8/10/2013

Introduction to Applied Linguistics

The need to study
Psycho-Linguistics




Shivani Joshi
SNDT, Churchgate
MA Linguistics Part1
2013-2014



Introduction
Few things play as central a role in our everyday lives as language. It is our most
important tool in communicating our thoughts and feelings to each other. As we grow,
language becomes a badge of sorts, a means of identifying whether a person is within a
social group. Similar processes are at work in gender and social class differences in
language use. Over time, for many of us language becomes not merely a means to an
end but an end in itself. We come to love words and word play. So we turn to writing
poetry or short stories. Or to playing word games, such as anagrams and crossword
puzzles. Or to reading novels on a lazy summer afternoon. A tool that is vital for
communicating our basic needs and wants has also become a source of leisurely
pleasure.
The diversity of how we use language is daunting for psychologists who wish to study
language. How can something widespread and far-reaching as language be examined
psychologically? An important consideration is that although language is intrinsically a
social phenomenon, psychology is principally the study of individuals. The psychology of
language deals with the mental processes that are involved in language use. Three sets
of processes are of primary interest: language comprehension (how we perceive and
understand speech and written language), language production (how we construct an
utterance, from idea to completed sentence), and language acquisition (how children
acquire language). The psychological study of language is called psycholinguistics.

What is Psycholinguistics?
"Psycholinguists study how word meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning
are computed and represented in the mind. They study how complex words and
sentences are composed in speech and how they are broken down into
their constituents in the acts of listening and reading. In short, psycholinguists seek to
understand how language is done. . . .

"In general, psycholinguistic studies have revealed that many of the concepts
employed in the analysis of sound structure, word structure, and sentence structure
also play a role in language processing. However, an account of language processing
also requires that we understand how these linguistic concepts interact with other
aspects of human processing to enable language production and comprehension."
(William O'Grady, et al., Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Bedford/St.
Martin's, 2001)

"Psycholinguistics . . . draws on ideas and knowledge from a number of associated
areas, such as phonetics, semantics and pure linguistics. There is a constant exchange
of information between psycholinguists and those working in neurolinguistics, who
study how language is represented in the brain. There are also close links with studies
in artificial intelligence. Indeed, much of the early interest in language processing
derived from the AI goals of designing computer programs that can turn speech into
writing and programs that can recognize the human voice."
(John Field, Psycholinguistics: A Resource Book for Students. Routledge, 2003)


"Psycholinguistics has classically focused on button press tasks and reaction time
experiments from which cognitive processes are being inferred. The advent of
neuroimaging opened new research perspectives for the psycholinguist as it became
possible to look at the neuronal mass activity that underlies language processing.
Studies of brain correlates of psycholinguistic processes can complement behavioural
results, and in some cases . . . can lead to direct information about the basis of
psycholinguistic processes."
(Friedmann Pulvermller, "Word Processing in the Brain as Revealed by
Neurophysiological Imaging." The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics, ed. by M.
Gareth Gaskell. Oxford Univ. Press, 2009)


Aims and Objectives
The common aim of psycholinguistics is "to find out about the structures and processes
which underlie a human's ability to speak and understand language".
Psycholinguistics involves:
Language processing - reading, writing, speaking, listening and memory.
[2]

Lexical storage and retrieval - how are words stored in our minds and then used.
Language acquisition - how a first language is acquired by children.
Special circumstances - twins, deafness, blindness, dyslexia and brain damage.
The brain and language - unique to humans? Evolution and part of the brain
concerned with language.
Second language acquisition and use - Bilingualism, how a second language is
learnt.

History
From the development of the rst psychological laboratory, at the University of Leipzig
in Germany in 1879, until the early 1900s, psychology was dened as the science of
mental life. A major gure in early scientic psychology was Wilhelm Wundt (1832
1920), a man trained in physiology who believed that it was possible to investigate
mental events such as sensations, feelings, and images by using procedures as rigorous
as those used in the natural sciences. Moreover, Wundt believed that the study of
language could provide important insights into the nature of the mind.
Psycholinguistics boomed (as did the rest of psychology) in the early to mid-1960s. The
Chomskian revolution (e.g. Chomsky, 1957, 1965, 1968) promoted language, and
specifically its structures, as obeying laws and principles in much the same way as, say,
chemical structures do. The legacy of the first 50 or so years of the 20th century was the
study of language as an entity that could be studied independently of the machinery
that produced it, the purpose that it served, or the world within which it was acquired
and subsequently used.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell (1959) was sensitive to this emerging legacy when he
wrote: The linguistic philosophy, which cares only about language, and not about the
world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although
it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating
pace. Subsequently, psycholinguistic research has nonetheless recognized the
inseparability of language from its underlying mental machinery and the external world.

What Does a Psycholinguist Do?
A psycholinguist studies the way humans learn, understand, and use language.
Psycholinguists also examine the effects that the use of language has on human social
dynamics; a speaker's choice of words and the manner in which he speaks, for example,
can lead listeners to infer what personality traits the speaker might possess. The field
of psycholinguistics spans several related topic areas, including cognitive psychology,
behavioural neuroscience, and psychological disorders. In addition, a psycholinguist
might find himself specializing in specific areas of study, such as semantics, phonology,
and speech therapy.
In general, a psycholinguist dissects every aspect of human language and attempts to
produce practical applications for his findings. An expert trained in the field studies both
written and spoken language, the progression of words in a statement, and the manner
in which an idea is expressed. She/he then applies existing psychological theories to
his/her observation in an effort to gain a fuller understanding of how people adapt
language for their purposes. The entire field can be broken down into specific areas of
interest, each with its own uses in working towards scientific and social progress.

The scope of Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is part of the emerging eld of study called cognitive science. Cognitive
science is an interdisciplinary venture that draws upon the insights of psychologists,
linguists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to study the mind and
mental processes (Johnson-Laird, 1988a; Stillings et al., 1995). Some of the topics that
have been studied by cognitive scientists include problem solving, memory, imagery,
and language. The topics do not belong to any one eld of study but rather are treated
in distinctive and yet complementary ways by various disciplines.
As the name implies, Psycholinguistics is principally an integration of the elds of
psychology and linguistics. Linguistics is the branch of science that studies the origin,
structure, and use of language. Like most interdisciplinary elds, however,
psycholinguistics has a rich heritage that includes contributions from diverse intellectual
traditions. These contrasting approaches have often led to controversies in how to best
think of or study language processes.

Language Processes and Linguistic Knowledge
At its heart, psycholinguistic work consists of two questions. One is, what knowledge of
language is needed for us to use language? In a sense, we must know a language to use
it, but we are not always fully aware of this knowledge.
Four broad areas of language knowledge may be distinguished. Semantics deals with the
meanings of sentences and words. Syntax involves the grammatical arrangement of
words within the sentence. Phonology concerns the system of sounds in a language.
Pragmatics entails the social rules involved in language use. It is not ordinarily
productive to ask people explicitly what they know about these aspects of language. We
infer linguistic knowledge from observable behaviour. The other primary
psycholinguistic question is, what cognitive processes are involved in the ordinary use of
language? Ordinary use of language meaning such things as understanding a lecture,
reading a book, writing a letter, and holding a conversation. Cognitive processes mean
processes such as perception, memory, and thinking. Although we do few things as often
or as easily as speaking and listening, we will nd that considerable cognitive processing
is going on during those activities.
Four Language Examples
The interplay of linguistic knowledge and language processes is a continuing theme
because these concepts play a central role in psycholinguistic work. For now, it will be
helpful to consider various examples of language and language processes. The following
examples are intended to illustrate how the aforementioned themes apply to specic
situations as well as to convey some of the scope of psycholinguistic research.
Garden path sentences
What happens when we comprehend a sentence? We get a hint of what is involved
when the process breaks down. For example, consider sentence (1):
(1) The novice accepted the deal before he had a chance to check his nances, which put
him in a state of conict when he realized he had a straight ush. (Adapted from Foss &
Jenkins, 1973)
Sentences such as this are sometimes called garden path sentences since the subjective
impression is one of following a garden path to a predictable destination until it is
obvious that you were mistaken in your original interpretation and thus are forced to
backtrack and reinterpret the sentence. That is, in terms of knowledge, we have
stored in our memory at least two different meanings of the word deal. One is related to
a business transaction, and the other, relevant in this case, pertains to card games. This
knowledge of the two meanings of deal is part of our semantic knowledge of the
language. Another part of our semantic knowledge is knowledge of the relationships
among words, such as deal and nances. From a process standpoint, we appear to select
the one that is most appropriate, and we have little or no conscious awareness of the
alternative (or how else would we have the garden path experience?). That is, we are
able, by some process, to focus our attention on what we believe is the relevant
meaning of deal. In studies of ambiguity, we will nd that there is more to garden path
sentences than what we are immediately aware of. The point for now is that in the
course of comprehending language we are making decisionswe are doing mental
work.
Indirect requests
Consider now a sentence such as (2):
(2) Can you open the door?
Literally, this sentence asks if we have the ability to open the door, but everybody
assumes that the speaker is asking us to open the door in an indirect manner. Why is the
request phrased indirectly? Part of the reason is that we have learned certain rules
about the use of language in social settings, including rules of politeness. A request is, by
denition, an attempt to change another persons behaviour. This can be perceived as
intrusive or threatening at times, so we soften it with indirect speech.
An indirect request is more polite than a direct command such as sentence (3):
(3) Open the door!
We know this, as it is part of our pragmatic knowledge of our language. From a
processing standpoint, a speaker takes this pragmatic knowledge into account when
producing a statement such as sentence (2) in a social situation. That is, the speaker
utters the sentence with the understanding that it will be taken as a request. The
listener presumably shares this aspect of pragmatic knowledge and interprets the
sentence as a request rather than in a literal manner, although the exact processes by
which the listener arrives at the nonliteral meaning are not fully clear.
Indirect requests are an aspect of language that forces us to consider language in a social
context. Sociolinguists remind us that language activities always take place in a social
world. Such aspects are well beyond those of the psychologist, who is principally
interested in the behaviour of individuals than studying social environment and its
influences. Yet even when studying individuals, it is necessary to recognize the social
dimension of language.
Language in aphasia
Although our primary focus is on language processes in normal individuals, we can learn
a great deal about language by studying individuals with impaired language functioning.
An aphasia is a language disorder due to brain damage. One type of aphasia, called
Wernickes aphasia, involves a breakdown in semantics. For example, consider excerpt
(4):
(4) Before I was in the one here, I was over in the other one. My sister had the
department in the other one. (Geschwind, 1972, p. 78)

Atypical language development
Atypical language development is language development that does not follow the usual
pattern of acquisition, such as in deaf children, or when someone has a stroke, had surgery or a
head trauma leading to a loss of speech. This strand of psycholinguistics is studied to increase
knowledge on abnormal language development, to help rehabilitate and try to improve the
language of the people in these situations. It can also lead to a better understanding of normal
language development. Studying abnormal language development and usage helps linguists
identify and understand in more depth what parts of the brain control what functions of
language e.g. where lexical information is stored or what part of the brain controls motor
movements that physically produce sounds and words using articulators.

Psycholinguistics Prospects
It is inevitable that a review of this size can capture neither the breadth nor depth of the
psycholinguistic research that has contributed to the current state of the art. A major
omission concerns the considerable body of work on disorders of language following
brain trauma. For example, some aphasics have impaired semantic knowledge of living
things (e.g. Warrington & Shallice, 1984), others of man-made artefacts (e.g. Warrington
& McCarthy, 1983), and these category-specific semantic deficits have provided
important insights into the manner in which meaning is encoded across different parts
of the cortex (auditory, visual, motor and so on; see McRae, de Sa, and Seidenberg
(1997) for a recent account of the dissociation based on correlational differences among
the features underlying word meaning). Similarly, patterns of semantic breakdown in
patients suffering Semantic dementia or Alzheimers dementia also inform models of
semantic organization (see Hodges & Patterson, 1997). The study of language
breakdown has proved critical in constraining theories of normal language function.
A second omission concerns disorders of language development (some of which co-
occur with other cognitive developmental disorders) and the development of language
in atypical circumstances. There are many disorders of language development: disorders
of reading (e.g. dyslexia, which appears to be due most often to an underlying
phonological deficit) and disorders of language understanding and production which go
beyond disorders of reading. Certain of these disorders affect populations of children
that can hardly be described as atypical: for example, between 10% and 15% of
children (in the UK) are poor readers that can be characterized as having good decoding
skills (good application of spelling-to-sound correspondences), age-appropriate word
recognition skills, but poor comprehension (Oakhill, 1982, 1984, 1993). Nation and
Snowling (1998) showed that their listening comprehension is also poor, with weak word
knowledge and poor semantic processing skills. In essence, these children have intact
decoding skills but both word-level problems (with distinct patterns of lexical activation
as evidenced in priming studies; Nation & Snowling, 1999) and higher-level problems
involving the integration of what they hear with the context in which it is heard. Similar
but generally more severe comprehension impairments have also been described in the
autistic population and in non-autistic hyperlexic children (Snowling & Frith, 1986). The
relevance of these disorders (no matter their severity or incidence) is twofold: studying
the disorder informs theories of normal development (e.g. Bates & Goodman, 1997,
1999), and understanding the nature of the deficit relative to normal development can
help in the construction of intervention techniques that are best suited to the individual
child given the nature of his or her deficit (see, for example, Oakhill (1994) for
intervention studies aimed at improving the comprehension skills of poor
comprehenders, and Olson and Wise (1992) and Snowling (2000) for interventions
aimed at improving the decoding skills of dyslexic children).
A final omission (there are still others), concerns the wealth of research on the
neuroscience of brain and language. There exists an increasing range of techniques for
exploring the neural dynamics of cognitive processing and for making the functional
neuro anatomy of the brain, as it goes about its daily business, ever more accessible to
the cognitive neuroscientist. Our understanding of the neural structure and functioning
of the brain and its subparts will inevitably contribute to our understanding of the range,
type and properties of neural computation that underlie different mental processes. This
in turn will feed into models of how such computations might bring about these distinct
mental activities.
While it is both appropriate and necessary to study the adult language faculty
independently both of its neural underpinnings and of the manner in which that faculty
develops from infancy onwards, one of the lasting lessons from the 20th century is that
the adult faculty is an emergent characteristic of a biological system that, in its initial
state at least, is as much a device for acquiring language as it is a device for using
language. The child language system does not suddenly switch off at puberty to be
replaced by a system that is the next size up. And although there are discontinuities in
the learning curve (e.g. in vocabulary growth and the acquisition of grammar; e.g. Bates,
Dale, & Thal, 1995), connectionist modelling has demonstrated how such discontinuities
can arise through the operation of a non-linear, but unitary, learning mechanism (e.g.
Elman et al., 1996). Perhaps the greatest challenge for the next century will be to foster
this relationship between theoretical models of learning, the operating principles of
which are becoming increasingly well understood, and the empirical study of the
biological mechanisms, the workings of which are becoming increasingly accessible, that
enable human learning and emergent cognition.

Current Directions
Where do things stand now? It is always more precarious to describe events that are
currently in progress than those well in the past, but it is possible to discern several
themes of psycholinguistic work over the last 15 to 20 years. One is that the eld has
become more interdisciplinary. In particular, as said earlier, psycholinguistics has
increasingly been viewed as a portion of the interdisciplinary eld of cognitive science,
which includes contributions from computer science, philosophy, neuroscience, and
related elds. Second, the wave of interest in syntax that occupied psychological interest
after the Chomskian revolution has spurred interest in other aspects of language. One
currently lively area of research deals with how people understand, remember, and
produce discourse, units of language larger than the sentence, such as paragraphs and
stories. Another is the lexicon, or mental dictionarystudies of individual words have
become much more prominent in the last decade. And both areas, while of considerable
theoretical importance, have also had practical applications. Studies of discourse have
provided insights into conversational processes in psychotherapy, and studies of the
lexicon have already been useful in increasing our understanding of how children learn
to read.
One nal theme concerns the ways psycholinguists look at child language acquisition.
Interest in innate language mechanisms has been complemented by a resurgence of
research of the childs linguistic environment. Adults speak to children in ways that are
phonologically, semantically, syntactically, and pragmatically distinct from their speech
to adults, and much research has examined the role of these language lessons in
childrens language acquisition.
On balance, psycholinguistics is a more diverse eld than the one that existed a few
decades ago. Neither psychology nor linguistics is dominated by a single theoretical
viewpoint, and the input from other elds within cognitive science has added new
perspectives and insights that have been incorporated into this growing eld. At the
same time, tangible progress has been made in applying psycholinguistic research to
topics such as reading (Just & Carpenter, 1987), bilingualism (Hakuta, 1986), and
language disorders (Caplan, 1987). These advances have been made possible by
integrating the insights from different disciplines within cognitive science. For instance,
Just and Carpenters book on reading comprehension integrates linguistic theories of
sentence structure, computer simulations of reading, and psychological experimentation
on eye movements. These results give us reason to believe that interdisciplinary work on
language, although it can produce tensions between different approaches, can
ultimately be fruitful (see, especially, Miller, 1990).
Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures due mainly to a
lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use
of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the
brain processes language.

Conclusion
Through language each of us cut through the barriers of our own personal existence. In
doing so, we use language as an abstraction of the world within and around us. Our
ability to interpret that world is extraordinary enough, but our ability to abstract from it
just certain key aspects, and to convey that abstraction through the medium of language
to another individual, is even more extraordinary. The challenge for psychology has been
to reveal, in the face of extraordinary complexity, something of the mental
representations and processes that underpin our faculty for language.