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What Is Psycholinguistics
What Is Psycholinguistics
psycholinguistics?
M. En C. Héctor Contreras Sandoval
What is Psycholinguistics?
▪ History is marked by the human urge to explore and venture. It is within the last century that
researchers have dared to explore the most proximal portion of the universe: the human
mind.
▪ How to study the human mind? – Language reflects patterns of thought. By using evidence
from speech and language it is possible to study patterns of conceptualization. The use of
them is a window to the nature and structure of the human mind. That is called
Psycholinguistics.
▪ Psycholinguistics is the study of the cognitive processes that support the acquisition, loss,
production and comprehension of language.
▪ Its scope includes:
– Language performance under normal circumstances
– Language performance when it breaks down.
▪ Its focus has been on first language (L1), in studies of acquisition in children and in research
on adult comprehension and production.
▪ Like all disciplines, psycholinguistics has evolved into a
conglomeration of sub-fields. However these divisions provide a
mean whereby a large body of information can be introduced in
smaller pieces.
▪ In this course, we will examine research questions in four sub-fields:
– How are language and speech acquired?
– How are language and speech produced?
– How are language and speech comprehended?
– How are language and speech lost?
Diachronic Synchronic
Synthesis Acquisition Production
Analysis dissolution comprehension
Diachronism and Synchronism
▪ This is probably the structure of the system as it really works in the brain, but
where and how it is located in the brain is an active area of investigation.
▪ Levelt’s ‘Speaking’ model (1989, 1999) aims at describing the process of
language production from the development of communicative intentions to
the articulation of the sounds. For this incredibly complex process a number of
sub-components, each performing specific tasks, are proposed.
– Conceptualizer.- communicative intentions are turned into something that can be expressed
in human language. At this level utterances are planned on the basis of the meanings to be
expressed.
– Formulator.- Isolated words and meanings are turned into sentences.
– Articulator.- Sentences are translated into sounds.
▪ He mentions the factors that have to be taken into account if we want to turn a monolingual
model into a bilingual model:
▪ L2 knowledge is typically incomplete. L2 speakers generally have fewer words and rules at their
disposal than L1 speakers. This may keep them from expressing messages they had originally
intended to convey, lead them to use compensatory strategies, or to avoid words or structures
about which they feel uncertain.
▪ • L2 speech is more hesitant, and contains more errors and slips, depending on the level of
proficiency of the learners. Cognitive skill theories stress the importance of the development of
automatic processes that are difficult to acquire and hard to unlearn. Less automaticity means
that more attention has to be paid to the execution of specific lower-level tasks, which leads to a
slowing down of the production process and to a greater number of slips.
▪ • L2 speech often carries traces of the L1. L2 speakers have a fully developed L1 system at their
disposal, and may switch to their L1 either deliberately (‘motivated’ switches) or unintentionally
(‘performance’ switches). Poulisse and Bongaerts argue that such accidental switches to the L1
are very similar to substitutions and slips in monolingual speech. In addition to such code
switches, L2 speech also contains traces of the L1 which are due to transfer or cross-linguistic
influence.
Keeping languages apart.
▪ Psycholinguistically, code-switching and keeping languages apart are different aspects of the
same phenomenon.
▪ Paradis (1981) - Sub-set hypothesis.
– Words (or syntactic rules or phonemes) from a given language form a sub-set of the total inventory. Each sub-
set can be activated independently.
– The sub-sets are formed and maintained by the use of words in specific settings.
– A major advantage of the sub-set hypothesis is that the set of lexical elements from which a selection has to
be made is reduced dramatically as a result of the fact that a particular language or sub-set has been chosen.
– The sub-set hypothesis may explain how languages in bilinguals may be kept apart, but not how the choice for
a given language is made.
– Bilingual speakers have stores for lemmas, lexemes, syntactic rules, morpho-phonological rules and elements,
and articulatory elements that are not fundamentally different from those of monolingual speakers.
– Within each of these stores there will be sub-sets for different languages, but also for different varieties, styles
and registers.
– There are relations between sub-sets in different stores, that is, lemmas forming a sub-set in a given language
will be related to both lexemes and syntactical rules from that same language.
Language choice
▪ The most crucial step is the matching of chunks from the pre-verbal message with
the meaning part of lemmas. Here is where the transition from conceptualization to
language-specific coding takes place.
▪ Lemma according to Levelt.
– Semantic specification.- Set of conceptual conditions under which the lemma can be used.
– Syntactic information. Syntactic structure of a lemma and it grammatical functions.
– Pointer to a lexeme.
▪ There are a number of steps in the process of lexical access where choices have to be
made. When choosing lemmas, language is one of the features used in the selection
process.
▪ A lemma will not only include semantic features, but it will also need to contain
information about which language it belongs to and this information will have to
match the language cue in the pre-verbal message.
Language Production in L1 and L2.
▪ Code Switching (CS) is defined as the use of more than one language in an
utterance.
▪ The focus has gradually moved from a primarily linguistic approach to a
more psycholinguistic approach that focuses in the machanisms of
language processing involved.
– Switching costs.- Switching costs time, it takes more time to switch from the weaker
language into a stronger language than the other way around. More effort is needed
to inhibit the stronger language and that it takes accordingly more time and effort to
reactivate again.
– The study of CS in interaction. In this model, dialogue is taken as the basic unit of
analysis. CS typically takes place in interaction and that the study of CS in dialogue is
ecologically more valid than taking a monologue perspective.
Gestures in a second language
▪ A life as a bilingual confers a set of benefits to cognition within the real of executive
function.
▪ Some studies suggest that bilinguals suffer relative to monolingual in the real of verbal
fluency and in the speed of lexical access.
▪ There are benefits of bilingualismo on attentional control that extend from young bilingual
children to Young adult bilinguals and to elderly bilinguals.
▪ These benefits are observed in simple cognitive tasks that do no explicitly involve
language.
▪ Bilingualism appears to provide a measure of protection against the normal effects of
cogntive aging.
▪ The hypothesis is that a life spent negotiating cross-language competition fine tunes a set
of cognitive skills that benefit the ability to select targeted information, regardless of
whether the context is linguistic or not.
Forgetting and Relearning