Language Behaviour: Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics investigates the mental

mechanisms underlying language
processing. (Cognitive)
How to perceive words and store them in the mind, how to
understand a sentence, how to learn to read, how language
and writing systems influence mental organizations.
What is Psycholinguistics
Two Aspects:
Language Comprehension how we understand the
meaning of words and sentences (receptive process)
Language Production how we speak and use language
(productive process)
Example: Visual Word Recognition
When people encounter a printed word,
how do they identify it?
Properties of the word
Visual or auditory (Modality)
Orthographic whether a word is constructed in a legal
way (e.g. math vs mtah)
Phonological (syllable: /cat/; phoneme: /k/, /e/, /t/,
Meaning
Time course of activation of the 3 types of linguistic info in
visual word identification