PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

The term Psycholinguistics is a study of language in mind which is derived from the word
Psyche which means mind, mental and Linguistics which means study of language.

Psycholinguistics is the language processing mechanism. It deals with the mental processes a
person uses in producing and understanding language. It is concerned with the relationship
between language and the human mind.(Aitchison,2000).

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● It is the study of language in relation to society.

● Psycholinguistics the study of the mental aspects of language and speech a branch of both
linguistics and psychology.
● Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s as a
result of the Chomskyan revolution.(Baker,2011).
ASPECTS OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

● Coinage of term.
● As a separate branch of study.
● Work on Psycholinguistics.
● Areas of study.
● Methodologies.
● Language acquisition.
● Language production.
● Language comprehension.

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Mental structures and processes that allow the human mind to encode, store and retrieve
information can be described independently of language. Study on what is going on in the brain
of a child during acquisition.(Field,2005).

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION :

Language acquisition is the process by which humans

acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language as well as to produce and use words
and to communicate.Language acquisition involves structures, rules, and representation. The
capacity to use language successfully requires one to acquire a range of tools including
phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and an extensive vocabulary. Language can be
vocalized as in speech, or manual as in sign.

LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION :

In contrast to a modular account, an interactive

theory of sentence processing, such as a constraint based lexical approach assumes that all
available information contained within a sentence can be processed at any time. Under an
interactive account, for example, the semantics of a sentence can come into play early on in order
to help determine the structure of a sentence. Hence,in the sentence above, the reader would be
able to make use of plausibility information in order to assume that "the evidence is being
examined instead of doing the examining. There is data to support both modular and interactive
accounts; which account is the correct one is still up for debate.

LANGUAGE PRODUCTION :

Language production concerns how people produce

language, either in written or spoken form, in a way that conveys meanings comprehensible to
others. One of the most effective ways to explain the way people represent meanings using
rule-governed languages is by observing and analyzing instances of speech errors.

METHODOLOGIES

● Experimental Methods: sentence processing, Parsing: Analysis of the meanings of its

words and syntactic structure.
● Timed reading experiments : Longer press times for content words
Pause at the end of clause boundaries.
● Eye movements : Longer fixation times on less frequent words regressive saccades.

REFERENCES

1) Aitchison, J. (2000) The Seeds of Speech: Language Origin and Evolution, Cambridge:
Cambridge University press.
2) Baker, C. (2011) Foundations of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 5th edn, Bristol:
Multilingual Matters.
3) Field. J. (2005) Language and the Mind, London: routledge.