Psycholinguistics

What is psycholinguistics? Psycholinguistics is the study of the interrelation between language

factors and mental and emotional qualities. According to Noam Chomsky, those factors are
innate and humans are hard-wired for complex syntactic features. Chomsky espouses that
those abilities are only found in humans. Psycholinguistics covers three main aspects namely :
(a) Language Comprehension, (b) Language Production and, (c) Language Acquisition.
Psycholinguistic itself has six major areas which sometimes overlap to one another; Language
processing, Language storage and access, Comprehension theory, Language and the brain,
Language in exceptional circumstances, and First language acquisition.

Language Comprehension, This sub-part can be discussed into two main branches : (a) language
perception and (b) language comprehending. In this section, since the concept of these two are
not significanly different, the following descriptions are intended to show them briefly. Clark
and Clark (1977) divided this concept into two (1) comprehension related to understading the
utterances we hear (ßperception), and (2) comprehension in relation to the act-needs to be
taken after the comprehension happened (ßcomprehending). The former can be defined as the
mental process where the hearer perceives the sound produced by a speaker using such sounds
to form an interpretation about what the speaker means. It is simply to say that comprehension
constitutes the form of meaning from the sounds. The latter is after the hearer comprehends
the utterenaces, is there any actions to be conducted in line with such comprehension, this is
called Utilization of sentences (Dardjowidjojo, 2003:59).

Anatomy of Language

There are several areas of the brain that play a critical role in speech and language.

Broca’s area, located in the left hemisphere, is associated with speech production and
articulation. Our ability to articulate ideas, as well as use words accurately in spoken and
written language, has been attributed to this crucial area.
Wernicke’s area is a critical language area in the posterior superior temporal lobe connects to
Broca’s area via a neural pathway. Wernicke’s area is primarily involved in the comprehension.
Historically, this area has been associated with language processing, whether it is written or
spoken.

The angular gyrus allows us to associate multiple types of language-related information

whether auditory, visual or sensory. It is located in close proximity to other critical brain regions
such as the parietal lobe which processes tactile sensation, the occipital lobe which is involved
in visual analyses and the temporal lobe which processes sounds. The angular gyrus allows us to
associate a perceived word with different images, sensations and ideas.

Human Language

Human language is distinct from all other known animal forms of communication in being
compositional. Human language allows speakers to express thoughts in sentences comprising
subjects, verbs and objects—such as ‘I kicked the ball’—and recognizing past, present and
future tenses. Compositionality gives human language an endless capacity for generating new
sentences as speakers combine and recombine sets of words into their subject, verb and object
roles. For instance, with just 25 different words for each role, it is already possible to generate
over 15,000 distinct sentences. Human language is also referential, meaning speakers use it to
exchange specific information with each other about people or objects and their locations or
actions.

No one knows for sure when language evolved, but fossil and genetic data suggest that
humanity can probably trace its ancestry back to populations of anatomically modern Homo
sapiens (people who would have looked like you and me) who lived around 150,000 to 200,000
years ago in eastern or perhaps southern Africa. Because all human groups have language,
language itself, or at least the capacity for it, is probably at least 150,000 to 200,000 years old.
This conclusion is backed up by evidence of abstract and symbolic behaviour in these early
modern humans, taking the form of engravings on red-ochre.
The archaeological record reveals that about 40,000 years ago there was a flowering of art and
other cultural artefacts at modern human sites, leading some archaeologists to suggest that a
late genetic change in our lineage gave rise to language at this later time. But this evidence
derives mainly from European sites and so struggles to explain how the newly evolved language
capacity found its way into the rest of humanity who had dispersed from Africa to other parts
of the globe by around 70,000 years ago.