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Intro of Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and psychological processes, focusing on how language is processed in the mind and brain. It encompasses various areas such as language acquisition, comprehension, production, and second language learning, utilizing interdisciplinary approaches from fields like psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics. The term 'psycholinguistics' gained prominence in 1946, aiming to unify diverse theoretical approaches to the psychology of language.

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13 views3 pages

Intro of Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of the relationship between language and psychological processes, focusing on how language is processed in the mind and brain. It encompasses various areas such as language acquisition, comprehension, production, and second language learning, utilizing interdisciplinary approaches from fields like psychology, neuroscience, and linguistics. The term 'psycholinguistics' gained prominence in 1946, aiming to unify diverse theoretical approaches to the psychology of language.

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INTRO OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS:

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the


interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The
discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language
is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the
psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire,
use, comprehend, and produce language.

Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes


that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language.
It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a
listener.

Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and


educational fields, due mainly to their location in departments other than
applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain
functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience,
cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the
mind-brain processes language, and less so the known processes of
social sciences, human development, communication theories, and infant
development, among others.

There are several subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for


studying the neurological workings of the brain. For example,
neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right, and developmental
psycholinguistics, as a branch of psycholinguistics, concerns I tself with
a child's ability to learn language.
Areas of study[
Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that consists of researchers
from a variety of different backgrounds, including psychology, cognitive
science, linguistics, speech and language pathology, and discourse
analysis. Psycholinguists study how people acquire and use language,
according to the following main areas:

1. language acquisition: how do children acquire language?


2. language comprehension: how do people comprehend language?
3. language production: how do people produce language?
4. second language acquisition: how do people who already know
one language acquire another one?
A researcher interested in language comprehension may
study word recognition during reading, to examine the processes
involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological,
and semantic information from patterns in printed text. A researcher
interested in language production might study how words are prepared
to be spoken starting from the conceptual or semantic level (this
concerns connotation, and possibly can be examined through the
conceptual framework concerned with the semantic
differential). Developmental psycholinguists study infants' and children's
ability to learn and process language.[3]
Psycholinguistics further divide their studies according to the different
components that make up human language.
Linguistics-related areas include:

 Phonetics and phonology are the study of speech sounds. Within


psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and
understands these sounds.
 Morphology is the study of word structures, especially between
related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words
based on rules (such as plural formation).
 Syntax is the study of how words are combined to form sentences.
 Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where
syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics
deals with the actual meaning of sentences.
 Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation
of meaning.

Origin of "psycholinguistics"
The theoretical framework for psycholinguistics began to be developed
before the end of the 19th century as the "Psychology of Language". The
work of Edward Thorndike and Frederic Bartlett laid the foundations of
what would come to be known as the science of psycholinguistics. In
1936 Jacob Kantor, a prominent psychologist at the time, used the term
"psycholinguistic" as a description within his book An Objective
Psychology of Grammar.
However, the term "psycholinguistics" only came into widespread usage
in 1946 when Kantor's student Nicholas Pronko published an article
entitled "Psycholinguistics: A Review". Pronko's desire was to unify
myriad related theoretical approaches under a single name.

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