Name: Pitri Karismanda

Nim: 17018146
Angkatan 2017
Kelas K-2
Jadwal: Wednesday, 07:00-08.40
No sesi: 202010180080
Topic ke 5
Psycholinguistics

Language Comprehension

Language comprehension is apparently something which is done unconsciously by most

humans. It happens when a listener builds a mental representation of information contained
within the language that a speaker is using. In addition, language processing is how language
is understood ( the way from sound to meaning) and produced (maps from message to
speech) by using devices and procedures in the human’s mentality (mental lexicon). language
processing can describe:
a) how people use their knowledge of language and how they understand what they hear and
read, b) how they produce messages that others can understand in turn
c) how language is represented in mind.
Concerning on language processing, it is related to human perception toward language and
language production. The perception is not only a form of how human can analyze sound
carried in the ear (audio), but also it concerns with other perceptions such as phonetic,
categorical perception.

There are specific components of language comprehension:

1. Speech processing, the segmentation and classification of the incoming sensory input.
2. Lexical processing, the recognition of individual words and the access to the different
types of information associated with them.
3. Discourse processing, the integration of the interpretation of successive sentences to create
a discourse representation

Issues on Language Comprehension

1. Phenomena common to reading and listening comprehension

In written and spoken language, the comprehension might be difficult since it is not always
easy to identify the phrases of a sentence and the ways in which they relate to one another.
Within the grammatical structure, the place of a particular 15 constituent may be temporarily
or permanently ambiguous. Studies of how people engage with grammatical ambiguities have
provided insights into the processes of language comprehension. For example, considering
the sentence “ He waits near the bank”. From this sentence, there will be at least two
interpretations. The first, one is someone is waiting in a bank which is likely a building to
save money, or someone is waiting in the edge of a river. This ambiguity comes up since the
lexical word bank has two meanings: place to save money and the edge of river. In this view,
the sentence processor constructs a single analysis of a sentence and attempts to interpret it.

2. Phenomena specific to the comprehension of spoken language

Phenomena applied in language comprehension can be used to comprehend both of spoken

and written language. One challenge that is specific to listening comes from the evanescent
nature of speech. People cannot re-listen to what they have just heard in the way that readers
can move their eyes back in the text. However, the fact that humans are adapted through
evolution to process auditory, language suggests that this may not be such a problem.
Auditory sensory memory can hold information for up to several seconds, and so language
that is heard may in fact persist for longer than language that is read, permitting effective
revision.