UNIVERSITY OF BAGHDAD

College of Education for women

Higher Studies in Iraq
English Language Department

What is Psycholinguistics and what are the scopes of it?

by

Shahad Qahtan Abdulameer

Psycholinguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology that studies the psychological basis of
linguistics competence and performance. It is a rule in which the insights of linguistics and
psychology are brought to bear on the cognitive aspects of language understanding and
production (Williams, 2001).It is the study of psychological and neurobiological factors that enable
humans to function, use and understand language (psycholinguistics, 2006). easily defined,
psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary and is studied in a variety of fields including psychology,
cognitive science and linguistics. Thus, studies done in psycholinguistics help us to understand
the psychology of how we learn and understand language whether it is our first, second, or even
third language.It is also a branch of linguistics and primarily concerns itself with the
neurobiological processes of language. Contemporary research uses data from a variety of
scientific disciplines to analyze how peoples’ brains use languages. The purpose of this field is to
advance the understanding of the human brain.Since the field of psycholinguistics was first
defined by Jacob Robert Kantor in “An Objective Psychology of Grammar” in 1936, a number of
sub-disciplines have developed, most notably neurolinguistics, which involves the studies of
neural connections in the brain involved in the comprehension, production, and acquisition of
language as well as how the brain uses these mechanisms in daily life. Other sub-disciplines
involve phonetics and phonology that focus on how the brain processes and identifying sounds
and morphology, which studies the relationship between word structures. Additional sub-
disciplines involved the study of semantics, syntax, and pragmatics. Many of the studies involved
in sound, word and sentence structure have revealed that these concepts also play a huge role in
language processing.Psycholinguistics provides an essential tool not only for scientific research
but also for daily life as advancements will allow teachers to better educate children in schools
while therapists will be able to help those whose language ability is impaired.In the 1960s and
early ’70s much research in child language used the transformational-generative model proposed
by the American linguist Noam Chomsky; the goal of that research has been to discover how
children come to know the grammatical processes that implied in the speech they hear. The
transformational model has also been adapted for another field of psycholinguistics, the
processing and comprehension of speech; early experiments in this area suggested, for example,
that passive sentences took longer to process than their active counterparts because an extra
grammatical rule was necessarily used to produce the passive sentences. Many of the results of
this work were controversial and inconclusive, and psycholinguistics has been turning increasingly
to other functionally related and socially oriented models of language structure.And in term of the
Scope of Linguistics , Linguistics consist of a vast, complex and systematic study, with different
basic areas such as phonology, phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics. It is also
intertwined with various other disciplines and contains fields like sociolinguistics etc. Linguistics,
unlike past ages, is being recognized as an independent discipline of study, thus paving the way
to a lot of developments . Linguistics is a descriptive study and not a prescriptive one and
describes language in all aspects. It is a subject that keeps changing, as languages change.It is a
very dynamic domain of study. Although some aspects of the subject are based on historical
points and few sets of rules, it continues to evolve out of old boundaries into new, with
developments that occur in different languages. Linguistics is applied to different fields of study,
and this makes it a very important discipline. The application of linguistics extends from
anthropology to speech therapy in modern medicine. Extensive researches and studies are
conducted on the linguistic perspectives of every language, aimed at tracing the characteristics of
the language as well as in employing the scope of linguistics into understanding the specific
characteristics of literature, including prose and poems in different languages.Language
has a hierarchical structure. In order to study the science of language systematically, we
sub-divide the area of study in an analytical and easier way. Each level of the system that
constitutes the study of linguistics is independent on its own. These levels can be
represented in the following manner : Branches of LinguisticsPhonetics: Phonetics refers
to the study of the sounds of speech. It deals with the way sounds are produced,
transmitted and perceived.The three main branches of phonetics are.Articulatory
phonetics: studies the articulation of speech sound. Acoustic phonetics: studies the
physical properties of speech sounds as transmitted between mouth and ear.Auditory
phonetics: studies the perpetual response to speech sounds as mediated by ear, auditory
nerve and brain.Phonology: a study of how sounds/sound patterns/signs are arranged in
each language, as arranged units of speech. It also looks into the specifications in the
distribution of sounds in each language.Morphology: studies the formations of words in
different uses and constructions. It is concerned with the evolution of small words from
meaningful units called ‘morphemes’. It is studied under two fields, which are named,
inflectional morphology and derivational morphology.Syntax: studies the construction of
phrases, clauses and sentences in a language. It analyses the basic word order followed
in languages.semantics: it is a study of meaning. It demands studying the structure of
meaning in a language and in giving an account of word and sentence
meaning.Pragmatics: it is an addition of semantic and deals with the study on how
meaning changes with different contexts.