Introduction to psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics: an academic discipline that falls within the field of cognitive science. The discipline draws upon psychology and linguistics and is interested in language processing mechanisms/systems, i.e., how the brain processes, comprehends, and produces language.

Psycholinguistics is that filed which joins two approaches for the sake of giving insightful and useful explanation of the seemingly easy task of language acquisition.

What is language?

-         Language is the eminent element that any one uses for the sake of communicating ideas, feelings, opinions and so forth.

-         This human particularity helps its users to express themselves and to expose their thoughts i.e. it is a vehicle of communication and thoughts at the same time.

-         Language is deemed to be the vital and natural feature that any one possesses and uses to express his internal thoughts and transform them into external paroles i.e. transforming abstract ideas into concrete speech.

-         Language is used to clarify complicated things and simplify them by looking for their alternatives (synonyms, antonyms and so on).

-         Language also contains rules of conduct that enable the persons to be acquainted with what is permitted and what is not. In other words, it reflects the culture of its population and the way they preserve it.

 

-         Language is divided into the following categories

 

-         Phonology (the sounds that make up language)

-         Syntax (grammar). Semantics (the meaning of words)

-         Pragmatics the study of meaning in context (how we use language in social situation to communicate i.e. words and their relations with the persons and situations.

-         Basically, these are carried out by two related and but separate activities namely: listening & speaking.

 

These two complicated skills can be studied under the following headings:

1- Comprehension: inquires into what people do when they listen to speech and understand it, when they store and remember it later.

2- Production: deals with why and how people say what they do say.

3-Acquisition: i.e. how this complex of activities develops.

In fact, language has been the concern of linguistics and its subfields such as sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. The latter is the study of the language acquisition process i.e. how it is captured, stored, understood and produced.

Some Definitions of Psycholinguistics

1. Definitions

Psycholinguistics is the bridge between Linguistics and psychology as shown in the following definitions:

• Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental faculties involved in the perception, production, and acquisition of language.

• “Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental mechanisms that make it possible for people to use language. It is a scientific discipline whose goal is a coherent theory of the way in which language is produced and understood.” (Alan Garnham, Psycholinguistics: Central Topics. Psychology Press, 1985)

• Psycholinguists study how words 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.

• Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language.