THE SCOPE OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

Psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science, and is the study of how
individuals comprehend, produce and acquire language.

It mainly addresses two key questions:

1. What knowledge of language is needed for us to use the language?

2. What cognitive processes are involved in the ordinary use of language?

In a sense, we must know a language in order to use it, but normally we are not
fully aware of this knowledge. We must have a tacit knowledge.

Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge of how to perform various acts, whereas
explicit knowledge refers to the knowledge of the processes or mechanisms used
in these acts.

We sometimes know how to do something without knowing how we do it.

Ex: a tennis man might know how to serve a ball 150 kms/hour but might have
little or no explicit knowledge of the muscles that involved in this act.

Similarly, we may distinguish between knowing how to speak and knowing what
processes are involved in producing or understanding a speech; generally, much
of our linguistic knowledge is tacit rather than explicit.

Let us briefly examine some examples of this interplay, to illustrate both the
concept of “linguistic knowledge” and the concept of “cognitive processing” in a
way that highlights the types of questions a psycholinguist is likely to ask.

Understanding Indirect Requests

What happens when we comprehend a sentence like:

Can you shut the door?

Will you shut the door?

Why not shut the door?

Must you shut the door?

Literally, this sentence asks if we have the ability to shut the door, but everybody
assumes the speaker is asking us (in an indirect manner) to shut the door.

An interesting fact about indirect speech acts is that although there is no direct
relationship between the form of the sentence and its intended meaning,
listeners apparently have little trouble comprehending these speech acts.

Garden-path Sentences

Is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader’s most
likely interpretation will be incorrect.

Example: the novice accepted the deal before he had a chance to check his
finances.

Subjective impression is one of the following a garden path to a predictable

destination until it is obvious that you were mistaken in your original
interpretation and decided to backtrack and reinterpret your sentences.

This is because of the knowledge we stored in our memory at least 2 different

meanings of the word “deal” (business transaction/card games)

Language in Aphasia

Aphasia is a language disorder, a person who doesn’t have the ability to put
words together. A person may have the deficiency in language production and
comprehension.

Broca’s Aphasia

A person who has the difficulty in reproducing speech, frequently omit small
words but able to understand a language.

Wernicke’s Aphasia

Able to produce speech but most of the words lack coherence and unaware of
their mistakes.
Language in Children

A concern to psycholinguists is the language acquisition.

Example:

a one-year old baby interacting with her mother and saying the word “milk”, the
mother doesn’t see it as a word but a request