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Chapter 9
Psycholinguistics
What do these activities have in common?
What kind of process is involved in producing and understanding
language?
Chapter 9 Psycholinguistics
Questions
• What is psycholinguistics?
• What are the main topics of
psycholinguistics?
Question 1
• What is psycholinguistics?
9.1 Introduction
•
* Psycholinguistics is the study of the language
processing mechanisms. Psycholinguistics deals
with the mental processes a person uses in
producing and understanding language.
It is concerned with the relationship between
language and the human mind, for example,
how word, sentence, and discourse meaning are
represented and computed in the mind.
9.1 Introduction
* As the name suggests, it is a subject which links
psychology and linguistics.
• Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature
and is studied by people in a variety of fields,
such as psychology, cognitive science, and
linguistics. It is an area of study which draws
insights from linguistics and psychology and
focuses upon the comprehension and
production of language.
• The scope of psycholinguistics
• The common aim of psycholinguists is to
find out the structures and processes
which underline a human’s ability to
speak and understand language.
• Psycholinguists are not necessarily
interested in language interaction between
people. They are trying above all to probe
into what is happening within the individual.
The scope of psycholinguistics
• At its heart, psycholinguistic work consists
of two questions.
– What knowledge of language is needed
for us to use language?
– What processes are involved in the use
of language?
The “knowledge” question
• Four broad areas of language knowledge:
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 behavior.
The “process” question
•What cognitive processes are involved in
the ordinary use of language?
– “ordinary use of language”: e.g. understanding a
lecture, reading a book, writing a letter, and holding
a conversation, etc.
– “cognitive processes”: processes like perception,
memory and thinking.
• Although we do few things as often or as easily as
speaking and listening, we will find that
considerable cognitive processing is going on
during those activities.
Two possible directions of study in psycholinguistics
• Language as a way of explaining
psycholinguistic theories and processes:
language influences memory, perception,
attention and learning.
• The effects of psychological constraints on
the use of language: how memory limitations
affect language production and
comprehension.
Question 2
• What are the main topics of psycholinguistics?
Topics to be covered include…
• General issues of psycholinguistics:
• language acquisition (how human beings learn
language)
• language production (how we create and
express meaning through language)
• language comprehension (how we perceive
and understand speech and written language)
• The relationship between language and
thought
9.2 Language Acquisition
• Psycholinguistics is interested in the
acquisition of language: how children
acquire their mother tongue.
• The study of the acquisition of language
by children is often called developmental
psycholinguistics.
9.2 Language Acquisition
•
Many linguists feel that if we can understand the
internal mechanism which enables children to
learn language so quickly we shall have
penetrated one of the deepest secrets of the
mind.
• The psycholinguist Steven Pinker makes a strong case
for considering the elements of linguistic knowledge to
be innate. This is consistent with the Chomskyan
concept of universal grammar: the idea that there is a
common underlying structure to every language, the
knowledge of which we are born with.
• Language acquisition refers to the learning and
development of a person’s language. The
learning of a native or first language is called
first language acquisition, and the learning of a
second or foreign language is called second
language acquisition.
Two basic notions in first language acquisition
• Overgeneralization/Overextension(the extension
of a rule beyond its proper limits)
• Undergeneralization/Underextension(a child
uses a word in a more limited way than adults
do )
Examples of overgeneralization
It is shown by psycholinguistics that children’s
use of language is rule-governed. For example,
children frequently say tooths and mouses,
instead of teeth and mice, and holded, goed,
runned and finded, instead of held, went, ran
and found.
Can you find more examples of
overgeneralizations in your English acquisition?
Examples of overgeneralization
Overgeneralization is a frequent phenomenon in
language development. It can be found not only
in syntactic usage but also in word meanings.
moons: all round objects
cars: all vehicles
dogs: all four-legged animals
Examples of overgeneralization
• Most psycholinguists believe that the intonational,
gestural, and contextual clues make it clear that children
are using single-word sentences, exactly as adults often
do in a conversation.
• Milk(Do you have any milk?/ I’d like some milk.)
Undergeneralization
• Children also undergeneralize. When a child
uses a word in a more limited way than adults do
(e.g. refusing to call a taxi a car), this
phenomenon is called undergeneralization or
underextension.
• Shoes only refers to his mother’s shoes.
• Hat only refers to his own hat.
Reasons for overgeneralization and undergeneralization
• On some occasions, children’s conceptual categories
may actually differ from those adults.
• On other occasions, they may know perfectly well that a
cow is not a dog but not know what it is called.
• On still other occasions, the child’s misuse of words may
reflect an attempt at humor.
Stages of first language acquisition
•
•
•
•
The prelinguistic stage牙牙學語期
The one-word stage 单词期
The two-word stage兩詞期
The multiword stage多語期
The prelinguistic stage牙牙學語期
• By the age of six months when they are
able to sit up, children are heard producing
a number of different vowels and
consonants.
• At the babbling（牙牙學語）stage, the
sound and syllables that children utter are
as yet meaningless.
The one-word stage
• At some point in the late part of the first year or
the early part of the second year.
• Children’s one-word utterances are also called
holophrastic 全句字(以一個字表示整句的意思),
because they can be used to express a concept
or prediction that would be associated with an
entire sentence in adult speech.
The two-word stage兩詞期
• In general, the two-word stage begins
roughly in the second half of the child’s
second year.
• Children’s two-word utterances can
express a certain variety of grammatical
relations indicated by word order, i.e.
“Baby chair”.
The multiword stage多語期
• Between two and three years old.
• When a child starts stringing more than
two words together, the utterances may be
two, three, four, or five word or longer, e.g.
Cathy build house.
9.3 Language production
1.The definition of language production
2. Stages of language production
Language production
Language production refers to the cognitive processes
that convert nonverbal communication intentions into
verbal action.
Language production involves two simultaneous
processes
1) the thought process, which is global and holistic,
involving a type of thinking in mentalese (心理语言 )
that is not yet speech.
2) the speech process, which is serial and linear
assemblage of the units of language. (William James 1980)
Language production
According to Levelt (莱维尔特) (1989), language
production contains four stages:
1)conceptualizing
2)formulating
3)articulating
4)self-monitoring
• First, we must conceptualize what we wish to
communicate;
• Second, we formulate this thought into a
linguistic plan;
• Third, we execute the plan through the muscles
in the speech system;
• Finally, we monitor our speech, accessing
whether it is what we intended to say and
whether we said it the way we intended to.
Conceptualization
• Where do ideas come from? In what form do ideas exist
before they are put into words?
• These are difficult questions to answer, partly because
we still don’t know enough about how language is
produced, partly because they deal with mental
abstractions so vague that they elude empirical
investigation.
• As to the second question, psycholinguists generally
agree that some form of mentalese exists---a
representation system which is different from language.
Conceptualizing
•
•
Conceptualzing involves conceiving of an intention,
selecting the relevant information to be expressed
for the realization of this purpose, ordering this
information for expression, the sum total of these
mental activities will be called conceptualizing.
According to Levelt, conceptualizing is
responsible for generating message.
Formulating
• Formulation refers to converting the thought (which
is conceptualized in the first stage) into linguistic plan,
to generating a framework on which to hang the units
of speech.
• Formulation is the second stage of speech
production.
• This stage consists of three phases:
identifying the meaning
selecting a syntactic structure
generating an intonation contour.
Three phases of formulating
1. identifying the meaning
• This framework begins with the thought you want to
express and the searches for definition that best match
the thought, like consulting a dictionary in reverse----defining the meaning and then finding the word to
match it.
words
meaning
Three phases of formulating
• 2.selecting a syntactic structure
This step involves finding the appropriate
syntactic structure, three models could be used.
1) tree diagram
2) semantics-based framework
3) the connectionist model
2.selecting a syntactic structure
1)Similar to use tree diagrams to parse sentences with a
phrase structure grammar, here we can use tree
diagram to generate sentences, starting with a sentencelevel representation (S), and flesh out the phrases
(NP+VP), then the constituents within phrases (N, V,
etc.)
e.g.
S
NP
det
VP
N
V
NP
2.selecting a syntactic structure
• 2) Semantics-based framework: using not tree
diagrams but cases, themes, or roles assigned to the
main verbs and nouns in the sentence. We would find
the appropriate nouns and verbs that describe the
actions, actors and objects in the conceptualization.
For instance, the word “stab” would activate agent,
patient, and instrument roles.
2. selecting a syntactic structure
• 3)The connectionist model: a sentence to be
spoken would be represented by spreading
activation through a network of nodes
representing phonological, lexical, and
morphological levels.
• Finding the syntactic frame could be using any
of these three models.
Three phases of formulating
• 3 Generating an intonation contour ['kɔntuə]
Whether you are going to ask a question or make a
statement, and the constituents in the utterance that
need to be emphasized or stressed have to be tagged
at this point. Here is where we layout the stress
pattern in the sentence to be produced.
e.g.
Mike like baby .(to emphasize object )
Mike like baby. (to emphasize subject )
Formulation
• Speech errors are made by speakers unintentionally. In
formulating speech, we are often influenced by the
sound system of language.
• The scientific study of speech errors, commonly called
slips of the tongue or tongue-slips, can provide useful
clues to the processes of language production.
Table: major types of slips of the tongue
Type
Examples
Shift
That’s so she’ll be ready in case she decide to hits it
(decides to hit it).
Exchange
Fancy getting your model renosed (getting your nose
remodeled).
Anticipation
Bake my bike (take my bike).
perseveration He pulled a pantrum (tantrum).
Addition
I didn’t explain this clarefully enough (carefully enough).
Deletion
I’ll just get up and mutter intelligibly (unintenlligibly).
Substitution
At slow speeds it’s too light (heavy).
Blend
That child is looking to be spaddled
（spanked/paddled).
Articulation
• Articulation of speech sounds is the third and a very
important stages of production.
• Once we have organized our thoughts into a linguistic
plan, this information must be sent from the brain to the
muscles in the speech system so that they can then
execute the required movements and produce the
desired sounds.
• We depend on vocal organs to produce speech sounds
so as to express ourselves. In the production of speech
sounds, the lungs, larynx and lips may work at the same
time and thus form co-articulation.
Self-regulation
• Self-regulation is the last stage of speech production. To
err is human. So each person would do some selfcorrection over and over again while conversing.
• According to some psycholinguists, errors are committed
only by non-native speakers. Native speakers often
make “mistakes” and correct themselves immediately.
• Native speakers often use different ways to edit their
linguistic performance.
• Speech production or written production is not a one-way
linear process; it is a parallel, two-way system involving
production and self-regulation in the production.
9.4 Language Comprehension
• Understanding language, like producing it, is such an
automatic task that it seems to be a relatively
straightforward process.
• What is apparent from the vast research into the
comprehension of spoken and written language is that
people do not process linguistic information in a neat,
linear fashion; they do not move smoothly from one
linguistic level to another.
• The research shows that in most situations, listeners and
readers use a great deal of information other than the
actual language being produced to help them find the
meaning of the linguistic symbols they hear or see.
1 Sound Comprehension
• Sound comprehension is not a passive process. It often
depends on the context from which listeners expect to
hear. People understand the meaning as a whole. They
do not listen to each word individually.
• Distinguishing similar sounds, such as /b/ and /p/, /t/ and
/d/ in English, is another type of sound comprehension.
People often recognize the differences of sounds based
on the length of producing time.
• In a word, the successful comprehension of speech
sounds is a combination of the innate ability of humans
to distinguish minute differences between speech
sounds, and the ability to adjust to the acoustic
categories of the language they are exposed to.
2 Word Comprehension
• Word comprehension is a very complex psycholinguistic
process and is much more complex than the processing
of speech sounds. That is because there are mountains
of words in the vocabulary which not only consist of
sounds, but also convey meanings.
• Psycholinguists use parallel distributed processing (PDP)
to explain the complex process of word understanding.
• PDP is a model of cognition developed from
neurology, computer science and psychology. It
is a way in which people use several seperate
and paralell processes at the same time to
understand spoken or written language.
• For example, understanding a word involves:
remember the word;
search the meaning of the word;
spell word
pronounce the word
• A PDP model of comprehension can be used to explain
lexical access. In our mind we have stored many words,
some of which are easily accessible, but some of which
are not. As a rule, high-frequency words are rapidly and
frequently activated, and low-frequency words take
longer time to be incorporated into a system of
understanding. Logogens, or lexical detection devices,
are like individual neuros in a gigantic neuronal network.
When they are activated, they would co-operate with
many other logogens to create comprehension.
• The PDP approach is able to explain tip-of-the-tongue
(TOT) phenomenon. In our daily life many of us have
had the experience that we knew the word, but could not
access the whole word. For many times, we could not
only get part of the words vaguely, such as the beginning
or the ending of the words. This is called bathtub effect
because when we submerge ourselves in a bathtub, we
can only see our head and feet.
3 Sentence comprehension
• Besides decoding sounds and lexical meanings,
comprehension also includes untangling the meaning of
sentences. The greatest influence on sentence
comprehension is meaning.
• There are a few factors influencing the
comprehension of sentences. The first is that the
ambiguity of word meaning leads to difficulties in
sentence understanding. The more complex
information the word has, the more difficult the
sentence is to understand.
Ambiguities
•
Lexical ambiguity
• bank
financial institution where you deposit your
money
slope of land along a river
Ambiguities
Lexical ambiguity
e.g.
They are playing cards.
Those people, they are performing the act of playing cards.
Those cards, they are not greeting cards but playing cards.
Flying planes can be dangerous.
The act of flying planes can be dangerous.
Planes that are flying can be dangerous.
3 Sentence comprehension
• The second factor is that the linguistic structure of the
sentence affects the processing time.
• Garden-pathing
• The horse raced past the barn fell.
• The evidence examined by the witness was forged.
• The horse that was raced past the barn fell.
• These are garden-path sentences: they mislead you
part-way through.
• The ambiguity is between main-verb and reduced
relative interpretations of the verb raced, examined.
• If the sentence structure is what readers or hearers
expected to read or hear, the processing time is short,
and the sentence is easy to understand. If the sentence
structure is not what readers or hearers expect, the
comprehension is disrupted and sentence
comprehension become slow. This is so-called gardenpathing, a natural comprehension of strategy. In
understanding sentences, the point is whether readers or
hearers choose the right path or wrong path.
4 Text comprehension
• Text comprehension is the largest unit compared with the
comprehension of sounds, words and sentences.
According to research on text understanding, people
tend to comprehend or memorize the content but not the
structure.
• Therefore in the process of understanding texts,
background information plays a very important part, and
greatly affects the way in which people remember a
piece of discourse. Background knowledge can active
people’s mental association which can help the
comprehension of texts.
9.5 Language and Thought
• The relationship between language and thought has long
been a subject of discussion. There are a wide range of
opinions about the general nature of the relationship. It is
probably true to say that every possible relation between
the two has been proposed by some theorists.
• At the risk of oversimplification, we can still say that
there are mainly two groups: those who believe that
language determines thought and those who think that
thought determines language.
• So the whole question we are concerned with here is
whether our thoughts are formed in advance of the
words that we utter or whether our ideas are formed in
terms of the words themselves.
1 Language determines thought
• There are dramatic vocabulary differences from
language to language. In some languages, there may be
only a single word for a certain object, creature or
concept, whereas in another language, there may be
several words, even quite a large number.
• In Chinese, there is only a single term luotuo (骆驼); in
English there is camel (or dromedary for the onehumped camel, and Bactrain camel for the two-humped
animal). But in Arabic, it is said that there are more than
400 words for the animal. The camel is of far greater
importance as a means of travel with most Arabicspeaking people. The greater number of words relating
to the camel is an obvious reflection of this.
• According to E. Spair and B. Lee Whorf, the child’s
cognitive system is determined by the structure of the
language he acquires. Since linguistic structures are
different, the associated cognitive systems are also
different.
• Spair-Whorf Hypothesis has two parts: the first is called
linguistic determinism, which says that linguistic structure
determines cognitive structure. That is, learning a
language changes the way a person thinks. The second
part is called linguistic relativity, which says that the
resulting cognitive systems are different in speakers of
different languages.
• Certain aspects of language behavior challenge Whorf’s
thesis, that the absence or presence of a lexical
distinction can be taken as an indicator of a
corresponding perceptual or conceptual distinction.
Secondly, there are bilinguals among the general
population in most communities who can express their
ideas freely in two or more languages. Thirdly,
languages borrow words from each other fairly frequently,
which demonstrate that existing vocabulary does not
exhaust the discrimination of which the language users
are capable.
• So a more acceptable conclusion might be that
“language differ not so much as to what can be said in
them, but rather as to what it is relatively easy to say”. It
seems clear that a strong version of the Whorfian
Hypothesis---language determines thought---cannot be
supported. However, it is equally clear that a weak
version of the hypothesis---language influences thought--is reasonable and supportable.
2 Thought determines language
• Those who believe that thought determines language
would say that cognitive development comes earlier in
the life of children and that cognitive categories they
develop determine the linguistic categories that they will
acquire.
• Many experiments have been carried out to test the
validity of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The results of
some experiments turned out to argue against it. B.
Berlin and P. Kay’s experiment in 1969 is a case in point.
It was concerned with how speakers of different
languages divided up the color spectrum.
• For our purpose, the importance of Berlin and
Kay’s work is that it strongly argues against the
hypothesis that languages are free to divide the
world of experience in any convenient way. In
the realm of colors, at least, there appear to be
some basic constraints that limit the way in
which this aspect of our experience is coded in
the language. This conclusion is directly contrary
to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
• If the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is
accepted, there will be no thought without language. If
there are no constraints on the variation to be found
between people in the way they think, speakers of
different languages will never see the world in the same
way. It also follows that if one can find a way to control
the language that people learn, one would thereby be
able to control their thoughts.
• Therefore, if the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is true, then we
are helplessly trapped by the language we speak. We
could not escape from it and even if we could, we would
fall into the framework of another language which would
determine what we think, what we perceive and what we
say.
• What is more, if language determines thought,
people speaking diverse languages would never
understand each other. The fact is that people of
the world have been communicating over the
centuries and that there have been radical
changes of world-views within languages.
Thank you!!!

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