Introduction: Basic Concepts: Course: Psycholinguistics

Introduction: Basic Concepts
Course: Psycholinguistics
What is Psycholinguistics?
Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary 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.
The Creativity of Human Language
Language is a system that allows people
immense creativity.
• We can use language to communicate
anything we can think of.
• Language is used to communicate, to
interact socially, to entertain, and to inform.
Language as Distinct from Speech,
Thought, and Communication
In ordinary circumstances language is used to
convey thoughts through speech. It is a special
system, however, that functions
independently of speech, writing, thought,
and communication.
Some Characteristics of the Linguistic
System
• Language is a formal system for pairing signals
with meanings. This pairing can go either way.
• When people produce a sentence, they use
language to encode the meaning that they
wish to convey into a sequence of speech
sounds. When people understand a spoken
sentence, language allows them to reverse the
process and decode a speaker’s speech to
recover the intended meaning.
The Universality of Human Language
• All human languages have a grammar and a lexicon.
The fact that all humans have languages of similar
organization and function strongly suggests that
language is part of the human biological capital.
• Linguists are interested in understanding what is
specific and what is universal, not only about
knowledge of language but also about the mechanisms
that put that knowledge of language to use.
• The majority of the world’s population is bilingual or
multilingual, and most of the world’s children grow up
in environments that expose them to multiple
languages.
Implications for the Acquisition of
Language
• Language acquisition is more similar to the
acquisition of other skills that develop in early
childhood, such as walking, than it is to skills
that are learned later in life, such as riding
a bicycle.
• The rapid, effortless, and natural acquisition of
language by children is likely a result of the fact that
language is a faculty of the human brain. As the brain
develops, it organizes the language the child is
exposed to in ways that are common to all humans.
Implications for the Acquisition of
Language
• This picture is complicated somewhat by
second language acquisition after early
childhood, because learning a language as a
teenager or as an adult is perceived as being
very difficult, especially compared to the ease
with which we learned our first language.
How Language Pairs Sound and
Meaning
• In any human language, the principles and
rules of the grammar organize words from the
lexicon into sentences used to convey
meaning. Three kinds of rule systems make up
a grammar: Phonological rules, Morphological
rules, and syntactic rules.
• It is a fundamental concept inpsycholinguistics
• that the meaning of a sentence is a function of
• the meaning of individual words and how
those words are organized structurally.
Linguistic Competence vs. Linguistic
Performance
• A grammar and a lexicon are those components of
language that allow sounds and meanings to be
paired.
• Linguistic competence refers to the knowledge of
language that is in a person’s brain (or mind),
knowledge that provides a system for pairing sound
and meaning.
• Linguistic performance, in contrast, is the use of such
knowledge in the actual processing of sentences, by
which we mean their production and
comprehension.
Performance
Performance
• Exchanging ideas using speech is so
commonplace that people never think about
the complex cognitive processes that underlie
that experience.
• Like the complex processes underlying most of
the activities of living – walking, breathing,
sleeping – the activities involved in the
production and perception of sentences are
completely unconscious.
Neurolinguistics
• Neurolinguistics is the study of how language

is represented in the brain: that is, how and
where our brains store our knowledge of the
language (or languages) that we speak,
understand, read, and write, what happens in
our brains as we acquire that knowledge, and
what happens as we use it in our everyday
lives
Neurolinguists try to answer
questions like these:
• What about our brains makes human
language possible.
• why is our communication system so
elaborate and so different from that of other
animals?
• Does language use the same kind of neural
computation as other cognitive systems, such
as music or mathematics?
Contin...........
• Where in your brain is a word that you've
learned?
• How does a word ‘come to mind’ when you
need it (and why does it sometimes not come
to you?).
• If you know two languages, how do you switch
between them and how do you keep them
from interfering with each other?
Questions??????
• How our brains work
• Where is language in the brain?

Rub the brain
• If you learn two languages from birth, how is
your brain different from the brain of
someone who speaks only one language, and
why?
• Is the left side of your brain really ‘the
language side’?
• If you lose the ability to talk or to read
because of a stroke or other brain injury, how
well can you learn to talk again?

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Introduction: Basic Concepts

• Neurolinguistics is the study of how language

• Where is language in the brain?

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