NAME : Manar Naguib .

ID : 5511042 .

Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is about the relation between
linguistics and psychology. It is the use of language and
speech as a window to the nature and structure of the
human mind. The psychology of language is a term often
used as a synonym for psycholinguistics. There is a
difference between the brain and the mind. The brain is the
physical organ, while the mind is the psychological organ.
Psycholinguists discusses four subfields. Firstly, how
language is acquired. Secondly, how language is produced.
Thirdly, how language is comprehnded. Finally, how
language is lost. In addition, language acquisition is a must.
Anyone must acquire language. The human's brain and mind
are designed to acquire a language. Language acquisition
starts with producing sounds.
There are different kinds of language acquisition, such
as crying, cooing, and babbling. Firstly, crying is the very
first stage of language acquisition. Crying is a kind of
language without speech. Crying helps the child to learn how
to produce linguistic sounds. In addition , crying is a sort of
language communication. Crying is completely iconic. The
hungrier a baby becomes, the louder and louder the crying.
In the first month or two the child's crying becomes more
differentiated and more symbolic. Secondly, the child starts
to coo; making soft gurguling sounds. Cooing is the stage
where the child starts to produce human sounds. Finally,
when the child is about six months old, he starts to babble.
Babbling refers to the child's ability to produce phonemes.

After crying, cooing, and babbling , the child's early

language developed. The child starts to produce the first
words. Children often use idimorphs; words the invent for
themselves. Children have their own semantic system.
Forexample, one psychologuist recorded that when his
daughter was about one year old, she came with the word
"kakka" as the word for milk. Moreover, the child is the
center of his universe. He thinks he owns everything. This
stage is called egocentric speech. Most of the time in this
stage , the child uses I, my, and mine.
The next stage is called the birth of grammar. In this
stage, the child starts to use one word as a sentence. This
stage is called holophrastic stage. Holophrastic means one
word. In this stage, the child starts to use one word instead
of a whole sentence. For example, the child uses the word
"Milk!"instead of "I'd have some milk."In addition,
transformational Generative (GT) grammar is the most
influential school of linguistics. It has always been involved
most centrally in the study of sentences. Child creativity is
one of the most imprtant stages. In this stage, the child
starts to create new sentence structure and new words. It is
very difficult for a child to follow the rules of the language.
For example, it is very difficult for a child to to follow the
irregular verbs. The child may say "seed" instead of "saw",
"goed' instead of "went", or "thinked" instead of "thought".
Stages of linguistic development are very important
stages. Children must pass through three stages to say a
whole sentence or a WH question correctly. In stage I, they
use WH words, such as what, why, where, and when, but
they use them without auxiliary verbs. For example, " where
mommy go ?" In stage II, the child starts to use auxiliary
verbs, but the child does not put them in the right place. For
example, "why doggie can't see ?" In stage III, the child

starts to use WH questions correctly. For example, the child

can say " why don't you know?"
The next stage is language production. Psycholinguists
become excited about a new way od discovering how we put
words in our mouths or how we produce language. They start
to look at what happen when we trip over our tongues. Slips
of the tongue differs from stammering andaphasia which are
caused due to brain damage. Slips of the tongue are normal.
What proofs that they are normal is that when our friends
spot our mistake, we can immediately correct what we said.
In stammering, the error remains uncorrected.
When we misspeak, we make errors with the framwork
of a certain language structure. Mistakes occur at
predictable points and predictable patterns. For example, a
person may say "a leading list " instead of " a reading list".
Psycholinguists find that slips of the tongue insightful. There
is a difference between the native speaker errors and the
non native speaker errors. The native speaker will correct
themselves when the err because their mistake is a
production problem, while non native speaker may not
recognize exactly what was wrong because his mistake is
due to lack of knowledge.
The planning of higher levels of speech is another way
of trying to understand the process of producing language is
to analyze steps we have to take and the decisions we have
to make in order to produce an intended utterance.
Pragmatics is the study of what people mean when they use
language in normal social interaction , or those who study
sociolinguistics the study of why we say what to whom,
when, and where. In articulation, the brain gives the vocal
organs a message to start articulating. In self montoring we
have direct evidence of what is happening when people
compose speech. The field of Second Language Acquisition

(SLA) classified slips of the tongue and the pen mistakes.

Mistakes are production problems and the can be corrected.
Errors are committed by non native speakers.
Language Comprehension means understanding what
we hear and what we read. We decode our ideas and
thoughts into words, phrases, and sentences. We have
language comprehension in different levels; sounds level,
words level, sentences level, and texts level. Firstly , the
comprehension of sounds. People do not necessarily hear
what each of the words spoken to them. We do not seem to
listen to each word individually and comprehend its meaning
in isolation; we understand the word from the contextual
meaning even if there is a missing letter or two from the
word. Secondly, the comprehension of words is much more
complex than the processing of phonemes. The
comprehension of words is indeed a very complex
psychologuistic process.
Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) is one model that
psychologuists have adopted to account for this complexity.
The PDP perspective argues that we use several separate
but simultaneous and parallel processes when we try to
understand spoken or written language. A clear example of
the usefulness of a PDP approach to comprehension of words
is an experience many of us encounter on an almost daily
basis , what psychologists term the Tip Of The Tongue (TOT)
phenomenon. Thirdly, the comprehension of sentences.
Chomsky's model claimed that all sentences were generated
from a phrase structure skeleton which was the fleshed out
into everyday utterances by a series of transformational
rules. These transformations were powerful and they could
creat many varieties of ' surface structure' by rearranging,
deleting, adding, or subtitling words which where found in
the deep structire of the original PS skeleton. Finally, the

comprehension of texts. In addition to the research on

sounds, words, and sentences, psycholinguists have also
examined the way we process texts. Mnemonists are people
who have a rare and uncanny ability to recall texts that they
have heard or read. Our memory is rather poor for structure
but is comparatively very accurate for content.
Language loss is not a must which means that there are
reasons for language loss. Language loss can be caused by
an unhappy accident , a disease, or genetic disorder. Aphasia
is one of the important stages in language loss. The brain is
responsible for our language and if this physical part
affected it will affect our language. The human brain has two
separate identical cerebal hemispheres. There is a link
between the left and the right hemispheres. If we put our left
hand over your left ear so the palm of you hand clapped over
your ear hole. The first two fingers of your hand is on the
part of our brain that is responsible for our language. In
addition, Broca's aphasia is characterized by speech and
writing which is slow, very hesitant, and in severe cases,
completely inhibited. Usually the production of key words,
like subjects, verbs, and objects, is hesitant and inaccurate.
Wernicke's aphasia; speech production and writing are pretty
much intact, but because the sensory cortex is damaged,
patients experience a great deal trouble processing linguistic
input. Moreover, The broca's aphasia struggles to search for
appropriate words and ends up producing mostly nouns. The
speech of the Wernicke's aphasia appeares to be series of
cohesive phrases and clauses, without coherence or
apparent communicative purpose.
Stattering and autism are two rare cases of dissolution
from non damaged brains . Firstly , Stuttering is one of the
most common articulation problems. Stuttering reveals
psycholinguists information about how speech is organized

and planed. Secondly, autism is much less common. An

autistic infant has a huge rejection of human interaction. He
ignores eye and face contacts. Autism is aften referred to as
childhood schizophrenia. Finally, language loss through aging
is caused due to the damage of the brain cells through
aging. The more we grow up , the more we loss our physical
and mental capability.