psycholinguistics - Areas of study, Theories, Methodologies, Issues and areas of research, Bibliography/Further Reading

The study of the psychology of language. Psycholinguists are variously concerned with first and second language acquisition, language production and comprehension, and linguistic deficits such as aphasia and dyslexia. The central goal of the subject is to marry the methods and theories of the linguist with those of the psychologist. For example, a linguist might propose a grammar that accurately describes the structure of English, but the psycholinguist must try to explain how such a grammar could be learned by an infant with limited perceptual and mnemonic capacities.

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Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language.

Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of children).

Areas of study

Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics. Morphology is the study of word structures, especially the relationships between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation). The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text

Theories

Theories about how language works in the human mind attempt to account for, among other things, how we associate meaning with the sounds (or signs) of language and how we use syntax—that is, how we manage to put words in the proper order to produce and understand the strings of words we call "sentences."

There are essentially two schools of thought as to how we manage to create syntactic sentences: (1) syntax is an evolutionary product of increased human intelligence over time and social factors that encouraged the development of spoken language; (Recursion, for example, includes the use of relative pronouns to refer back to earlier parts of a sentence—"The girl whose car is blocking my view of the tree that I planted last year is my friend .") The ability to use syntax like that would not exist without an innate concept that contains the underpinnings for the grammatical rules that produce recursion, says the "innate" view. Such syntax is, according to the second point of view, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.

The first view was prevalent until about 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist, Rudolf Carnap.

The field of psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro and con.

The con view still holds that language—including syntax—is an outgrowth of hundreds of thousands of years of increasing intelligence and tens of thousands of years of human interaction. From that view, syntax in language gradually increased group cohesion and potential for survival. the fact that a particular, conceivable syntactic structure does not exist in any of the world's finite repertoire of languages is an interesting observation, but it is not proof of a genetic constraint on possible forms, nor does it prove that such forms couldn't exist or couldn't be learned.

Contemporary theorists, besides Chomsky, working in the field of theories of psycholinguistics include George Lakoff, Steven Pinker, and Michael Tomasello.

Methodologies

Much methodology in psycholinguistics takes the form of behavioral experiments.

Such tasks might include, for example, asking the subject to convert nouns into verbs;

Until the recent advent of non-invasive medical techniques, brain surgery was the preferred way for language researchers to discover how language works in the brain. Where an illness made brain surgery necessary, language researchers had an opportunity to pursue their research.

Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission tomography (PET);

More recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Tanenhaus et al., have performed a number of visual-world eye-tracking studies to study the cognitive processes related to spoken language.

Issues and areas of research

Developmental

There are a number of unanswered questions in psycholinguistics. Can some animals be taught the syntax of human language?

How are infants able to learn language? In addition, it is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languages than it is for infants to learn their first language (bilingual infants are able to learn both of their native languages easily).

Also, recent research using new non-invasive imaging techniques seeks to shed light on just where language is located in the brain. The older, traditional descriptions of the language functions of Broca's area, Wernicke's area and other areas of the brain will be refined as research continues.

Machine learning/translation

Another unsolved problem in the field is how to create computer programs that can understand language as well as humans.

Bibliography/Further Reading

A short list of books that deal with psycholinguistics, written in language accessible to the non-expert, includes:

Belyanin V.P.