Basic Psychology: Psycholinguistics

Introduction
Areas of study
History
Theories
Methodologies
Areas for further research

Introduction

Psycholinguistics, also known as language psychology, is the study of the interactions between linguistic and psychological factors. The discipline is primarily concerned with the mechanisms that allow language to be processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that allow humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.

The cognitive faculties and processes required to produce grammatical constructions of language are the focus of psycholinguistics. It is also concerned with how a listener perceives these constructions.

Because they were located in departments other than applied sciences, the first forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). To study how the mind-brain processes language, modern research employs biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science, as well as less well-known processes in social sciences, human development, communication theories, and infant development, among others.

Non-invasive techniques are used in several subdisciplines to study the neurological workings of the brain. For example, neurolinguistics has emerged as a distinct field, and developmental psycholinguistics, a subfield of psycholinguistics, is concerned with a child's ability to learn language.

Areas of study

Psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, speech and language pathology, and discourse analysis are among the fields of study. Psycholinguists study how people learn and use language in the following areas:

Language acquisition: How do children learn to speak?
Language comprehension: How do people understand what they hear?
Language production: How do people generate language?
second language acquisition: how do people who know one language learn another?

A language comprehension researcher may investigate word recognition during reading to investigate the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text. A language production researcher might investigate how words are prepared to be spoken at the conceptual or semantic level (this concerns connotation, and possibly can be examined through the conceptual framework concerned with the semantic differential). Developmental psycholinguists research the ability of infants and children to learn and process language.

Psycholinguistics subdivides their research further based on the various components that comprise human language.

Linguistics-related areas include:

The study of speech sounds is known as phonetics and phonology. The study of psycholinguistics focuses on how the brain processes and comprehends these sounds.
Morphology is the study of word structures, particularly those between related words (such as dog and dog), as well as the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation).
The study of how words are combined to form sentences is known as syntax.
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and sentences. Syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, whereas semantics is concerned with the meaning of sentences.
Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in meaning interpretation.

History

In seeking to understand the properties of language acquisition, psycholinguistics has roots in debates regarding innate versus acquired behaviors (both in biology and psychology). For some time, the concept of an innate trait was something that was not recognized in studying the psychology of the individual. However, with the redefinition of innateness as time progressed, behaviors considered innate could once again be analyzed as behaviors that interacted with the psychological aspect of an individual. After the diminished popularity of the behaviorist model, ethology reemerged as a leading train of thought within psychology, allowing the subject of language, an innate human behavior, to be examined once more within the scope of psychology.

Origin of "psycholinguistics"

The theoretical framework for psycholinguistics was first developed as the "Psychology of Language" before the end of the nineteenth century. The work of Edward Thorndike and Frederic Bartlett laid the groundwork for what would become known as psycholinguistics. In his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar, published in 1936, Jacob Kantor, a prominent psychologist at the time, used the term "psycholinguistic" as a description.

However, the term "psycholinguistics" did not become widely used until 1946, when Kantor's student Nicholas Pronko published "Psycholinguistics: A Review." [6] Pronko's ambition was to bring together a plethora of related theoretical approaches under a single umbrella. Psycholinguistics was used for the first time to refer to an interdisciplinary science "that could be coherent," as well as the title of Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok's 1954 book Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems.

Theories

Language acquisition

There are two primary theories on childhood language acquisition, though there is still much debate:

The behaviourist viewpoint holds that all language must be learned by the child; and
The innatist viewpoint holds that the abstract system of language cannot be learned, but that humans have an innate language faculty or access to what has been called "universal grammar."

Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior began the innatist perspective in 1959. (1957). This review contributed to what has been dubbed the "cognitive revolution" in psychology. Chomsky proposed that humans have an innate ability for language and that complex syntactic features like recursion are "hard-wired" in the brain. Even the most intelligent and social non-humans are thought to be incapable of acquiring these abilities. When Chomsky claimed that children learning a language have a vast search space to explore among all possible human grammars, there was no evidence that children received enough input to learn all of their language's rules. As a result, there must be another innate mechanism that gives humans the ability to learn language. According to the "innateness hypothesis," such a language faculty is what distinguishes human language from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.

Since then, the field of linguistics and psycholinguistics has been defined by pro and con responses to Chomsky. According to Chomsky's supporters, the human ability to use language (specifically, the ability to use recursion) is qualitatively different from any other animal ability. This ability could have evolved as a result of a favourable mutation or as an adaptation of skills that were originally evolved for other purposes.

Before 1960, the view that language must be learned was especially popular, and it is well represented by Jean Piaget's mentalistic theories and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap's empiricist Rudolf Carnap's empiricist Rudolf Carnap's empiricist Rudolf Carnap's empi Similarly, the behaviourist school of psychology holds that language is a learned behaviour that is shaped by conditioned response. The belief that language can be learned has recently experienced a renaissance, owing to emergentism. This viewpoint rejects the "innate" viewpoint as scientifically unfalsifiable; that is, it cannot be tested. Researchers have been able to simulate language acquisition using neural network models thanks to advances in computer technology since the 1980s.

Language comprehension

Language structures and uses are linked to the formation of ontological insights. Some regard this system as "structured cooperation between language-users" who use conceptual and semantic deference to exchange meaning and knowledge, as well as to give meaning to language, examining and describing "semantic processes bound by a'stopping' constraint that are not cases of ordinary deferring." Deferring is usually done for a reason, and a rational person will always defer if there is a good reason.

The "semantic differential" theory assumes universal distinctions such as

Typicality: that included scales such as "regular–rare", "typical–exclusive";
Reality: "imaginary–real", "evident–fantastic", "abstract–concrete";
Complexity: "complex–simple", "unlimited–limited", "mysterious–usual";
Improvement or Organization: "regular–spasmodic", "constant–changeable", "organized– disorganized", "precise–indefinite";
Stimulation: "interesting–boring", "trivial–new".

Reading

One question in the realm of language comprehension is how people understand sentences as they read (i.e., sentence processing). Experimental research has spawned several theories about the architecture and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. These theories are typically concerned with the types of information, contained in the sentence, that the reader can use to build meaning, and at what point in reading does that information becomes available to the reader. Issues such as "modular" versus "interactive" processing have been theoretical divides in the field.

A modular view of sentence processing assumes that the stages of reading a sentence operate independently as separate modules. These modules have only a limited amount of interaction with one another. One influential theory of sentence processing, the "garden-path theory," for example, states that syntactic analysis comes first. According to this theory, when a reader reads a sentence, he or she creates the simplest structure possible in order to minimise effort and cognitive load. This is accomplished without the use of semantic analysis or context-dependent information. As a result, by the time the reader gets to the word "examined" in the sentence "The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable," he or she has committed to a reading of the sentence in which the evidence is examining something because it is the simplest parsing. This commitment is made despite the fact that it results in an implausible situation: evidence cannot be used to examine something. Semantic information is processed later in this "syntax first" theory. The reader will only realise later that he or she needs to revise the initial parsing into one in which "the evidence" is being examined. In this example, readers usually recognise their error by the time they get to "by the lawyer," and they must go back and reevaluate the sentence. This reanalysis is expensive and contributes to slower reading speeds.

An interactive theory of sentence processing, such as a constraint-based lexical approach, assumes that all available information contained within a sentence can be processed at any time, in contrast to the modular view. The semantics of a sentence (such as plausibility) can come into play early on in an interactive view to help determine the structure of a sentence. As a result, in the sentence above, the reader can use plausibility information to assume that "the evidence" is being examined rather than doing the examining. There is data to support both modular and interactive views, but which is correct is debatable.

When reading, saccades can cause the mind to skip over words because it does not see them as important to the sentence, and the mind either completely omits them from the sentence or substitutes the incorrect word in their place. This is depicted in "Paris in the Spring." This is a common psychological test in which the mind will frequently skip the second "the," particularly if there is a line break between the two.

Language production

Language production refers to how people produce language, either written or spoken, in a way that conveys meanings that others can understand. Observing and analysing instances of speech errors, which include speech disfluencies such as false starts, repetition, reformulation, and constant pauses in between words or sentences, as well as slips of the tongue, like-blendings, substitutions, exchanges (e.g. Spoonerism), and various pronunciation errors, is one of the most effective ways to explain how people represent meanings using rule-governed languages.

These speech errors have important implications for understanding how language is produced because they show:

Speech is planned ahead of time: speech errors such as substitution and exchanges indicate that the speaker does not plan their entire sentence before speaking. Rather, during the speech production process, their language faculty is constantly engaged. The limitation of working memory accounts for this. Errors involving exchanges, in particular, imply that one plans one's sentence ahead of time, but only with regard to its significant ideas (e.g., the words that constitute the core meaning) and to a limited extent.
Lexicon is semantically and phonologically organised: substitution and pronunciation errors demonstrate that lexicon is organised not only by meaning, but also by form.
Morphologically complex words are assembled: blending errors within a word indicate that there appears to be a rule governing the construction of words in production (and also likely in mental lexicon). In other words, rather than retrieving morphologically complex words as chunks, speakers generate them by merging morphemes.

It is useful to distinguish three distinct stages of language production:

conceptualization: "determining what to say";
formulation: "translating the intention to say something into linguistic form";
execution: "the detailed articulatory planning and articulation itself".

Because the conceptualization phase remains largely elusive and mysterious, psycholinguistic research has focused primarily on formulation.

Methodologies

Behavioral tasks

Many of the experiments carried out in psycholinguistics, particularly early on, are behavioural in nature. Subjects are presented with linguistic stimuli and asked to respond in these studies. For example, they may be asked to make a lexical decision about a word, reproduce the stimulus, or say a visually presented word aloud. The most commonly used measures of performance in behavioural tasks are reaction times to stimuli (usually on the order of milliseconds) and the proportion of correct responses. Priming effects, in which a "priming" word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related "target" word later, are frequently used in such experiments.

Fischler (1977) investigated word encoding using a lexical-decision task as an example of how behavioural methods can be used in psycholinguistics research. He asked the audience to decide whether two strings of letters were English words. Sometimes the strings are actual English words that require a "yes" response, and other times they are non-words that require a "no" response. A subset of the licit words were semantically related (e.g., cat–dog), while others were not (e.g., bread– stem). Fischler discovered that related word pairs were responded to faster than unrelated word pairs, implying that semantic relatedness can aid in word encoding.

Eye-movements

Eye tracking has recently been used to study online language processing. The significance of understanding eye movements during reading was established by Rayner (1978). Tanenhaus et al. (1995) later used a visual-world paradigm to investigate the cognitive processes associated with spoken language. Language processing can be studied by monitoring eye movements while a subject listens to spoken language, assuming that eye movements are closely related to the current focus of attention.

Language production errors

The analysis of systematic errors in speech, as well as errors in writing and typing language, can provide evidence of the process that produced them. Speech errors, in particular, provide insight into how the mind generates language while a speaker is mid-utterance. As evidenced by the various ways in which errors can manifest themselves, speech errors are more likely to occur during the lexical, morpheme, and phoneme encoding stages of language production.

The types of speech errors, with some examples, include

Substitutions (phoneme and lexical) — replacing a sound with an unrelated sound or a word with its antonym, for example, saying "verbal outfit" instead of "verbal output" or "He rode his bike tomorrow" instead of "...yesterday";
Blends — combining two synonyms and saying "my stummy hurts" instead of "stomach" or "tummy";
Exchanges (phoneme [aka spoonerisms] and morpheme) — switching two onset sounds or two root words and saying "You hissed my mystery lectures" instead of "You missed my history lectures" or "They're Turking talkish" instead of "They're talking Turkish";
Morpheme shifts are when you change a function morpheme like "-ly" or "-ed" to another word and say "easy enoughly" instead of "easily enough".
Perseverance — starting a word incorrectly with a sound from the previous utterance, such as saying "John gave the goy a ball" instead of "John gave the boy a ball";
Anticipation — substituting a sound that belongs later in the utterance, such as saying "She drank a cot cup of tea" instead of "She drank a hot cup of tea."

Speech errors are most likely to occur during the lexical, morpheme, or phoneme encoding stages, rather than the first step of semantic encoding. This can be attributed to a speaker who is still pondering what to say; and, unless he changes his mind, cannot be misconstrued as what he intended to say.

Neuroimaging

Until recently, non-invasive medical techniques were the preferred method for language researchers to learn how language affects the brain. Severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) was once used to treat some types of epilepsy. Researchers could then investigate how such drastic surgery affected language comprehension and production. When an illness necessitated brain surgery, language researchers were able to continue their work.

Brain imaging with positron emission tomography (PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG); and transcranial magnetic stimulation are all newer, non-invasive techniques (TMS). The spatial and temporal resolutions of brain imaging techniques vary (fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons per pixel, and ERP has millisecond accuracy). For the study of psycholinguistics, each methodology has advantages and disadvantages.

Computational modeling

Another methodology is computational modelling, which refers to the practise of creating cognitive models in the form of executable computer programmes, such as the DRC model of reading and word recognition proposed by Max Coltheart and colleagues . Such programmes are useful because they require theorists to be explicit in their hypotheses and can be used to generate accurate predictions for theoretical models that are so complex that discursive analysis is untrustworthy. McClelland and Elman's TRACE model of speech perception and Franklin Chang's Dual-Path model of sentence production are two other examples of computational modelling.

Areas for further research

The study of the nature of the processes that the brain goes through in order to comprehend and produce language is known as psycholinguistics. The cohort model, for example, attempts to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input. Recent research seeks to shed light on the areas of the brain involved in language processing using new noninvasive imaging techniques.

Another unanswered question in psycholinguistics is whether the human ability to use syntax is derived from innate mental structures or social interaction, and whether some animals can be taught human language syntax.

Another major subfield of psycholinguistics is the study of first language acquisition, which is the process by which infants learn to speak, and second language acquisition. It is far more difficult for adults to learn second languages than it is for infants to learn their first (infants are able to learn more than one native language easily). As a result, sensitive periods may exist during which language can be easily learned. A significant amount of research in psycholinguistics is devoted to understanding how this ability develops and diminishes over time. It also appears that the more languages one knows, the easier it is to learn more.

The field of aphasiology is concerned with language deficits caused by brain damage. Aphasiology research can provide both advances in therapy for people suffering from aphasia and new insights into how the brain processes language.