The scope of Psycholinguistics Studies

Psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science, and is the study of how individuals comprehend, produce and acquire language. Psycholinguists are also interested in the social rules involved in language use, and the brain mechanisms associated with language. Psycholinguistics focuses on how people process language –how we comprehend and produce spoken and written language- and how these skills are acquired. In order to understand these language processes, we need to understand the major properties of language as well as the processing characteristics of the individuals who use it.

The scope of psycholinguistics

• Language process and linguistic knowledge

1. What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language?

• tacit knowledge –how to perform

• explicit knowledge –process or mechanisms

2. What cognitive processes are involved in the ordinary use of language?

 General psychological mechanisms

Both comprehension and production of language are performed within the constraints of our information processing system. The system consists of structural components (memory systems) along with a set of control processes that govern the flow of information within the system.

The information processing system.

Central issues in language processing : Serial vs Parallel processing, Top-Down vs Bottom-Up processing, Automatic vs Controlled processes, Modularity vs Interactivity, Development of the processing systems.

Language comprehension

In this part, we will ewamine language comprehension at a number of levels of processing (for the convenience of exposition) : levels of speech processing, Words processing (internal lexicon), syntactic parsing and sentence understanding, connected discourse comprehension.

• Perception of language : identification of isolated speech sounds and of continuous speech.
• The internal lexicon : representation and organization of semantic knowledge (lexical access processes in comprehension).
• Comprehension of sentences : syntactic and semantic aPsycholinguisticsroaches to the construction of interpretations.
• Discourse comprehension : Comprehension of discourse, Memory for discourse, Schemata and discourse processing.

Language production and conversational interaction

Language production can be viewed as consisting in four major stages : conceptualizing a thought to be expressed, formulating a linguistic plan, articulating the plan, and monitoring one’s speech. These various stages will be examined in this part.

1. Production of speech and language : Serial vs Parallel models of linguistic planning ; implementing linguistic plans (articulating and self monitoring)
2. Conversational interaction : The structure of conversations, Conversational skills, conversational settings.