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Lecture 9
Psycholinguistics
The branch of knowledge which studies the mental aspects of language, combining linguistics and psychology is often defined as the study of language and the mind. It explores what goes on in the human mind as an individual acquires, comprehends, produces and stores language. Such a study covers an enormous range of topics. It overlaps with a wider more general field known as psychology of language, which includes the relationship of language to thought, and with an even wider one, the psychology of communication.
Psycholinguistics, as the study of language and the mind, is usually distinguished from neurolinguistics, the study of language and the brain. Psycholinguistics occupies the borderline between General Psychology and General Linguistics. Psychology studies the nature and function of the human soul. Its scope of interest lies in the human ability to use language.
Psycholinguistics began to emerge as a distinct discipline in the 1950s. Many people date psycholinguistics proper from the mid 1960-s, when an upsurge of interest followed on from the work of N. Chomsky, who argued that language was likely to be genetically programmed. N. Chomsky’s ideas triggered an avalanche of work by both linguists and psychologists on child language acquisition, and also an interest in finding out whether his theory of transformational-generative grammar had “psychological reality”, in the sense of reflecting the way people store or process language. Much of this early work turned out to be somewhat naïve and disappointing results. Because N. Chomsky repeatedly revised his theories, a number of psychologists decided that linguistic theory was too changeable to provide a secure basis for their work. The field has therefore become somewhat splintered, even though it continued to expand. Considerable progress has been made in major areas like child language acquisition, speech comprehension, and speech production.
Child language acquisition
Language has all the hallmarks of maturationally controlled behavour. It is used to be thought that animal behaviour could be divided into two types: that which was inborn and natural (dogs naturally bark), and that which was learnt and unnatural (dogs may be taught to beg). It turns out that this division is by no means clear-cut and may be misleading. Many types of behaviour develop “naturally” at a certain age, provided that the surrounding environment is adequate. Such behaviour is maturationally controlled. Arguments as to whether it is inborn or learnt are futile. Both nature and nurture are important. Innate potentialities lay down the framework, and within this framework, there is a wide variation depending on the environment. When individuals reach the crucial point in their maturation, they are biologically in a state of readiness for learning the behaviour. They would not learn it at this time without a biological trigger, and conversely, the biological trigger could not be activated if there was nobody around from whom they could learn the behaviour.
Human infants pay attention to language from birth. They produce recognizable words at around 12 to 15 months, and start putting words together at around 18 months. The urge for language to emerge at this time is very strong, and only very extraordinary circumstances will suppress it – as in the case of Genie, a Californian teenager who from the age of 20 months had been confined to one small room, and had been physically punished by her father if she made any sounds. Naturally, she was without speech when she was found. But all normal children, and some abnormal ones, will begin to speak if they hear language going on around them.
Children all over the world show similarities in the way they acquire language, whose development appears to be maturationally controlled (pre-programmed to emerge at a particular point in development, providing that the environment is normal, and the child unimpaired). Moreover, at each stage, child language is not just a substandard form of an adults language, but an independent system with rules of its own. The nature of the genetic input is still under discussion as is the question how children abandon immature rules, such as What kitty can eat? for What can kitty eat?, since they are apparently impervious to direct corrections.
Speech comprehension
Understanding speech is now known to be an active rather than a passive process, in which hearers construct the intended message, based on outline clues and their own expectations. This can be demonstrated by representing them with a confusing sentence such as Anyone who shoots the ducks out of the line of fire (Any person who uses a gun gets down quickly out of the line of fire). This is so called garden path sentence, in which hearers are “led up the garden path” (misled) as they try to impose their expectations of a subject – verb – object pattern on a sentence which requires different interpretation. Further evidence of the active nature of comprehension comes from experiments with homonyms, such as It’s a rose / They all rose, when all meanings of a linguistic form turn out to be briefly considered before the unwanted ones are suppressed.
Speech production
Producing speech is a complex procedure, in which future stretches of speech are prepared while others are being uttered, as shown by slips of the tongue such as The curse has walked for you (The course has walked for you). At the same time, more than one candidate is possibly being considered for each word slot: in an error such as I looked in the calendar (catalogue), the speaker has possibly activated several three-syllable words beginning with ca-, narrowed it down to those involving lists, then accidentally suppressed the wrong one. An important issue is to discover not only how the mind activates a required word or a construction, but also how it suppresses the numerous alternatives which are subconsciously considered.
Psycholinguistic evidence
The mind cannot be directly observed, so psycholinguists have to devise ways of finding out how it works. They get their evidence from two main sources: observation of spontaneous utterances and psycholinguistic experiments. Spontaneous utterances which deviate from the norm in some way are the most informative. We can learn considerably more from a child’s mistake such as foots instead of feet.
However, ordinary speech is somewhat messy, in that there are dozens of different factors which have to be taken into account when utterances are analyzed. Psycholinguists devise experiments in which the number of variable factors can be controlled, and the results can be accurately measured.
But this type of methodology presents a problem, sometimes called the “experimental paradox”. The more carefully the experiment is devised so as to limit variables, the more subjects are put into in an unnatural situation, in which they are likely to behave oddly. The more one allows the situation to be like “real life”, the less one is able to sort out various interacting factors. Ideally, major topics should be tackled both by observing spontaneous speech and by devising experiments. And when the results coincide, this is a sign that progress is being made.
The content-process controversy
The realization that language is maturationally controlled means that most psycholinguists now agree that human beings are innately programmed to speak. But they cannot agree on exactly what is innate. They cannot decide to what extent (if any) language ability is separate from other cognitive abilities.
All researchers agree that there is extraordinary similarity in the speech development of English children. Children who could not possibly be acquainted go through the similar stages in their development, and also make similar mistakes. The implications of this coincidence are hotly disputed. On the one hand, there are those who consider that this infirmity of speech development indicates that children innately contain a blueprint for language: this view represents a so-called content approach. Extreme supporters of this view suggest that children may have a universal framework imprinted on their brains.
On the other hand, there are those who support a process approach, and argue that children could not possibly contain specific language universals. Instead, they are innately geared to processing linguistic data, for which they utilize a puzzle-solving ability which is closely related to other cognitive skills.
A further group of people point to the social nature of language, and the role of parents. Children, they argue, are social beings who have a great need to interact with those around them. Furthermore, all over the world, child-carers tend to talk about the same sort of things, chatting mainly about food, clothes and other objects in the immediate environment. Motherese or caregiver language has fairly similar characteristics almost everywhere: the caregivers slow down their rate of speech and speak in slow, well-formed utterances, with quite a lot of repetition. People who stress these social aspects of language claim that there is no need to search for complex innate mechanisms: social interaction with caring caregivers is sufficient to cause language to develop.
The later view is turning out to be something of exaggeration. The fact that the parents make it easier for children to learn language does not explain why they are so quick to acquire it: intelligent chimps exposed to intensive sign language rarely get beyond 200 words and two-word sequences. Furthermore, language seems to be due to something more than a desire to communicate. There is at least one strange child on record who acquired fluent language, but did not use it to communicate. He spoke only monologues to himself, and refused to interact with others.
The whole controversy is far from being solved, though psycholinguists hope that the increasing amount of work being done on the acquisition of languages other than English may shed more light on the topic. It is possible that we shall never unravel the mystery entirely: it seems likely that children use an inbuilt linguistic ability to solve general intelligence problems, and also their natural puzzle-solving abilities to solve linguistic problems.
Basic psycholinguistic factors
There can be three factors that are of primary importance for the speaking individual: the human factor, the situational factor, the experimental factor, the abnormal factor.
The human factor is extremely important in defining psycholinguistics as an independent science. In the center of analysis here is not the product of speaking (our speech) but the speaking person with all his/her merits and demerits, strong and weak points, creative abilities and disturbances.
The situational factor also plays an important role. If we look at any text more or less carefully, we will see that all the parameters of the communicative speech situations are somehow reflected in it. We can basically determine where and when this or that conversation takes place
The experimental factor is of primary importance as well. The experiment is recognized as a leading method of psychology. The experiment helps to create an artificial situation allowing the speaker to exercise certain linguistic devices which are of special interest for the researcher. Besides, the experimental situation may cause the speaker to exercise the certain linguistic abilities so that the scholar may determine whether these abilities are well developed, underdeveloped or impaired. Texts are extremely popular in psycholinguistic studies.
The abnormal factor should also be taken into consideration when dealing with language. Linguistics has always been a norm centric discipline. It means that linguistics have analyzed the “correct” texts only. It has never been clear what is to be done with the “wrong” texts. The texts produced by illiterate people, foreigners or mentally sick individuals were merely defined as “incorrect” and according considered not worth studying at all. These texts do exist, so something must be done with them. The term “wrong” is not very successful one because it gives nothing to our understanding what such texts are really like and what mental processes bring them into being.