Course: Psycholinguistics – Winter 1392 & Spring 1393

Instructor: Dr Maryam Danaye Tous

Prepared by: Nasrin Eftekhari

In the Name of God

Language is a communication system that enables us to talk about anything,

irrespective of time and space.

IntroductionThere are steps involve in communicative transaction that we must have such as : necessary biological hardware articulatory apparatus move at right time language complex enough to convey message aware of social setting to produce & understand message aware of knowledge and beliefs of people

Psychological process involve sort of behavior such as :

aware of knowledge and beliefs of people and have some ideas of : how they will interpret our utterances

These are the subject of matter of this book.

Crystal (1997) lists eight functions of language:

1.The primary purpose of language is to communicate,2.To express emotion (e.g. by swearing), 3.for social interaction (e.g. by saying “bless you!” when

someone sneezes), 4. to make use of its sounds (e.g. in various children’s

games), 5. to attempt to control the environment (e.g. magical

spells), 6. to record facts, 7. to think with, and 8. to express identity (e.g. chanting in demonstrations).

We even play with language such as —particularly punning—

Linguistics examines language itself.

Neuropsychology examines the role of different parts of the brain in behavior.

Psycholinguistics examines the psychology of language. It means the psychological process involve in language.

Psycholinguists is the name given to : understandingProducingremembering language and hence are concerned with listening readingSpeakingWriting and memory for language.

Psycholinguistics are also interested in: how we acquire language the way in which language interacts with

other psychological systems. the area might have been the

psychological of linguistic theory psycholinguistics is closely related to other

areas of cognitive psychology psycholinguistics relies to experimental

methods used in cognitive psychology

Data are the pieces of evidence that have to explained.

Theory is general explanation of how something works.

Model is rather more specific.

Hypothesis is a specific idea that can be tested.

What is language ?

It is “a system of symbols and rules that enable us to communicate”.

Symbols are things that stand for other things: words, either written or spoken, are symbols.

Rules specify how words are ordered to form sentences.

Principles of linguistics and the aspects of language are :

semantic syntax morphology pragmatics phonetics phonology

Morphology made up of simpler units , called morphemes.

Inflectional morphemes: words that do not change its meaning or syntax category.

Derivational morphology: change part of speech

What is word ? Crystal (1997 ) defines word as :

The smallest units of grammar that can stand alone as a complete utterance, separated with spaces in written language.

Lexicon Psychologists believes that we store representation of words in a mental dictionary. Psycholinguists call this mental dictionary the lexicon.

Psycholinguists are particularly interested in the process of lexical access and how things are represented .

How did language originate?

Brain increased in size and complexity. Broca’s area was present in the brains

of early human beings associated with language.

vocal apparatus has become well adapted for making speech sounds.

The idea that language evolved from mimicry or imitation has been called ding-dong , heave-ho, bow-wow theory.

Language arose as a side-effect of the evolution of something else, such as the ability to use more complex manual gestures, or to use tools.

Chomsky, 1988, Piatelli, 1989 suggested that language arose as a by-product of the increase in overall brain size. Paget (1930) proposed that language evolved in intimate connection with the use of hand gestures. Carballis, 1992, argued that tools could be made and used with communication. Pinker and Bloom (1990) argued that sufficient time for grammar to evolve, and that the ability to communicate . Elman, 1999, argued that language arose from communication system through many interaction “ tweaks and twiddles”.

Deacon (1997) proposed that language and the brain co-evolved in an interactive way. Jaynes, 1977, argued that the emergence of consciousness is the source of evolution of language.

What is language for?

language is used for communication. Language is a social activity. Language might play a role in other, originally non-linguistic, cognitive processes. The extreme version of this idea is that the form of our language shapes our perception and cognition, a view known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

A brief history of psycholinguistics

it is a recent one. it is often traced to a conference held in Cornell

USA. Osgood & Sebeok, 1954 used the word of “

psycholinguistics”. Chomsky , 1959, remarked modern

psycholinguistics.

The primary concerns of early linguistics is :

comparative linguistics that led to structuralism which provide description of units of language.

Early psychological approach to language are:

Information theory & Behaviorism

Psycholinguistics was largely absorbed into: Cognitive psychology :

information processing (IP) computational metaphor

Information processing approachescognition is symbolic processing

The cognitive science approach

Cognitive science is the study of the mind including :

developmental psychology philosophyLinguisticsAnthropologyneuropsychologyparticularly artificial intelligence (AI)

We have already seen how linguistics influenced early psycholinguistics; its influence has been particularly strong on work on syntax. Philosophy has played an important role in our understanding of meaning. AI involves getting computers to do things that appear to need intelligence. Traditional AI involves computer modeling of human behavior emphasizing rules, plans, and goals.

ELIZA

SHRDLU

ATNs

Connectionism

areas of psycholinguistics involve many very simple, richly interconnected neuron-like units rules and behavior emerge from the interactions between these many simple units.

Activation we can assume that the mind makes use of something like activation, and that the activation level of units—such as those representing words—caninfluence the activation levels of similar items.

The methods of modern psycholinguistics

Experimental techniques: the priming methodology

Semantic priming Facilitation Inhibition

Techniques for examining the brain’s activity:

EEG (electroencephalograms)ERP (event-related potentials)CAT (computerized axial tomography), MRI ([nuclear or functional] magnetic

resonance imaging), PET (positron emission tomography) scans

these techniques are expensive; and their temporal and spatial resolution are currently poor. a significant problem with current brain imaging is that the results are often difficult to interpret. It is hard to be sure exactly what is causing any activity. Imaging will tell us where something is happening, but in itself it does not tell us how or why.

these techniques could potentially tell us a number of things: great deal about the time course of processes, and when different sources of information are usedrevealing about the extent to which mental processes form discrete modules.

Themes and controversies in modern psycholinguistics

Nine themes will recur throughout this book.

The first theme is the goal of the book: to discover the processes involved in producing and understanding language.

The second theme is the question of whether apparently different language processes are related to one another.

The third theme is whether or not processes in language operate independently of one another, or whether they interact. This is the issue of modularity.

Fourth, what is innate about language?Fifth, do we need to refer to explicit rules when considering language processing?Sixth, how sensitive are the results of our experiments to the particular techniques employed? Seventh, what can be learned from looking at the language of people with damage to the parts of the brain that control language?

Eighth, how people learn the two languages, and how they translate between them, Finally, how can the study of language be applied to everyday life.

How modular is the language system?

A module is a set of processes module converts an input to an output the processes inside a module are “independent” Processing is autonomous ,opposing view is that processing is interactive.

Interaction Interaction involves the influence of one level of

processing on the operation of another.

there are two intertwined notions involved: First, overlap of processing between stages

discrete modelcascade model

Second , reverse flow of information, or feedbackBottom- up Top -down

modularity was a major research theme in cognitive psychology.

neuropsychology of modularity: physical modularity (are psychological processes localized in one part of the brain?) processing modularity (in principle a set of processes might be distributed across the brain yet have a modular role in the processing model).

In addition, there is a wider question about modularity:

to what extent is the whole language system a self-contained module? Is it just a special module for interfacing between social processes and cognition? Or does it provide a true window onto wider cognitive processes?

Chomsky (1975) argued that language is a special faculty that cannot be reduced to cognitive processes.

Piaget(1923) argued that language is a cognitive process just like any other, and that linguistic development depends on general cognitive development.

Is any part of language innate?

language processes are highly modular language capacity is innate.

To what extent is the innate information specifically linguistic?

A related issue is the extent to which the innate components are only found in humans.

Does the language system make use of rules?

“yes”.

Many linguistic orientation linguistics still believe this and recently the situation has changed greatly with influence of connectionism modeling.

Connectionism has had two major consequences:

First, boxology

second, details of representation by use of language

What can studies of brain damage and language tell us?Cognitive neuropsychology helps us to understand psycholinguistics. Neuropsychology have been concerned which parts of the brain control different sorts of behavior (that is, with the localization of function),

Neuropsychology working out how complex behaviors map onto the flow of information through brain structures. The emphasis of cognitive neuropsychology is to relate brain-damaged behavior to models of normal processing.

Three crucial aspects of differences between cognitive neuropsychology and traditional

neuropsychology :

1. Relating neuropsychological disorder to cognitive models.

2. stressing the importance of single case study rather than group studies of neuropsychological impairments.

3. emphasize how models of normal processing can be informed by studying brain – damaged behavior.

Double dissociations are important in the neuropsychological study of language .

It means different process underlie each task.

End of Chapter 1 (Harley, 2001)