What is psycholinguistics?
المؤلف:
Paul Warren
المصدر:
Introducing Psycholinguistics
الجزء والصفحة:
P4
2025-10-28
47
What is psycholinguistics?
The rather disparate observations in the preceding section illustrate just a few of the areas of interest in psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics can be defined as the study of the mental representations and processes involved in language use, including the production, comprehension and storage of spoken and written language. A number of issues arise from this definition. Some are to do with e ese a o s, such as:
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 a listed near the similar sounding word a or near the meaning-related word or neither or both?
Do we have phoneme-sized chunks of language in our heads That is, as part of recognising the word a do we also recognise the component sounds /k/, / æ / and /t/
Do literate people have letter-sized chunks filling equivalent roles for the processing of written language?
How is the meaning of a sentence represented in our memory?
Is go vernment a single word or gevern + ment?
Is the plural form as represented in the lexicon, or just the singular cat?
Other questions concern the oesses that might operate on those representations:
How do we recognise words so effortlessly?
Do we analyse the speech signal phoneme-by-phoneme or do we identify complete syllables or even larger units?
Do we recognise go vernment as a complete form or do we have to construct it from go vern + ment ?
If cats is not represented in the lexicon, does that mean that we use a rule to get the plural form of cat, and how does this work for irregular plurals like children?
When we speak, how do we convert an idea into an utterance?
As listeners, how do we get from hearing an utterance to developing our own representation of the ideas being expressed by that utterance?
What stages do we have to go through during the construction of utterances For example, do we first generate a sentence structure and only then populate it with words from our mental lexicon, or do we first choose words and 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?
The outline sketch of language use in Figure 1.2 gives an overview of areas of interest in psycholinguistics as well as providing the basic structure of this book, which has chapters on language production roughly following the progression shown in the second column and on comprehension fourth column. Psycholinguistics clearly has links to other areas of linguistic study, and some of these are shown in the final column. From the language producer’s speaker’s, writer’s perspective, the pro duction of a message takes us from an underlying intention, through stages of planning sentence structures and selecting words, to the articulation of that intention as a sequence of sounds or letters, as shown by the arrow.
From the comprehender’s listener’s, reader’s viewpoint, the goal is to perceive or recognise elements such as letters and sounds in the input, to recognise words and to work out the connections between these words in sentence structures, in order to arrive at a message-level interpretation. The arrow in the comprehension’ column shows such a bottom-up’ flow of information from the input to an interpretation. This is a simplification, though, as there is evidence for top-down’ information flow too, e.g. when a listener starts to gain an understanding of the sentence they are hearing this can influence the efficiency with which they recognise sub sequent words in the sentence. Most psycholinguists today support the idea of interactive processing in both production and comprehension, with information flowing in both directions bottom-up and top-down as well as between elements at the same level so recognising one word has an effect on the likelihood of recognising similar words.
It is reasonable to claim that the main focal areas of psycholinguistics have tended to be sentences and words. So, production studies have focused on the generation of sentence structure and on syntactic planning, as well as on word finding and word building. Similarly, much of the study of comprehension has dealt with word recognition and sentence parsing working out the syntactic structure of sentences. The study of these processes has in turn involved consideration of the representation of words and of grammar.
In effect there are many more fields’ than this, dealing with many subprocesses, such as the perception of letters and of speech sounds, the processing of different kinds of word endings, and so on. In addition, these fields are not always clearly distinct, neither in terms of research nor in terms of the ways in which the processor operates. For instance, does our choice of words influence our choice of sentence structure, does sentence-level interpretation influence phonetic perception, does the spoken form of a word affect our silent reading of it, and so on
Although the discussion above has tried to be inclusive of both spoken and written language, the content of this book shows a bias towards the production and comprehension of spoken language. To an extent this is a personal bias, since the author’s own research interests are in this area, but it also reflects the primacy of the spoken language in the development both of the individual and of the species, as well as a general bias in the research literature.
الاكثر قراءة في Linguistics fields
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