1. Course: Psycholinguistics – Winter 1392 &
Spring 1393
Instructor: Dr Maryam Danaye Tous
Prepared by: Nasrin Eftekhari
In the Name of God

2.  Language is a communication system that
enables us to talk about anything, irrespective
of time and space.

3. Introduction
There are steps involve in communicative transaction that
we must have such as :
 necessary biological hardware
 articulatory apparatus move at right time
 language complex enough to convey message
 aware of social setting to produce & understand message
 aware of knowledge and beliefs of people

4. Psychological process involve sort of behavior such
as :
 aware of knowledge and beliefs of people
and have some ideas of :
 how they will interpret our utterances
These are the subject of matter of this book.

5.  Crystal (1997) lists eight functions of
language:
1. The primary purpose of language is to communicate,
2. To express emotion (e.g. by swearing),
3. for social interaction (e.g. by saying “bless you!” when
someone sneezes),
4. to make use of its sounds (e.g. in various children’s
games),
5. to attempt to control the environment (e.g. magical
spells),
6. to record facts,
7. to think with, and
8. to express identity (e.g. chanting in demonstrations).

6. Linguistics examines language itself.
 Neuropsychology examines the role of different parts of
the brain in behavior.
 Psycholinguistics examines the psychology of language.
It means the psychological process involve in language.

7. Psycholinguists is the name given to :
 understanding
 Producing
 remembering language
and hence are concerned with
 listening
 reading
Speaking
Writing
 and memory for language.

8. Psycholinguistics are also interested in:
how we acquire language
 the way in which language interacts with other
psychological systems.
 the area might have been the psychological of
linguistic theory
 psycholinguistics is closely related to other areas
of cognitive psychology
 psycholinguistics relies to experimental methods
used in cognitive psychology

9.  Data are the pieces of evidence that have to
explained.
 Theory is general explanation of how something
works.
 Model is rather more specific.
 Hypothesis is a specific idea that can be tested.

10. What is language ?
It is “a system of symbols and rules that enable us to
communicate”.
 Symbols are things that stand for other things: words,
either written or spoken, are symbols.
 Rules specify how words are ordered to form sentences.

11. Principles of linguistics and the aspects of language
are :
 semantic
 syntax
 morphology
 pragmatics
 phonetics
 phonology

12. Morphology made up of simpler units , called morphemes.
 Inflectional morphemes: words that do not change its
meaning or syntax category.
 Derivational morphology: change part of speech

13. What is word ?
Crystal (1997 ) defines word as :
 The smallest units of grammar that can stand
alone as a complete utterance, separated with
spaces in written language.

14. Lexicon
 Psychologists believes that we store representation of
words in a mental dictionary.
 Psycholinguists call this mental dictionary the lexicon.
 Psycholinguists are particularly interested in the process of
lexical access and how things are represented .

15. How did language originate?
 Brain increased in size and complexity.
 Broca’s area was present in the brains of
early human beings associated with
language.
 vocal apparatus has become well adapted
for making speech sounds.

16.  The idea that language evolved from mimicry or imitation
has been called ding-dong , heave-ho, bow-wow theory.
 Language arose as a side-effect of the evolution of
something else, such as the ability to use more complex
manual gestures, or to use tools.

17.  Chomsky, 1988, Piatelli, 1989 suggested that language
arose as a by-product of the increase in overall brain size.
 Paget (1930) proposed that language evolved in intimate
connection with the use of hand gestures.
 Carballis, 1992, argued that tools could be made and
used with communication.
 Pinker and Bloom (1990) argued that sufficient time for
grammar to evolve, and that the ability to communicate .
 Elman, 1999, argued that language arose from
communication system through many interaction “ tweaks
and twiddles”.

18.  Deacon (1997) proposed that language and the brain co-
evolved in an interactive way.
 Jaynes, 1977, argued that the emergence of
consciousness is the source of evolution of language.

19. What is language for?
 language is used for communication.
 Language is a social activity.
 Language might play a role in other, originally non-
linguistic, cognitive processes. The extreme version of this
idea is that the form of our language shapes our perception
and cognition, a view known as the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis.

20. A brief history of psycholinguistics
 it is a recent one.
 it is often traced to a conference held in Cornell USA.
 Osgood & Sebeok, 1954 used the word of “
psycholinguistics”.
 Chomsky , 1959, remarked modern psycholinguistics.

21.  The primary concerns of early linguistics is :
comparative linguistics that led to structuralism
which provide description of units of language.
 Early psychological approach to language are:
Information theory & Behaviorism

22. Psycholinguistics was largely absorbed into:
 Cognitive psychology :
 information processing (IP)
 computational metaphor
 Information processing approaches
cognition is symbolic processing

23. The cognitive science approach
 Cognitive science is the study of the mind including :
 developmental psychology
 philosophy
 Linguistics
 Anthropology
 neuropsychology
particularly artificial intelligence (AI)

24.  We have already seen how linguistics influenced early
psycholinguistics; its influence has been particularly strong
on work on syntax.
 Philosophy has played an important role in our
understanding of meaning.
 AI involves getting computers to do things that appear to
need intelligence.
 Traditional AI involves computer modeling of human
behavior emphasizing rules, plans, and goals.

25.  ELIZA
 SHRDLU
 ATNs

26. Connectionism
 areas of psycholinguistics
 involve many very simple, richly interconnected neuron-
like units
 rules and behavior emerge from the interactions between
these many simple units.

27. Activation
we can assume that the mind makes use
of something like activation, and that the
activation level of units—such as those
representing words—can
influence the activation levels of similar
items.

28. The methods of modern psycholinguistics
Experimental techniques:
the priming methodology
Semantic priming
Facilitation
Inhibition

29. Techniques for examining the brain’s activity:
 EEG (electroencephalograms)
 ERP (event-related potentials)
 CAT (computerized axial tomography),
 MRI ([nuclear or functional] magnetic resonance
imaging),
 PET (positron emission tomography) scans

30. these techniques are expensive; and their
temporal and spatial resolution are currently poor.
 a significant problem with current brain imaging is
that the results are often difficult to interpret. It is
hard to be sure exactly what is causing any activity.
Imaging will tell us where something is happening,
but in itself it does not tell us how or why.

31. these techniques could potentially tell us a number
of things:
great deal about the time course of processes, and when
different sources of information are used
revealing about the extent to which mental processes form
discrete modules.

32. Themes and controversies in modern psycholinguistics
Nine themes will recur throughout this book.
 The first theme is the goal of the book: to discover the
processes involved in producing and understanding
language.
 The second theme is the question of whether apparently
different language processes are related to one another.
 The third theme is whether or not processes in language
operate independently of one another, or whether they
interact. This is the issue of modularity.

33. Fourth, what is innate about language?
Fifth, do we need to refer to explicit rules when
considering language processing?
Sixth, how sensitive are the results of our experiments to
the particular techniques employed?
Seventh, what can be learned from looking at the language
of people with damage to the parts of the brain that control
language?

34. Eighth, how people learn the two languages, and how they
translate between them,
Finally, how can the study of language be applied to
everyday life.

35. How modular is the language system?
 A module is a set of processes
 module converts an input to an output
 the processes inside a module are “independent”
 Processing is autonomous ,opposing view is that
processing is interactive.

36. Interaction
Interaction involves the influence of one level of processing
on the operation of another.
there are two intertwined notions involved:
 First, overlap of processing between stages
discrete model
cascade model
 Second , reverse flow of information, or feedback
Bottom- up
Top -down

37. modularity was a major research theme in cognitive
psychology.
neuropsychology of modularity:
 physical modularity (are psychological processes
localized in one part of the brain?)
processing modularity (in principle a set of processes
might be distributed across the brain yet have a modular role
in the processing model).

38. In addition, there is a wider question about modularity:
 to what extent is the whole language system a self-
contained module?
 Is it just a special module for interfacing between social
processes and cognition?
Or does it provide a true window onto wider cognitive
processes?

39.  Chomsky (1975) argued that language is a
special faculty that cannot be reduced to cognitive
processes.
Piaget(1923) argued that language is a cognitive
process just like any other, and that linguistic
development depends on general cognitive
development.

40. Is any part of language innate?
 language processes are highly modular
 language capacity is innate.
To what extent is the innate information
specifically linguistic?
A related issue is the extent to which the innate components
are only found in humans.

41. Does the language system make use of rules?
“yes”.
Many linguistic orientation linguistics still believe this and
recently the situation has changed greatly with influence of
connectionism modeling.

42. Connectionism has had two major
consequences:
First, boxology
 second, details of representation by use of
language

43. What can studies of brain damage and language tell us?
Cognitive neuropsychology helps us to understand
psycholinguistics.
 Neuropsychology have been concerned which parts of the
brain control different sorts of behavior (that is, with the
localization of function),
 Neuropsychology working out how complex behaviors
map onto the flow of information through brain structures.
 The emphasis of cognitive neuropsychology is to relate
brain-damaged behavior to models of normal processing.

44. Three crucial aspects of differences between cognitive
neuropsychology and traditional neuropsychology :
1. Relating neuropsychological disorder to cognitive models.
2. stressing the importance of single case study rather than
group studies of neuropsychological impairments.
3. emphasize how models of normal processing can be
informed by studying brain – damaged behavior.

45.  Double dissociations are important in the
neuropsychological study of language .
It means different process underlie each task.

46. End of Chapter 1 (Harley, 2001)