3. Definition of PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Psycholinguistics is a branch of study which
combines the disciplines of psychology and
linguistics.
It is concerned with the relationship between the
human mind and the language as it examines the
processes that occur in brain while producing and
perceiving both written and spoken discourse.
4. Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study
emerged
in the late 1950s and 1960s as a result of
Chomskyan revolution.
5. The three primary processes in
PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
Language Compréhension
Language Production
Language Acquisition
6. LANGUAGE
COMPREHENSION
Understanding what other people say and write (i.e.,
language comprehension) is more complicated than it
might at first appear.
Comprehending language involves a variety of
capacities, skills, processes, knowledge, and dispositions
that are used to derive meaning from spoken, written, and
signed language.
7. Comprehension is mainly thought to occur in the Wernicke’s
area of the brain which is located in the left temporal lobe.
Language comprehension is a complex process that occurs
easily and effortlessly by humans. It develops along with the
brain and is able to be enhanced with the use of gesture.
Though it is unknown exactly how early comprehension is
fully developed in children, gestures are undoubtedly useful
for understanding the language around us.
8. Language Production
language production is the production of
spoken or written language. It describes
all of the stages between having a
concept, and translating that concept into
linguistic form.
9. Stages of production
Intended message
Encode message into linguistic form
Encode linguistic form into speech
[motor system]
Sound goes from speaker's mouth to hearer's ear
[auditory system]
Speech is decoded into linguistic form
Linguistic form is decoded into meaning
10. Language Acquisition
Language acquisition is the process by which
humans acquire the capacity to perceive and
comprehend.
language, as well as to produce and use words
and sentences to communicate.
11. Language acquisition usually refers to first-language
acquisition,
which studies infants' acquisition of their native language.
This is distinguished from second-language acquisition, which
deals with the acquisition (in both children and adults) of
additional languages.
Language acquisition is just one strand of psycholinguistics
which is all about how people learn to speak and the mental
processes involved.
13. Behaviorism
Theories of language acquisition were heavily influenced by
behaviorism, a school of psychology prevalent in the 1950s.
B. F. Skinner, one of the founders of behaviorist psychology.
As the name implies, behaviorism focused on people’s
behaviors. Language was viewed as a kind of verbal behavior,
and it was proposed that children learn language through
imitation, reinforcement, and similar processes
14. Innateness
Two years later, Noam Chomsky showed that language is
a complex cognitive system that could not be acquired
by behaviorist principles.
Language is an innate capacity. A child’s brain contains
special language learning mechanism at the birth. This
suggests that children are born with a genetically
endowed faculty to learn and use human language, which
is part of the Universal Grammar.
15. Cognitive
Language acquisition is driven by Cognitive Development
as the child succeeds in making sense of the world
around it.
Jean Piaget ( 1980)
16. Through a series of stages, Piaget proposed four stages of
cognitive development: the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete
operational and formal operational period. The sensorimotor stage
is the first of the four stages in cognitive development which
"extends from birth to the acquisition of language".
17. Input theory
Another theory of C. A. Ferguson (1977) is that children
are able
to learn language because adults speak to them in a
special
“simplified”.
Language sometimes called mothers, or child-directed
speech or more informally, baby talk.
This theory places a lot of emphasis on the role of the
environment in facilitating language acquisition.
18. Stages of Acquisition
The Babbling Stage – around 6 months
The One-Word stage – around 1 year
The Two-Words stage – around 2 years
The Telegraphic Speech stage
19. Sign Language
Deaf children acquire sign language much in the way
that hearing children acquire a spoken language .
Sign languages do not use sounds to express meanings.
Instead, they are visual gestural systems that use
hand, body, and facial gestures as the forms used to
represent words and grammatical rules.
Sign languages are fully developed languages, and
signers create and comprehend unlimited numbers of
new sentences, just as speakers of spoken languages
do.
