PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

INTRODUCTION
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological

and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend

and produce language.

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language acquisition and use is the

study of language acquisition and use in relation to the psychological factors

controlling its use and recognition .

Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate

a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and

grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to

understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics

studies children's ability to learn language.

AREAS OF STUDY OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary and is studied by people in
a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and
linguistics. There are several subdivisions within
psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up
human language.
A. Linguistic-related areas:
1. Phonetics and phonology are concerned with the study of
speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on
how the brain processes and understands these sounds.
2. 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).
3. Syntax is the study of the patterns which dictate how words
are combined together to form sentences.
3. 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.
4. Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation
of meaning.

B. Psychology-related areas:
1. The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes
involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological,
phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text.
2. Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's
ability to learn and process language, usually with experimental or at
least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations
such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development
of children).
In short, psycholinguistics brings together the theoretical and
empirical tools of both psychology and linguistics to study the
mental processes underlying the acquisition and use of
language. Linguists are interested in the formal description of an
important segment of human knowledge-namely the structure of
language including speech sounds and meanings, and the
complex system of grammar which relates sounds and
meanings.
THEORIES OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Theories about how language works in the human mind
attempt to account for, among other things, how we
associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of language
and how we use syntax—that is, how we manage to put
words in the proper order to produce and understand the
strings of words we call "sentences".
CONTENTS
1. GRAMMAR AND PSYCHOLOGY
2. PSYCHOLINGUISTICS INVESTIGATIONS OF
GRAMMAR
3. LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD
4. PROBLEMS OF MEANING
5. LANGUAGE AND COGNITION
GRAMMAR AND PSYCHOLOGY
TWO KINDS OF GRAMMAR: PRESCRIPTIVE AND
DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR.
PRESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR REFERS TO THE RULES
OF HOW EDUCATED PEOPLE OUGHT TO SPEAK
AND WRITE.
DESCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR REFERS TO THE
KNOWLEDGE WHICH PEOPLE MUST HAVE IN
ORDER TO SPEAK AND UNDERSTAND
LANGUAGE.
WHAT DOES GRAMMAR DO?
Grammar lies between the speech sounds you hear or say
and the meanings you connect with them. You can only
make sense of the strings of words you hear if you know
the grammar of your language. You can communicate with
someone else if both of you have the same underlying
knowledge of the language.
STUDY THE FOLLOWING THREE
STRINGS OF WORDS.
1. Pie little blue mud make eye girl was. (string of words)
2. The little pie with mud eyes was making a blue girl.
(an anomalous sentence)
3. The little girl with blue eyes was making a mud pie.
(an unanomalous sentence)
The most obvious addition in strings 2 and 3 in comparison 1, is
order telling us the subject – verb relationship.
There is also the addition of markers: function words(the, a, with)
and suffixes(-s, -ing).
Order and various forms markers make up grammar, and convert
a disconnected string of words into a sentence.
One part of grammar, called syntax, deals with the way in which
sentences are put together.
How can a new sentence be understood or produced? To qualify
as a native speaker, one must learn rules.
LINGUISTIC INTUITIONS
Grammaticality
The sense of grammaticality includes:
 The ability to distinguish between well-formed
sentences from ungrammatical strings.
 some knowledge of degree of deviation of sentences
from English.
 the ability to interpret deviant sentences
Examples:
1. Pie little blue mud make eye girl was. (unstructured string of
words)
2. The little pie with mud eyes was making a blue girl. (an
anomalous sentence)
3. The little girl with blue eyes was making a mud pie. (an
unanomalous sentence)
4. The scene of the movie was in Chicago. (grammatical)
5. The scene that I wrote was in Chicago. (grammatical)
6. The scene of the movie and that I wrote was in Chicago. (not
grammatical)
7. The scene of the movie that I wrote was in Chicago.
(grammatical-know how (4) and (5) are put together)
8. The dog looks terrifying. (correct- usual construction)
9. The dog looks barking. (deviant-unusual construction)
10. The dog looks lamb. (deviant-unusual construction)
Grammatical Relations
When perceiving a sentence, you are able to determine which
noun is subject and which is object, what words modify a given
noun, the relationship of the noun and the verbs, and so on.
11. John is easy to please. (somebody pleases John)
12. John is eager to please. (John pleases somebody)
Sentence Relations
Another ability which syntactic theory account for is the ability
to determine underlying grammatical relations in a sentence.
13. The President makes the decisions.
14. The decisions are made by the president.
Thus you know the logical propositions underlying the active
(13) and the passive (14) sentences above are identical. The
sentences have different surface structures but they have similar
deep structures.
Ambiguity
A theory of syntax must also account for the fact that we can
recognize syntactic ambiguity. There are some sentences which
can have several interpretations.
15. Visiting relatives can be a nuisance.
To disambiguate such a sentence is to relate it to different
propositions which may be thought of as underlying sentence
(15).we can explain the ambiguity by showing that the sentences
can be related to two other sentences in which the ambiguous can
be realized in two different ways:
16. Visiting relatives are a nuisance.
17. Visiting relatives is a nuisance.
Thus, sentence (15) has one surface structure, but two deep
structures.
GRAMMAR AS THEORY
The goal of syntactic theory is to account for linguistic
intuitions. Grammar is a theory of language which should
be able to discriminate sentences from nonsentences,
assign degrees of deviance to nonsentences, relate sentence
structures to both meanings and sounds, and generate all
possible sentences of the language.
Grammar is an attempt to characterized the kind of
linguistic knowledge or competence human beings must
have in order to use language. Competence is the language
user’s knowledge of grammaticality, grammatical relations,
sentence relations, ambiguity, and so on.
COMPETENCE AND PERFORMANCE
Human performance of speaking and understanding is
intervened by many psychological variables (short span,
fatigue, switching of attention, distractibility, emotional
excitement, drugs, and so on). We must try to cut through
the maze of psychological factors that make performance
to deviate from competence in order to convince ourselves
that competence has psychological reality (exists in some
psychological sense).
PROBABILISTIC, LEFT – TO - RIGHT
MODELS
The model of grammar which has most appealed to
traditional behavioristic psychology is a left-to-right
probabilistic model in which the occurrence of each word
is determined by the immediately preceding word or series
of words. This model is similar to the chain theories of
behavior in which each response serves as a stimulus for
the next response. However, this model cannot generate all
the grammatical sentences because we have the possibility
of embedding sentences inside of other sentences.
There is another sort of argument against the attempt to account
for the understanding of sentences simply on the basis of a
knowledge of the ways in which words occur in sequence.
Consider the sentence:
(21) They are visiting firemen.
This sentence has two meanings, and one way to indicate this is
by bracketing the group of words which go together as phrases.
(21a) (they) ((are) (visiting firemen))
(21b) (they) ((are) (visiting) (firemen))
According to transformationalists, understanding a sentence is
based on knowledge of its structure.
Another way is by drawing a tree diagram:
 TREE DIAGRAM
sentence sentence

noun phrase verb phrase noun phrase verb phrase

verb noun phrase

noun phrase

noun auxiliary verb

verb adjective

They are visiting firemen they are visiting firemen

PHRASE STRUCTURE GRAMMAR
We can understand sentence (21) in two ways because it has
two constituent structures. Thus, we can break it up into two
units or constituents, in two different ways.
Example: The boy hit the ball.
Your linguistic intuition tells you that some pairs of words are
more closely related than other pairs. “The ball” feels like a
unit, but “hit the” does not. Another way to express this
intuitive feeling is to say that “The ball” can be easily replaced
by “it” – whereas “hit the” could not be easily replaced by
another single word. Likewise, “the boy can be replaced by
“he”, while “hit the ball” is larger unit that can be replaced by
a more general word like “acted” as we can see in the diagram
below. This process is called Constituent Analysis .
The boy hit the ball

He hit it

He acted
The segments of the sentences which can be treated as units are
called its “constituents”: “the ball” is a constituent, but “hit the”
is not.
The procedure of constituent analysis is made more general by
naming, or labeling the different kinds of constituent units. For
example:
“the” is an article (T) and “boy” is a noun (N); together they form
a noun phrase (NP). “The ball” is thus a noun phrase (NP). The
verb “hit” is combined with this noun phrase to form a verb
phrase (VP). At the highest level, the first noun phrase (“the
boy”) combines with the verb phrase (“hit the ball”) to make a
grammatical sentence. The name of the constituents can be
introduced into the diagram:
the boy the ball

hit
T N T N

V NP

NP VP
Another way of describing the constituent structure of a sentence
is to use a generative grammar with the rules as follows:
1. S NP + VP S
2. NP T+N
3. VP V + NP
4. T the, a NP VP

5. N boy, girl, ball

T N V NP
6. V hit

the boy hit T N

the ball