Psycholinguistics

An Introduction to
language Science
By Teacher Jessyca Flores
Daniel L.Everett
What does it mean to know a Language?
How Languages work?
Where do they come from?
What made languages take their current
forms?
How is language related to thought?
Are thought and language identical?
What is a language?
What does it mean to know a language?
Language Characteristics
• Semanticity

• Arbitrariness

• Discreteness

• Displacement

• Duality of patterning

• Generativity
The most fundamental question in language science:
What is language? What does it mean to know a
language?
• Semanticity: Language can communicate meaning or
words can be assigned particular meaning.

• Arbitrariness:The word that goes with an object need not

resemble the real object in any way.

• Discreteness: Refers to the idea that components of the

language are organized into a set of distinct categories,
with clear-cut boundaries between different categories.
• Displacement: Ability to convey information of space and time
(information or events happening out sight of the speaker)
(tense markers) (Mandarin). Ubiquitous Feature of human
languages is absent in animal communication systems.

• Duality of patterning: We perceive language in different

ways.Words can be detected if we decide to pay attention to
the form of the message rather than its meaning.

• Generativity: Languages have fixed number of symbols but

every large and potentially infinite number of messages that
can be created combining those symbols in different patterns
 Chief Components of language
Charles Hockett

*Grammar

*Lexicon

Languages need both of these components so

that speakers can formulate messages…
 Grammar

*Prescriptive Grammar (collections of artificial

rules).

*Descriptive Grammar (set of rules or principles

that governs the way people use the language).
“ A theory of grammar is a theory about
mental representation of linguistic
knowledge”
Ivan Sag
• Descriptive grammars explain why language takes
the form that it does … Steven Pinker and Ray
Jackendoff

• Three crucial ways that grammars regulate the combination of

symbols into messages

• 1st Grammar determines the order that symbols appear in

expressions.

• 2nd The grammar dictates different kinds of agreement.(certain

words in a sentence must appear in a specific because of the
presence of another of another word in a sentence).

• Case Marking: words appear in particular forms depending on

what grammatical functions they fulfill.
 Recursion
• Is a core property of the grammars of all languages.

• Only uniquely human component of the faculty of

language

• Only property that is specific to human language.

 Definition

*Ability to place one component inside another

component of the same type.

*It gives the language the property of discrete infinity

and the ability to generate infinite messages.
 Why does the Pirahã lack
recursion?

Cultural principles determine the form of Pirahã

grammar.
They place great store in first-hand knowledge.
• .
Sentences in the language must be assertions.

They do not have creation myths.

They do not tell fictional stories.

 Research on communication
abilities in apes

“If human forms of communication … Descended from

primitive animal forms of communications study of the
latter is likely to disclose that there is indeed
a straight line of evolution of this feature.”
(Lenneberg, 1967)
MONKEYS DON´T TALK
Spoken language requires us to make different
sounds when referring to different concepts.

The chimp vocal apparatus is not well

configured to make speech sounds.

Chimps do not have good voluntary control

over vocalizations.
 Insights and Conclusions

• Nim had lexicon (words) that he can used to

communicated mainly to beg for food or for a
certain reward.
• He lacked syntax. I can speak a chain of words
that makes not grammatical sense. (but is not
language)
• Language is lexicon with syntax.
 Insights and Conclusions

• Grammar and language are the product of

g r a d u a l e v o l u t i o n f ro m c l o s e l y re l a t e d
communication systems (the continuity
hypothesis)
• Complex speech skills were present in human
ancestors.
• Discontinuity argue that ape language skills are
qualitative different from and inferior to human
language abilities.
 Insights and Conclusions

• Language dictates perception (Individuals who

speak different languages have qualitatively
different perceptual abilities). Whorf
• Language that you speak can influence the
accomplishing of certain cognitive tasks, such as
discriminating different colors or keeping track of
large sets of objects.
 INTRODUCTION

• HUMAN MIND

• WHY IS PSYCHOLOGY ONE OF THE NEWEST

SCIENCES?

• WHY HAS THE STUDY OF MIND PROVOKED SO

MUCH RECENT ATTENTION?
 Descartes who thought extensively about mind-brain relationships, found it possible to explain
reflexes and other simple behaviors in mechanistic terms, although he did not believe that complex
thought, and language in particular, could be explained by reference to the physical brain alone.
A phrenological mapping of the brain. Phrenology
was among the first attempts to correlate mental
functions with specific parts of the brain.
 MIND AND BRAIN
• It is a powerful lens through which we can
understand our inner lives with more clarity,
integrate the brain and enhance our relationships
with others. Mindsight is a kind of focused attention
that allows us to see the internal workings of our
own minds. it help us get ourselves off the autopilot
of ingrained behaviors and habitual responses. it
let us “name and tame” the emotions we are
experiencing, rather that being overwhelmed by
them.” Daniel Siegel
 The Brain
• The brain is an organ. Is the physical place where the
mind resides.

• It is the vessel in which the electronic impulses that

create thought are contained.

• With the Brain you coordinate your moves but you use
your mind to think this moves.
 Mind
• The mind is a set of cognitive faculties including
thinking, memory, and perception. The mind is the
faculty of a human being’s reasoning and thoughts.

• Is the activity of the brain. The mind monitors the flow of

energy and information.

• it holds the power of imagination, recognition and

appreciation is responsible for processing feelings and
emotions.

• Mind is exclusive to humans.

 Psycholinguistics
• The use of language and speech as a window to the
nature and structure of the human mind is called
Psycholinguistics.

• Research questions: How are language and speech

acquired? How are language and speech produced?
How are language and speech comprehended? How
are language and speech lost?

• Four subfields ( acquisition, dissolution, production

and comprehension.)
 Views

• Diachronically

• Synchronic
 ACQUISITION PRODUCTION COMPREHENSION DISSOLUTION

Innateness Formulation
Hearing sounds language loss
crying

first words
Linguistic
The birth of grammar Articulation understanding text
disorders

reading/hearing
Child creativity Conceptualization Neurolinguistics
sentences

self-monitoring reading/hearing words

 Acquisition: when I was a
child I spoke as a child
• Developmental psycholinguistics: Examines how
speech emerges over time and how children
construct the complex structures of their mother
tongue.

• Our first efforts at speech are not words but cries.

Tennyson

• Common mistake of early students of

developmental psycholinguistics was to assume
that children had no language.
…No language but a cry
• Crying is a direct precursor to both language and speech.

• During the first few weeks of a child's life crying is an

autonomic response to noxious stimuli, triggered by the
nervous system as a primary reflex.

• Crying is a direct preparation for a lifetime of vocal

communication.

• crying trains babies to time their breathing patterns so

that eventually they learn how to play their lungs like
bagpipes.
 continue…
• Social Interaction influences language acquisition even
as early as the cradle.

• Marginal Babbling: infants produce a few consonants.

• Canonical babbling ( age around eight months old) a

child can produce syllables.

• Psycholinguistic irony (The child acquires phonemes

and make sounds from languages that are not his or her
mother tongue, meaning that just by uttering sounds he
or she acquires sounds that he or she has never heard
before.
 continue…
• suprasegmental or prosodic feature: speech feature
such as stress and tone.

• First psycholinguistic stage: Babbling (strong

evidence that infants are influenced by the exposure to
their mother tongue).
 First words
• Idiomorphs (words they invent)

• Egocentric speech (Piaget) They are the center of

the Universe.

• transition from the iconic creature to a symbolic

human being.

• “That living word awakened my soul, gave it light,

hope, joy, set it free…I left the well-house eager to
learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave
birth to a new thought… “ Hellen Keller. 1903. The
Story of my life.
 First words
• It represents a step into symbolic communication.

• It is the start of the rapid vocabulary growth with

which thoughts, feelings and perceptions as well
as other areas of linguistic development are
framed.
The Birth of grammar
• holophrastic stage: The use of single words as
skeletal sentences.

• Holophrastic speech is the bridge from the primitive

land of cries,words, and names across into the brave
new world of phrases, clauses and sentences.

• Transformational Generative grammar (TG) grammar.

(The most influential school of linguistics to affect the
study of language over the past four decades)

• it is involve with the study of sentences.

• Children progress through different stages of

grammatical development, measured largely by the
average number of words.every time they speak.
• Children are already sensitive to the word order
their mother tongue.

• Nim Chimsky.

• Leibnitz - Noam Chomsky TG school.

• Conclusion is that young humans very rapidly

acquire the notion that words do not combine
randomly but follow a systematic pattern of
permissible sequences.
Evidence for innateness
• Early linguistic learning comes from an innately
specified language ability in human beings.

• LAD

• UG

• Steven Pinker ( The language instinct)

• DNA
 Childish Creativity
• Children produce all kinds of expressions they have
never rarely heard in their environment, but which they
create on their own in their attempts to construct, or
reconstruct, their mother tongue.

• Creativity construction is yet another example of the

relatively autonomy of the child’s linguistic system in
relation to the adult versionn of the language.

• They are remarkably sensitive to the subtle but inherent

grammatical characteristics of the language they are
learning.
 Speech Production and
Comprehension
• Foreign accent syndrome.

• As a result of brain damage.

• 1900s first cases.

• Brain injury changes the mental and motor

processes involved in speech production.

• describe some of the hidden complexity of the

speech production system.
continue
• ideas to convey.

• 1st you have an idea, then you pick words and

express the idea, finally you say the words.

• Mental processes that intervene between thinking

and producing the physical movements that create
speech are quite complex.

• Acoustic Signal (Pattern of sound waves).

• how listeners overcome obstacles created by the

peculiar acoustic properties of speech.
 Speech Production
• The three kinds of mental operation that speech
production are the following

• conceptualization (think of something to say)

• formulation (once you have something to say, you figure

out a good way to express that idea given the tools that
your language provides)

• Articulation.( physical action) Speech requires tight control

over more than 100 muscles moving simultaneously to
make a sound wave that a listener can perceive.
Speech Production Model
Willem Levelt
WEAVER++ Model
 continue
• Speech production is viewed as involving a sequence of
mental processes.

• 1st Choose the idea (make sure that your idea lines up with
words that you have in your language, second the output
of this process a lexical concept.

• We calculate the best way to organize the sequence of

phonemes into syllables.

• Syllables serve as the basis of production.

• The speech planning system activates a set of morphemes

or words, and then organize those morphemes or words
into a set of syllables.
 continue
• The production of the syllabification process is a set of
phonological words.

• In the WEAVER++ model a phonological word is a set

of syllables that is produced as a single unit.

• We speak in phonological words rather than in

morphemes and lexical words.

• By activating a number of lemmas and morphemes you

plan the actual speech movements. One phonological
word at a time.
• Production begins with a set of ideas that the speaker wishes
to express.In the next step those ideas are tied to lexical
concepts,lemmas that correspond to those lexical concepts
become activated. This provides information about the
morphological properties of words, including how words can
be combined. A set of morphemes has been activated and
organized into a sequence, the speech sounds ( phonemes)
that are required can be activated and place in a sequence.
The outcome is a set of phonological words consisting of a
sequence of syllable-size frames.
SPEECH ERRORS
• viewed speech errors as a window into the
unconscious mind.

• revealed our true inner thoughts.

• thoughts that we suppressed in order to be polite.

 continue

• Modern Psycholinguistics ( reflecting breakdowns in

various components of the speech production process)

• understanding of speech production.

• speech errors are not random.

• particularly, slips of the tongue.

• “slips of the tongue can be seen as products of the
productivity of language. A slip is an unintended novelty.
Word errors create syntactic novelties; morphemic errors
create novel word; and sound errors create nove, but
phonologically legal. combinations of sounds.” (Dell,1986)
Semantic Substitution error

• ( reflects the conceptual preparation or lexical

selection component of the speech production
process).

• conceptual preparation if an individual mistakenly

focuses on the wrong (non-linguistic) concept.

• reflect the way (non-linguistic) concepts are related

to one another
• positional constraint( when sounds trade places, they
almost always come from the same part of the word, usually
the first phoneme)

• positional constraint reflects the way individual phonemes

are activated and inserted into frames.

• most errors respect the positional constrain.

• word exchange errors ( is produced in a different position)

My boyfriend plays the guitar/ the guitar plays my boyfriend.

• sound exchange errors ( respect the category constraint)

big feet/ fig beet

• category( parts of speech, such as noun, verb, adjective)

 Access interruptus: tip of the
tongue experiences
• Happens when you are trying to retrieve a word, you
have a strong subjective impression that you know the
word, but you are temporarily unable to consciously
recall and pronounce that word.

• Occurs when you have accessed the correct lemma

but you have been unable to fully activate the
phonological information that goes along with the
lemma.

• Are taken as evidence for the distinction between

semantic activation and phonological activation.
Access interruptus: tip of the
tongue experiences
• Method of measuring TOT experiences (Prospecting)

• A variety of results point to phonological encoding, rather

than semantic processes, as being the cause of the
problem.

• Words that we encounter more infrequently are more likely

to produce a TOT experience then words that we
encounter more frequently.

• TOTs probably occur because of there is a weak

connection between the meaning and the sound of a word.
 Access interruptus: tip of the
tongue experiences
• A recent study by Dr Lori James of the University of California and Dr
Deborah Burke of Pomona College suggests this as a cause.How are
words held in memory? A lot of emphasis has been placed on the
importance of semantic information — the meaning of words. But it
may be that the sound of a word is as important as its meaning.

• If the connection between that meaning and the sound information is

not strong enough, the sound information won’t be activated strongly
enough to allow you to retrieve all of it.

• Drs James and Burke think that TOTs occur because of weak
connections between the meaning and the sound of a word.
 Spoonerisms-slips of the tongue
Look at the following sample-spoonerisms in Spanish and decide of
the type of spoonerism it is.
Intercambio, perseveración, dezplazamiento, fusión,
adición.

1 Esta tarde viene tus (vienes tú)

2 Con Samor a jabón (sabor a jamón)

3 ¡Qué verguenzia! (¡Qué verguenza!)

4 Se me ha olvidado coger el colso (coger el bolso)

5 Me encanta el jugo de manzándaros (manzana/

arándanos)
 Picture Naming and picture-
word interference studies
• Early Studies in picture recognition and picture naming show
that people take longer times to recognize and name
concepts that we used less frequently in speech or writing.
(Oldfield & Wingfield 1965; Wingfield, 1968)

• how do you find the word you need to express a concept,

and how do you activate the sounds that make up the word?

• The concepts or words that we are familiar with are easy to

remember and besides faster to remember too.

• The ones that we know the less it takes longer time to be

remember.
Picture Naming and picture-
word interference studies
• Additional research deals with how concepts are organized
and how they are related to one another in long-term memory.

• Do we activate just the concept we need right when we need

it?

• Or do we need to shift through a set of activated concepts

before we can select the one we need?

• Picture naming research claims that concepts do compete

with one another for selection during the process of speech
production ( Dell et al., 1997 Garrett, 1975; Griffin & Ferreira,
2006)
Picture Naming and picture-
word interference studies
Picture naming research used three types of
conditions (stimuli) for the naming of the pictures
presented to the informants.

• The identity condition.

• The semantic condition

• The phonological condition

Picture Naming and picture-
word interference studies
• The semantic condition produces interference effects
whereby people are slower to name pictures when the
overlapping word has a similar meaning to the object in
the picture ( Cutting & Ferreira, 1999)

• However, when the overlapping word has a similar-

sounding name to the picture, people name the object in
the picture faster.

• Picture naming research that relied on picture-word

interference experiments reinforce the distinction between
conceptual/ semantic processes and phonological
encoding processes in speech production.
 The spreading activation
model of speech production
• WEAVER ++ Recap

• Describe a set of mental representations that is involved in

speaking which are:

• Concepts

• Lemmas ( A mental abstraction of a word that has been

mentally selected for a spoken word )

• Syllabified metrical representations

• gestural scores
 The spreading activation
model of speech production
• It also assumes a specific kind of information flow
as people go from activated concepts to activated
lemmas to activated sets of syllabified phonemes

• The model claims a strict feed forward pattern

activation and no mutually inhibitory links between
representations at a given level of representation.

• Mutual inhibition means that as one mental

representation gain activation it sends signals that
reduce the activation of other representations.
 The spreading activation
model of speech production
• Production begins with a set of activated concepts.

• this leads to activation of a set of lemmas.

• Before phonological (sound)information can be

activated, one of those lemmas must be selected
for further processing.

• The phonological encoding system only works on

the one lemma that gets selected.
 The spreading activation
model of speech production
• WEAVER ++ Falls within the feed forward class of processing
models.

• Because information only moves in one direction in the system,

from concepts to lemmas to lexemes to phonemes.

• The system does not allow activation to feed back in the

opposite direction.

• Lexemes may not feed back and influence the activation of

lemmas.

• And lemmas may not feed back and influence the activation of
concepts.
 The spreading activation
model of speech production
• Dell’s spreading activation model:

• According to Dell (1986) and Dell et al (1997), information is allowed to flow both in
a feed forward direction ( WEAVER++) and in a feedback direction (Opposite to
WEAVER++).

• Activation is allowed to cascade through the system.

• In WEAVER++, selection has to take place at one level of the system before
activation starts to build up at the next.

• No phonemes get activated till lemma selection is complete.

• In Dells´s spreading activation model, as soon as activity begins at one level,

activation spreads to the next level.

• Thus, selection doesn't necessarily occur at one level before activity is seen at the
next.
 The spreading activation
model of speech production
• This is due to the fact that this model assumes
feedback between levels of representation.

• If the lemma for “cat” gains some activation. it will

feed back to the concept layer and reinforce
activation of the “cat” conceptual representation.

• If the phonological information associated with the

pronunciation /kat/ begins to be activated, it will
feed back and reinforce the activation of the “cat”
lemma.
 The lexical bias effect
• Feedback connections from the phonological (sound)
processors to the lemma (abstract word form) level help
explain the lexical bias effect.

• The lexical bias effect refers to the fact when people

produce sound exchange errors, more often than not, the
thing that they actually produce is a real word.

• Speech errors almost never violate phonotactic constrains

(rules about how phonemes can be combined)

• They create real words more often than they should purely
by chance.
 Potential limitations of
lemma theory
• The lemma is viewed as a pre-phonological (pre-sound)
mental representation that captures information about a
word`s meaning and the way it can interact with other
words in an expression.

• Alfonso Caramazza argues with the lemma theories

because the evidence from patients with brain damage.

• Brain damage can lead to language production

difficulties.and different types of damage can lead to
different patterns of difficulties ( Caramazza,1997)
Comprehension: understanding
what we hear and read
• comprehension seems to be nothing more than the
recognition of a sequential string of a linguistic
symbols, albeit at a very rapid pace.

• The research shows that is most situations listeners

and readers use a great deal of information other
than the actual language being produce to help
them decipher the linguistic symbols they hear or
see.
 The comprehension of
sounds
• Is not just the accurate perception of the sequences of sounds
or words that hit our ears.

• Phoneme restoration effect. (The insertion of a different missing

sound (phoneme) to create a separate but appropriate (eel)
word in each sentence.

• I It was found that the eel was on the axle.

• II It was found that the eel was on the shoe.

• III It was found that the eel was on the orange.

• IV It was found that the eel was on the table.

 The comprehension of
sounds
• We don't necessarily hear each of the words spoken to them.
Comprehension is not passive.

• Comprehension is strongly influenced by the slightest of

changes in discourse

• Listeners and readers process chunks of information and

sometimes wait to make decisions on what is comprehended
until much later in the sequence.

• We don't seem to listen to each word individually and

comprehend its meaning in isolation, we seek contextual
consistency and plausibility, even if it comes to adding a
sound or inventing a word that wasn't actually spoken
 The comprehension of
sounds
• Phoneticians have discovered that the main feature which
English speakers attend to, albeit unconsciously is the Voice
onset timing (VOT) of the initial consonant.

• The crucial clue that separates the voiced /b/ and its voiceless
counterpart /p/ is a VOT of a scant 50 milliseconds.

• Penny/ Benny ( depends on an ability to perceive a voicing

delay of one twentieth of a second.

• Myriad

• Humans are actually born with the ability to focus in on VOT

differences in the speech sounds they hear.
 The comprehension of
sounds
• IF a VOT is longer than 30 milliseconds we hear bar, if
is shorter the perception result is Par and Bar.

• Voice onset timing it is the point when vocal fold

vibration crucial starts relative to the release of closure.

• Innate ability to hear speech sounds categorically to

acquire the appropriate VOT settings.

• Learning to comprehend, like all aspects of language

acquisition, is again a merger of both nature and
nurture.
 The comprehension of
words
• The comprehension of words is indeed a very complex
psycholinguistic process.

• Parallel Distriuted Processing (PDP) We use several

separate but simultaneous and parallel processes
when we try to understand spoken or written language.

• Logogen Model of comprehension ( when you hear a

word in a conversation or see it on the printed page,
you stimulate and individual logged, or lexical
detection device, for that word).
 Conclusions
• The research has shown that we are affected by context,
and that our understanding is both facilitated and
complicated by different pieces of knowledge that we
possess for each Logogen.

• From the TOT phenomenon we learn that we have

access to a dictionary-like memory for words.

• The meaning of a word immediately triggers a spreading

activation of associations which help us understand it in
many different contexts, and bring other related words to
mind.
 Conclusions
• People remember the “what” that is spoken or written better
than the “ how”

• comprehension of larger units of language indicates the

importance of the meaning.

• Texts that fit into a context which we understand and expect

are comprehended more quickly and remembered more
readily than ones which are presented to us without a context.

• PDP complex model of comprehension can begin to account

for the way readers and listeners comprehend the millions of
linguistic messages
Bilingual Language Processing
Bilingual Language Processing
• The majority of the world’s language users are bilingual.

• Bilinguals access both L1 lexical representations and language-external

conceptual representations when they encounter words in their L2.

• The strength of connections between L2 labels and L1 labels, and

between L2 labels and concepts,changes as the L2 learner increases
her/ his proficiency in the L2.

• Highly proficient bilinguals have representations from both of their

languages activated simultaneously.

• Bilinguals develop powerful mental mechanisms to make sure that they

activate the appropriate representations at the appropriate times to
accomplish their current goals.
 Bilingual Language Processing
• Language Scientist have not nailed down the precise nature of
the mental process that give proficient bilinguals such
exquisite control over their production and comprehension
processes.

• Neurophysiological and neuroimaging research indicates that

a bilingual’s two languages share space in the brain.

• Subtly different patterns of activation occur for the L1 and

L2, and differences appear as well when bilinguals switch
languages, depending on whether the switch is from the
more dominant to the less dominant language or vice versa.

• Bilinguals are specially advantaged in the area of cognitive

control and executive function.
Dissolution:Language loss
Dissolution:Language loss
• Among the world’s more than five billion speakers, only a
remarkably small number of them are afflicted with any of the
communicative anomalies.

• It is amazing that dissolution is a comparative rarity and not the

norm.

• The everyday use of language without disorders in acquisition,

production or comprehension is a wonder of miraculous
proportions.

• language and speech enjoy a unique neurological status in the

human brained we find support for the notion that the capacity to
comprehend and produce language is hard- wired to the mid-
central area of the left hemisphere for most adults.
Dissolution:Language
• For young children especially, language seems to be
more diffusely controlled by both hemispheres.

• Why the neurolinguistics evidence tends to support the

independence of speech and language from other
aspects of behavior, whereas the psycholinguistic data
suggest just the opposite that language is part and parcel
of cognition and perception.

• Language seems to be closely related to others aspects

of human behavior particularly to cognition.

• Cognition: The mental action or process of acquiring

knowledge and understanding through though,
experience, and the senses.