Developmental Psycholinguistics
Warm- up
· Psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation of language and mind in processing and producing utterance and in a language acquisition.
· A Survey of Theory and Research Problems, defines Psycholinguistics deals directly with the process of encoding and decoding as they relate states of message to states communicators.
Branches/ Areas and Goals of Psycholinguistics
• Language Processing
What happens in the human mind when we speak/read/write/ listen?
What are the processes and mechanisms underlying this complex activity?
· Language Processing
Two main activities are involved:
• Speech production (what is going on from thought to output, to the actual production of a sound wave)
• Comprehension (a complementary activity to speech production) It is not just perception, it is also how do we interpret what is being said to us, how do we analyze the linguistic units (words).
Clark and Clark (1977) divided this concept into two (1) comprehension related to understanding the utterances we hear (perception), and (2) comprehension in relation to the act-needs to be taken after the comprehension happened (comprehending).
• Language Acquisition
How do children learn to speak?
How do they acquire their mother tongue?
· Language Acquisition
We are dealing with children! Despite their limited mental abilities, they acquire a language within just a few years of their lives.
-Developmental Psycholinguistics/ Child Language Acquisition
- Children represent the backbone of any family as they require special care and attention.
- Children and their behaviours such as smiling, crying, in addition to their first words are the focus of all the parents and caregivers anywhere in the world from the day they are born until the pre-school phase.
- Moreover, when people meet a child it is common to hear expressions like “he/she is so cute” “look he/she is smiling!” “does he/she speak yet?”.
- Child language acquisition has been the focus of psycholinguistics where many approaches have been proposed for the sake of studying and analysing the stages through which any child may pass.
- Nevertheless, before dealing with the main approaches of psycholinguistics which tackle the milestones of CLA, we find it necessary to discuss the central concern of developmental psycholinguistics. The latter is the first major sub-field of the psychology of language. The field of developmental psycholinguistics was first attracted by the children’s ability to pick up their mother tongue (first language). Its main focus was to investigate the breakneck and effortless acquisition of L1. In this respect, Kess (1993:30) argued that:
Developmental psycholinguistics, the study of child language has attempted to answer the key questions such as: “how does a child learn his/her language so well in such a short time?” and “what is the course of language learning” and has provided us with considerable insight into how and why of first language acquisition.
Henceforth, it examines the steps of speech emergence during the infancy period and how do children start developing the intricate system of their mother tongue?
The main differences between the Language Acquisition (LA) Language Learning (LL)
LA is considered as a sub-conscious effort (remember not unconscious) meaning that any language substances can be picked up any times, from any sources and anywhere. It is free and in natural manner, so it seems very automatic. LL is assumed as a conscious activity; therefore, in obtaining any language system, it must be controlled by syllabus or scheduled by lesson plan. This process must be done in artificial ways and nurtured teaching method. It can be schematized as follows :
· Language Acquisition and Language Learning
The main difference between the Language Acquisition (LA) Language Learning (LL)
LA is considered as a sub-conscious effort (remember not unconscious) meaning that any language substances can be picked up any times, from any sources and anywhere. It is free and in natural manner, so it seems very automatic. LL is assumed as a conscious activity; therefore, in obtaining any language system, it must be controlled by syllabus or scheduled by lesson plan. This process must be done in artificial ways and nurtured teaching method. It can be schematized as follows :
|
Types |
Language Acquisition |
Language Learning |
|
1 |
Subconscious |
Conscious |
|
2 |
Free |
Controlled |
|
3 |
Natural |
Artificial |
|
4 |
Automatic |
Scheduled |
|
5 |
Nature |
Nurture |