English Department

FKIP UNRI
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 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 What is Psycholinguistics?
 Based on the words formation, psycholinguistics has
two words; psycho and linguistics. From this, can we
assume that this discipline has something to do with
Psychology?
 Indeed, the word Psycholinguistics is sometimes
changeable with Psychology of language.
 Before defining what is psycholinguistics, let’s take a
look at (again) the chart of relationship of linguistics
and its interdiciplinary subjects.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 Linguistics-related areas:
 Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of
speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on
how the brain processes and understands these sounds.
 Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the
relationships between related words (such as dog and dogs)
and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural
formation).
 Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words
are combined to form sentences.
 Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences.
Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of
sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of
sentences.
 Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the
interpretation of meaning.
 FORM, LANGUAGE LANGUAGE INTERDICIPLINARY
MEANING,
UNITS SCIENCE VIEW
FUNCTION

INTERPRETIVE TEXT/
MEANING/
DISCOURSE PRAGMATICS SOCIOLINGUISTICS
FUNCTION

SEMANTICS PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

SENTENCE SYNTAX
FORM/
LOGICAL
MEANING
MORPHEME MORPHOLOGY LINGUISTICS

FORM PHONEME PHONOLOGY

 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of
the psychological and neurobiological factors that
enable humans to acquire, use, and understand
language.
 An important focus of psycholinguistics is the largely
unconscious application of grammatical rules that enable
people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences.
 Psycholinguists investigate the relationship between
language and thought. However, most problems in
psycholinguistics are more concrete, involving the study of
linguistic performance and language acquisition,
especially in children.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 The work of Noam Chomsky and other proponents of
transformational grammar have had a marked
influence on the field. Neurolinguists study the brain
activity involved in language use, obtaining much of
their data from people whose ability to use language
has been impaired due to brain damage.
 Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is
studied by people in a variety of fields, such as
psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 Areas of study
 Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field. Hence, it is
studied by researchers from a variety of different backgrounds,
such as psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and speech
and language pathology.
 Psycholinguists study many different topics, but these topics
can generally be divided into answering the following
questions:
(1) how do children acquire language (language acquisition)?;
(2) how do people process and comprehend language (language
comprehension)?;
(3) how do people produce language (language production)?; and
(4) how do adults acquire a new language (second language
acquisition)?
Language Acquisition

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 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 There are essentially two schools of thought as to how
children acquire or learn language, and there is still
much debate as to which theory is the correct one.
 The first theory states that all language must be
learned by the child.
 The second view states that the abstract system of
language cannot be learned, but that humans possess
an innate (present from birth) language faculty, or an
access to what has been called universal grammar.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 The view that language must be learned was especially
popular before 1960 and is well represented by the
mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist
Rudolf Carnap.
 Likewise, the school of psychology known as
behaviorism (1957) by B.F. Skinner puts forth the point
of view that language is a behavior shaped by
conditioned response, hence it is learned
(more about Mentalism & Behaviourism  Chap 10/group 10)
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 The innatist perspective began with Noam Chomsky's
highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959. This
review helped to start what has been termed "the
cognitive revolution" in psychology. Chomsky posited
humans possess a special, innate ability for language
and that complex syntactic features.
 According to Chomsky, children acquiring a language
have a vast search space to explore among all possible
human grammars, yet at the time there was no
evidence that children receive sufficient input to learn
all the rules of their language
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 The innatist perspective began with Noam Chomsky's
highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959. This
review helped to start what has been termed "the
cognitive revolution" in psychology. Chomsky posited
humans possess a special, innate ability for language
and that complex syntactic features.
 According to Chomsky, children acquiring a language
have a vast search space to explore among all possible
human grammars.
 Such a language faculty is, according to the innatist
theory, what defines human language and makes it
different from even the most sophisticated forms of
animal communication. (more in ch. 7 & 10)
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 How do children learn to speek?
 One of the sub-field of psychology of language;
Developmental psycholinguistics examines how speech
emerges over time and how children go about constructing
the complex structures of their mother tongue.
 We assume that a baby has no language but a cry. Is that a
true?
 The crying of a baby conveys some significant linguistic
communication. Even Plato observed that the crying
means whether it is comfort or discomfort.
 Crying, at least in the first few months, is a kind of
language without speech, because the child communicates
different types of discomfort without using normal speech
sound.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 Crying for an infant initially is completely iconic or
there is a direct and transparent link between the
physical sound and its communicative intend. For
example the hungrier a baby becomes, the louder and
longer the crying.
 The first month or two of the child’s development,
crying become more differentiated and more
symbolic. It means it is not merely related to
discomfort; rather the cries are indirectly, and almost
randomly assosiated with its needs.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 After several weeks of extensive interaction with its
caretaker (e.g. parents, brothers/sisters, etc) the child
stars to coo, starting about two month age, is making
soft gurgling sounds, seemingly to express satisfaction.
Crying and cooing affect, and are affected by caretaker
behavior.
 About six months old, a child is at a babbling stage.
Babbling refers to the natural tendency of children of
this age to burst out in a strings of consonant-vowel
syllable clusters almost as a kind of vocalic play.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 Some psycholinguists distinguish between Marginal
babbling and cononical babbling.
 Marginal babbling refers to an early stage similar to
cooing where infants produce a few, and somewhat
random, consonants
 Cononical babbling, usually begins around eight
months when the child’s vocalizations narrow down to
syllables that start to more or less similar to the
syllables of the caretaker’s language.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Egocentric speech
 After crying, cooing, and bubbling the child learn to
the firsth word. This stage of vocabulary development
is called egocentric speech. In this stage, children
want to talk about what surrounds them; at life begins,
they are the center of the universe.
Holophrastic
 The stage in whice the child has already invented and
used single word sentences. Most psycholinguists
believed that intonational, gestural, and contextual
clues which accompany holophrases as adult.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 Watch these video and determine in what stage or
phase of language developmet the baby or the child?

 A
 B
 C
Language Production

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 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 The production of speech is neurologically and
psychologically more complicated.

 The psycholinguists tend to devide linguistics

phenomena into stages. There are four successive
stages of speech production views as a liniear
progression. They are (1) Conceptualization, (2)
formulation, (3) articulation, and (4) self-monitoring.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Conceptualization
 It is difficult to answer a question Where does the very
beginning of any spoken utterence come from?
 Beside the lack of knowledge about how language is
produced, it is also because it deals with mental
abstraction (‘concept’) that it avoids empirical
investigation.
 However, an American psycholinguist David McNeil’s
investigation on an interesting mentalistic account of how
speech is first conceptualized in human mind.
 Based on his theory primitive linguistic concepts are
formed as two concurrent and parallel modes of thought.
They are Syntactic thinking and Imagistic thinking.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 Syntactic thinking, generates the sequence of words
which we typically think of when we talk. It is
segmented and linear, and creates the strings of
syllables, words, phrases, and sentences that together
make up speech.
 Imagistic thinking, creates a more holistics and
visual mode of communication. It is global and tends
to develop the gestures which we naturally use to
puntuate and illustrate our conversataions.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Formulation
 Formulation is the process of arranging what we want to
say after we have concept in the mind.
 The identification of formulation process can be seen
from slips of tongue like the mistake or ‘spoonerisms
(named after William Spooner) that someone have in
saying or writing something.
 The slips of tongue or typhographical mistakes are
normal in everyday occurrences in our speaking and
writing.
 Spoonerisms are slips of tongue in which an actual word
or phrase is created, often with a humourous twist to the
meaning which was intended.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 The phenomena of slips of tongue like mistake and
probably hesitations (e.g. uh, er, ) indicates that
human brain (or mind) have tried to formulate the
concept of language before producing it and by the
occurrence of these we can notify that sometimes the
formulation is not formulated well.
__________________________________
 Mistake vs error ???
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Articulation
 The articulation stage is similar to what happens when
all of information selected by word processing
program go from computer to printer.
 The articulation of speech sound is a vital third stage
of production. The speech sound are produced in a
linear, sequential fashion.
 However, the speech organ like lungs, larynx, and lips
may be working all at the same time that is, in the
production of any single sound, a lot of anatomical
effort is devoted to performing several different
movements simultaneously.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Self-monitoring
 This step is the evaluation steps of producing language
in which the speakers sometimes, in such a way,
evaluate the result of the language they produce.
 The self-evaluation of the language is often occur in
the occurrence of slips of tongue. Almost always,
however, the speakers instantly catch themselves
retreat or back away a step, and make correction.
 1. The last I knowed about it (I mean knew about it), he
had left the town.
2. She was so drank ( I mean drunk), that we decided to
drive her home
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 The fact that native speakers can monitor and quickly
correct any mistakes (not error for non native speaker)
in linguistics output proves Chomsky’s concept of
Performance and Competence.
 Performance refers to the words we say or write as the
manifestation of our ability in a language.
 Competence describes our implicit, intuitive knowledge
about the language or languages we have mastered.
Comprehension

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 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 What is Comprehesion?
 Simply as understanding of what we hear and read. It
is the recognition of a sequential string of linguistic
symbols, although at a very rapid speed.
 The range or level of comprehension is based on:
 The comprehension of sounds
 The comprehension of words
 The comprehension of sentence
 The comprehension of the text
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 The nature of Comprehention:
 Comprehention is not a the passive recording of
whatever is heard or seen.
 Comprehension is strongly influenced by even the
slightest of changes in discourse.
 Comprehension is not a simple item by item analysis of
word in a linear.
Overview of detail topics

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 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 How Children Learn Language ( chapter 1: group 1)
This chapter investigate in details how human learn
language from the infant stage, such as the development of
speech, comprehension, production and thought.
 The Deaf and Langauge: Sign, Oral, Written(Chap 2 : group 2)
This part will explain the way of communication for the deaf by
using sign language or language without speech.

 Wild and isolated children and the critical age issue for language
learning. (Chap. 4: group 4): This chapter investigates some
cases of children that can’t speak human language due to lack of
encounter to the society or because of abuse by the family.
 PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
 Animals and Language Learning (Chapter 5: group 5)
This part tells about how scientist wonders whether
language is for human only or can be learned by
animal. Some animals that considered to be the most
high intelligent or nearly close to human’s intelligence
were trained to speak human language or at least could
have two-way-communication with human.
 And many more topics that the groups should discuss
and explain.