⚫ How do sound waves hitting your ear become, in less
than half a second, your understanding of what another
person means?
⚫ How, in speaking a modest two-second sentence, have
you managed to find the dozen or so words that you
need to express your meaning out of the tens of
thousands of words stored in your mind, put them in the
right order so that they make sense.
Summary
⚫ The notion that language is a product of the
human mind gives rise to two interconnected
goals, both the concern of psycholinguistics:
⚫ to establish an understanding of the processes
which underlie the system we call language.
⚫ to examine language as a product of the human
mind and thus as evidence of the way in which
human beings organize their thoughts and impose
patterns upon their experiences.
⚫ Course Contents
⚫ Language and the human brain.
⚫ The human brain and its functions.
⚫ Speech perception.
⚫ Speech production.
⚫ Sentence production and comprehension.
⚫ The mental lexicon.

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