What is psycholinguistics

LENY SAILI RAHMAH, S.PD., M. HUM

Linguistics = the scientific study of language
Psychology = the scientific study of human
behavior and cognition
 Definition of psycholingustics

Psycholinguistics is an interdiciplinary field of study in

which the goals are to understand how people acquire
language, how people use language to speak and
understand one another, and how language is
represented and processed in the brain.
 Language as a means of communication

Linguistics Psycholinguistics

Language
Speaker
Message Listener
Informatio
n

Encodes Decodes
Linguistics
 Object: language The structural
components of a
language

Psycholinguistics
 object: speech process

Language as a
process
 Mind

Interpretatio Language
n/ acquisition
processing

Language
Language comprehensio
production n
 Scope

How language is acquired and produced by user

How brain works on language
Language acquisition
The difference between children language
acquisition and language learning
Linguistic interference
Language development
The role of motivation in foreign language learning
 History of psycholinguistics

Aitchison (1990) asserts that the first known

experiment in psycholinguistics was conducted by the
German philosopher, Dietrich Tiedemann.
The first experimental record in psycholinguistics is
nonetheless credited to the British psychologist Francis
Galton (1822-1911)
Wilhem Wundt, published a book on language (Die
Sprache) in 1900, covered a number of topics that are
still very much relevant in current psycholinguistics,
including child language acquisition, sign language,
language perception, and grammatical structure
 History of Psycholinguistics

Noam Chomsky is the father of psycholinguistics

Chomsky’s influence on modern linguistics and
psycholinguistics is profound, and his focus on
competence (as opposed to performance) drew
linguistics heavily in this direction
 Lingking language and the mind

Language
The inner process of the human mind
How does language relate the mind
 Human language

6 important characteristics of human language:

Displacement
Arbitrariness
Productivity
Cultural transmission
Discreteness
Duality
Displacement : the human language can refer to things in the past,
the future and even places outside the particular physical context
Arbitrariness: this suggests that a reference and the linguistic
element representing it have no actual iconic link.
Productivity: it is possible for new words to be formed in the
course of time
Cultural transmission: language is a means of transmitting culture
from one generation to another.
Discreteness: this distinctivenness is what helps to determine if a
sound is actually a phoneme or not in a language
Duality: language normally has the physical and the meaning
levels
 Inner Process of the Human Mind

Aitchison (1990) argues that the human mind is only

reflected in term of thought made tangible by
language
Steinberg, Nagata and Aline (2001) argue that the
basic mental entities used by the child acquiring the
language are actually derived from the physical world.
The processing of thoughts is what language reflects.
It is thus normal for children learning or acquiring a
language to process it within their cognitive and
environmental experiences.
 How does language relate to the mind?

Vygotsky (1962) observes that the major function

which language performs psychologically is to
communicate one’s intension and help maintain
social links. For one to convey what one has in mind,
one has to do it through a language of some sorts.
Whorf (1956) argues that language absolutely
controls one’s mindset and decides the way one uses
language
The human mind connects itself to experiences and
then transletes these into linguistic elements
 How does psycholinguistics relate to our lives?

Practical ways that psycholinguistcs relate to the

human ways of life
Relate psycholinguistics to your personal linguistics
experiences
Practical ways that psycholinguistcs relate to the human ways of life

It studies the way the human thinking process is closely

connected to language
Grammatically is highly rooted in the ability of the speaker to
control language usage
Psycholinguistics undoubtedly makes obvious, through such
practical occurrences like slips of the tongue and the
anticipation of the next phoneme in the course of discussing
Psycholinguistics also helps us to study how human beings
comprehend language.
Our environment as input to the thought processes of human
beings can also be seen as another thing that underlies the
psycholinguistic study.