Linguistics
Chapter 9
Psycholinguistics
Instructor: DU Shihong
School of Foreign Languages, Southwest
University
Classroom Activities
Objectives
Objectives
Procedures
Questions
An aphasiac American
Question
What is needed in learning a language?
In other words, how do we learn a language?
This is one of the central issues in
psycholinguistics.
To answer the questions here, you have to
concern about human brain/mind, language
acquisition, language production, language
comprehension, and language and thought.
These are the central topics in
psycholinguistics.
1. What is psycholinguistics?
Imagine
Can a dead person talk?
Whats the difference between a dead
person and an a living person?
Airstreams?
Brain?
Oversimplified view
Specific aspects of language ability can
be accorded specific locations in the
brain
Recent research:
Left hemisphere: analytic processing
Right hemisphere: holistic processing
Transition (
)
Question : How do human beings
acquire language?
Language acquisition
(Chapter 12)
Chomskys viewLanguage is innate.
LAD & UG
Pinkers viewInnate
Vaneechoutte and SkoylesMAD (music
acquiring device) vs. LAD (language
acquisition device)
Evidence???
Empirical knowledge????
3.1 Overgeneralization
Examples of overgeneralization
3.2 Under-generalization
Discussion
Bushism a mirror of
language production
4. Language production
4. Language production
4.1 Conceptualization
Discussion
Discussion
Discussion
Discussion
b. The THINKING-FOR-SPEAKING
hypothesis, which argues that
conceptualization as a component of
language production is always based on
language-specific principles. The level of
specificity of these principles remains an open
question (Talmy 1988). Important for the line
of argumentation is that under this view
language-dependent conceptualization is
relevant at the global (and local) level of
message generation.
4.2 Formulation
Spoonerisms
Well-oiled bicycle well-boiled icicle
4.3 Articulation
4.4 Self-regulation
Discussion
5. Language
comprehension
Understanding?
Message?
5. Language
comprehension
One of the primary aims of psycholinguistics
is to understand how people create and
understand language.
Language comprehension is an important
aspect of day to day functioning in adulthood.
Comprehension of written and spoken
language relies on the ability to correctly
process word and phrase meanings,
sentence grammar, and discourse or text
structure.
Question
an aim
a nice man
ice cream
seem able
Ambiguity
Question
Text comprehension
The
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Question
Linguistic relativity
Linguistic relativity
Linguistic determinism: Strong vs.
weak
Animal thinks?
Mental language
Mental image
Views
Piagets view
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Chomskys view (Pinkers view)
Wittgensteins view
Discussion
Review
The end