Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand Language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of Biology, Neuroscience, Cognitive science, and Information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines; for example, as non-invasive techniques to study the neurological workings of the brain become more and more used, Neurolinguistics has become a field of its own.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of Vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, Text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observation like Darwin and Jean Piaget emphasized when studying their own children).
Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as Psychology, Cognitive science, and Linguistics. There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up human Language.- Phonetics and Phonology are concerned with 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 the relationships 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 the patterns which dictate how words are combined together 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.
Theories
One of the most famous linguists is Noam Chomsky. Chomsky believed that humans have an innate Universal grammar, an abstract concept containing the underpinnings for grammatical rules in all languages. This view emphasizes the point that children acquiring a language have a vast search space to explore among possible human grammars, yet somehow settle on the language(s) spoken or signed in the community of speakers. Though Chomsky's own work is mainly theoretical, many psycholinguists attempt to test the theories in their experimental work. This view remains controversial.Psychiatrist Sigmund Freud wrote much on the influence between psychological and emotional states, particularly from the unconscious and language. Among his theories is that which developed into the notion of the Freudian slip. Much of his exploration of the topic can be found in his work, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901).
Methodologies
Most research in psycholinguistics takes the form of psychophysical and behavioral experiments. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with some form of linguistic input and asked to give a particular response. Reaction times and proportion correct are the most often employed measures of performance.More recently, Eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Beginning with Tanenhaus et al. (1995), a number of studies have begun to use eye movements as a tool for studying the cognitive processes related to language. Since eye movements are closely linked to the current focus of attention, language processing can be studied by monitoring eye movements as a subject is presented with linguistic input.
Other techniques include brain imaging and computational modeling. Each type of methodology presents a set of advantages and disadvantages for studying a particular problem in psycholinguistics.