Psycholinguistic research was born with Plato, interested in the world of language, and yet it became a true subject of linguistics during the second half of the 19th century with linguists who began to study language acquisition.
In fact, the coining of the term psycholinguistics is attributed to the American Jacob Robert Kantor in the mid-1930s. In this Psychology-Online article we will delve deeper into this subject to understand the Psycholinguistics: what it is, what is its importance and how it is appliedthrough the presentation of different examples.
What is psycholinguistics
In the 1950s, the term psycholinguistics began to be used to indicate research on linguistic behavior carried out on the basis of the concepts and analyzes of linguists.
If linguistics is commonly understood as the study of language, psycholinguistics or psychology of language can be defined as the study of psychological and neurobiological factors that underlie the acquisitionunderstanding and use of the language in humans.
Specifically, psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that takes advantage of the contributions of various disciplines such as neuropsychology, linguistics and cognitive sciences in general.
Object of study of psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is primarily concerned with the computational processes applied by the brain to understand and produce language. The three primary processes covered by psycholinguistics are:
- Understanding of the language.
- Language production.
- Acquisition of language.
Although it shares some notions and some levels of analysis typical of linguistics, it is distinguished from the latter in that try to define theories on the functional architecture of the processes involved in the use of language, investigating how language is represented and processed at a cognitive level and trying to locate it anatomically. This objective is achieved by investigating the different levels that constitute the ability to use language:
- Phonology.
- Morphology.
- Syntax.
- Semantics.
- Pragmatics.
In addition to the study of the anatomical-functional architecture of language processes in healthy subjects, psycholinguistics also studies damaged linguistic processes in subjects with evolutionary pathologies, such as , or who have developed language pathologies after injuries of various nature such as a stroke, tumor diseases, head trauma or neurodegenerative diseases, such as .
Importance of psycholinguistics
The results obtained in the study of language pathology and aphasiology are useful for define better cognitive rehabilitation techniques of aphasias, evolutionary pathologies or neurodegenerative diseases that affect language.
The data and theories developed about the brain’s computation of language can be applied in the following ways:
- For educational purposes: Understanding the anatomical organization of language in human beings plays a relevant role in education.
- Improve teaching techniques of the first or second language in school programs.
- Better understand the functioning of the brain and mind: Scientific research on the anatomo-functional organization of language in the brain of human beings may have the purpose of reaching a better understanding of the functioning of the brain and mind.
- Study the relationships between the mind and the brain: thus creating a field of research capable of unifying biological sciences with behavioral sciences.
How psycholinguistics is applied
psycholinguistics apply the scientific method and uses different methodologies to collect experimental data. Next, we show you what methods are used in the field of psycholinguistics:
- Observation of behavior: the observation of linguistic errors made by speakers.
- Behavioral measures: the measurement of reaction times in linguistic tasks, lexical decision or deciding whether a word presented by the researcher belongs or not to the language of the test subject.
- Psycho-neurophysiological measures: such as electrophysiological methods or neuroimaging techniques (eye movements, electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance, positron emission tomography). Using these techniques, the physiological reactions that take place in the brain during the execution of tasks of a linguistic nature are measured.
Examples of psycholinguistics
The linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky pioneered psycholinguistics, stating that all normal human beings have a innate linguistic ability and that all human languages have a common underlying structure known as universal grammar.
This directly challenges behavioral learning theories who affirm that language is not innate, but learned step by step through imitation and reinforcement. This is a debate that is still ongoing today.
The Language acquisition is an important subtitle in psycholinguistics of which the following factors have been studied:
- Study of language acquisition in young children learning their native language.
- Study of second language acquisition. Investigate questions such as why learning a second language is easier for children than for most adults.
- Study of why non-native speakers may have difficulty distinguishing and pronouncing certain sounds necessary for meaningful discourse in their second language, when these sounds are not present or differentiated in their native language.
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Bibliography
- Arroyo, F.V. (1991). Psycholinguistics. Morata Editions.
- Duarte, MJP, & Varo, CV (2006). Language and brain: connections between neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics. in Proceedings of the First National Congress of Clinical Linguistics (Vol. 1, pp. 107-119).
- Zanon, J. (2007). Psycholinguistics and language teaching: a historical and conceptual approach. MarcoELE. Journal of Didactics Spanish Foreign Language(5), 1-30.