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However, the term "psycholinguistics" only came into widespread usage in 1946 when Kantor's student Nicholas Pronko published an article entitled "Psycholinguistics: A Review". Pronko's desire was to unify myriad related theoretical approaches under a single name. Psycholinguistics was used for the first time to talk a... |
Though there is still much debate, there are two primary theories on childhood language acquisition: |
The field of linguistics and psycholinguistics has since been defined by pro-and-con reactions to Chomsky. The view in favor of Chomsky still holds that the human ability to use language (specifically the ability to use recursion) is qualitatively different from any sort of animal ability. This ability may have resulte... |
The structures and uses of language are related to the formation of ontological insights. Some see this system as "structured cooperation between language-users" who use conceptual and semantic deference in order to exchange meaning and knowledge, as well as give meaning to language, thereby examining and describing "s... |
The theory of the "semantic differential" supposes universal distinctions, such as: |
One question in the realm of language comprehension is how people understand sentences as they read (i.e., sentence processing). Experimental research has spawned several theories about the architecture and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. These theories are typically concerned with the types of information, conta... |
In contrast to the modular view, an interactive theory of sentence processing, such as a constraint-based lexical approach assumes that all available information contained within a sentence can be processed at any time. Under an interactive view, the semantics of a sentence (such as plausibility) can come into play ear... |
When reading, saccades can cause the mind to skip over words because it does not see them as important to the sentence, and the mind completely omits it from the sentence or supplies the wrong word in its stead. This can be seen in "Paris in thethe Spring". This is a common psychological test, where the mind will often... |
Language production refers to how people produce language, either in written or spoken form, in a way that conveys meanings comprehensible to others. One of the most effective ways to explain the way people represent meanings using rule-governed languages is by observing and analyzing instances of speech errors, which ... |
These speech errors have significant implications for understanding how language is produced, in that they reflect that: |
It is useful to differentiate between three separate phases of language production: |
Psycholinguistic research has largely concerned itself with the study of formulation because the conceptualization phase remains largely elusive and mysterious. |
Many of the experiments conducted in psycholinguistics, especially early on, are behavioral in nature. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with linguistic stimuli and asked to respond. For example, they may be asked to make a judgment about a word (lexical decision), reproduce the stimulus, or say a visua... |
As an example of how behavioral methods can be used in psycholinguistics research, Fischler (1977) investigated word encoding, using a lexical-decision task. He asked participants to make decisions about whether two strings of letters were English words. Sometimes the strings would be actual English words requiring a "... |
Recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Beginning with Rayner (1978), the importance of understanding eye-movements during reading was established. Later, Tanenhaus et al. (1995) used a visual-world paradigm to study the cognitive processes related to spoken language. Assuming that eye... |
The analysis of systematic errors in speech, as well as the writing and typing of language, can provide evidence of the process that has generated it. Errors of speech, in particular, grant insight into how the mind produces language while a speaker is mid-utterance. Speech errors tend to occur in the lexical, morpheme... |
The types of speech errors, with some examples, include: |
Speech errors will usually occur in the stages that involve lexical, morpheme, or phoneme encoding, and usually not in the first step of semantic encoding. This can be attributed to a speaker still conjuring the idea of what to say; and unless he changes his mind, can not be mistaken for what he wanted to say. |
Until the recent advent of non-invasive medical techniques, brain surgery was the preferred way for language researchers to discover how language affects the brain. For example, severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) was at one time a treatment for some forms ... |
Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission tomography (PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG); and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Brain imaging techniques vary in th... |
Computational modelling, such as the DRC model of reading and word recognition proposed by Max Coltheart and colleagues, is another methodology, which refers to the practice of setting up cognitive models in the form of executable computer programs. Such programs are useful because they require theorists to be explicit... |
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the processes that the brain undergoes in order to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input. Using new non-invasive imaging techniqu... |
Another unanswered question in psycholinguistics is whether the human ability to use syntax originates from innate mental structures or social interaction, and whether or not some animals can be taught the syntax of human language. |
Two other major subfields of psycholinguistics investigate first language acquisition, the process by which infants acquire language, and second language acquisition. It is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languages than it is for infants to learn their first language (infants are able to learn more tha... |
The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of brain damage. Studies in aphasiology can offer both advances in therapy for individuals suffering from aphasia and further insight into how the brain processes language. |
A short list of books that deal with psycholinguistics, written in language accessible to the non-expert, includes: |
International Association for the Study of Child Language |
The International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) is an academic society for first language acquisition researchers. |
IASCL was founded in 1970 by a group of prominent language acquisition researchers to promote international and interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of child language. Its major activity is the sponsorship of the triennial International Congress for the Study of Child Language, for which it publishes proceedings.... |
A mora (plural "morae" or "moras"; often symbolized μ) is a unit in phonology that describes syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. A mora is a sound which comes after a short pause in a syllable. The term comes from the Latin word for "linger, delay", which was also used to translate the... |
Monomoraic syllables have one mora, bimoraic syllables have two, and trimoraic syllables have three, although this last type is relatively rare. |
In general, morae are formed as follows: |
In general, monomoraic syllables are called "light syllables", bimoraic syllables are called "heavy syllables", and trimoraic syllables (in languages that have them) are called "superheavy syllables". Some languages, such as Old English and present-day English, can have syllables with up to four morae. |
A prosodic stress system in which moraically heavy syllables are assigned stress is said to have the property of quantity sensitivity. |
For the purpose of determining accent in Ancient Greek, short vowels have one mora, and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae. Thus long "ē" (eta: ) can be understood as a sequence of two short vowels: "ee". |
Ancient Greek pitch accent is placed on only one mora in a word. An acute (, ) represents high pitch on the only mora of a short vowel or the last mora of a long vowel ("é", "eé"). A circumflex () represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel ("ée"). |
In Old English, short diphthongs and monophthongs were monomoraic, long diphthongs and monophthongs were bimoraic, consonants ending in a syllable were each a mora, and geminate consonants added a mora to the preceding syllable. In Modern English, the rules are similar, except that all diphthongs are bimoraic. In Engli... |
Gilbertese, an Austronesian language spoken mainly in Kiribati, is a trimoraic language. The typical foot in Gilbertese contains three morae. These trimoraic constituents are units of stress in Gilbertese. These "ternary metrical constituents of the sort found in Gilbertese are quite rare cross-linguistically, and as f... |
In Hawaiian, both syllables and morae are important. Stress falls on the penultimate mora, though in words long enough to have two stresses, only the final stress is predictable. However, although a diphthong, such as "oi," consists of two morae, stress may fall only on the first, a restriction not found with other vow... |
Most dialects of Japanese, including the standard, use morae, known in Japanese as "haku" () or "mōra" (), rather than syllables, as the basis of the sound system. Writing Japanese in kana (hiragana and katakana) is said by those scholars who use the term "mora" to demonstrate a moraic system of writing. For example, i... |
The Japanese syllable-final "n" is also said to be moraic, as is the first part of a geminate consonant. For example, the Japanese name for "Japan", , has two different pronunciations, one with three morae ("Nihon") and one with four ("Nippon"). In the hiragana spelling, the three morae of "Ni-ho-n" are represented by ... |
Similarly, the names "Tōkyō" ("To-u-kyo-u", ), "Ōsaka" ("O-o-sa-ka", ), and "Nagasaki" ("Na-ga-sa-ki", ) all have four morae, even though, on this analysis, they can be said to have two, three and four syllables, respectively. The number of morae in a word is not always equal to the number of graphemes when written in ... |
In Luganda, a short vowel constitutes one mora while a long vowel constitutes two morae. A simple consonant has no morae, and a doubled or prenasalised consonant has one. No syllable may contain more than three morae. The tone system in Luganda is based on morae. See Luganda tones. |
In Sanskrit, the mora is expressed as the "mātrā". For example, the short vowel "a" (pronounced like a schwa) is assigned a value of one "mātrā", the long vowel "ā" is assigned a value of two "mātrā"s, and the compound vowel (diphthong) "ai" (which has either two simple short vowels, "a"+"i", or one long and one short ... |
Sanskrit prosody and metrics have a deep history of taking into account moraic weight, as it were, rather than straight syllables, divided into "laghu" (, "light") and "dīrgha"/"guru" (/, "heavy") feet based on how many morae can be isolated in each word. Thus, for example, the word "kartṛ" (), meaning "agent" or "doer... |
Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a lengthy period of time) in place of repetition als... |
Leon Jakobovits James coined the phrase "semantic satiation" in his 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University. It was demonstrated as a stable phenomenon that is possibly similar to a cognitive form of reactive inhibition. Prior to that, the expression "verbal satiation" had been used along with terms that expres... |
James presented several experiments that demonstrated the operation of the semantic satiation effect in various cognitive tasks such as rating words and figures that are presented repeatedly in a short time, verbally repeating words then grouping them into concepts, adding numbers after repeating them out loud, and bil... |
An explanation for the phenomenon is that, in the cortex, verbal repetition repeatedly arouses a specific neural pattern that corresponds to the meaning of the word. Rapid repetition makes both the peripheral sensorimotor activity and central neural activation fire repeatedly. This is known to cause reactive inhibition... |
Studies that further explored semantic satiation include the work of Pilotti, Antrobus, and Duff (1997), which claimed that it is possible that the true locus of this phenomenon is presemantic instead of semantic adaptation. There is also the experiment conducted by Kouinos et al. (2000), which revealed that semantic s... |
Jakobovits cited several possible semantic satiation applications and these include its integration in the treatment of phobias through systematic desensitization. He argued that "in principle, semantic satiation as an applied tool ought to work wherever some specifiable cognitive activity mediates some behavior that o... |
There are studies that also linked semantic satiation in education. For instance, the work of Tian and Huber (2010) explored the impact of this phenomenon on word learning and effective reading. The authors claimed that this process can serve as a unique approach to test for discounting through loss of association sinc... |
Speech shadowing is a psycholinguistic experimental technique in which subjects repeat speech at a delay to the onset of hearing the phrase. The time between hearing the speech and responding, is how long the brain takes to process and produce speech. The task instructs participants to shadow speech, which generates in... |
The reaction time between perceiving speech and then producing speech has been recorded at 250 ms for a standardised test. However, for people with left dominant brains, the reaction time has been recorded at 150 ms. Functional imaging finds that the shadowing of speech occurs through the dorsal stream. This area links... |
The speech shadowing technique was created as a research technique by the Leningrad Group led by Ludmilla Chistovich and Valerij Kozhevnikov in the late 1950s. In the 1950s, the Motor theory of speech perception was also in development through Alvin Liberman and Franklin S. Cooper. It has been used for research on stut... |
Ludmilla Chistovich and Valerij Kozhevnikov focused on research of the mental processes that stimulate the functions of perception and production of speech in communication. In linguistics, speech perception was the chronological process that analysed steadily paced and similar sounding words but Chistovich and Kozhevn... |
Shadowing was used to measure the reaction time taken to repeat consonant-vowel syllables. Alveolar consonants were measured when the tongue first touched an artificial palate and labial consonants were measured by the contact of metal pieces when the upper and lower lips pressed together. The participant would begin... |
Close speech shadowing is when the technique requires an immediate repetition, at the fastest pace a person is able to achieve. It does not allow people to hear the entire phrase beforehand or to understand the words vocalised until the end of a sentence. It was found that close speech shadowing would occur at the shor... |
The short delay of response occurs as the motor regions of the brain have recorded cues that are related to consonants. The brain would then estimate the adjacent vowel syllable before it is heard. When the vowel is registered through the auditory system, it would confirm the action to produce speech based on the est... |
Research has developed a biological model as to how the meaning of speech can be perceived instantaneously even though the sentence has never been heard before. An understanding of syntactic, lexical and phonemic characteristics is first required for this to occur. Speech perception also requires the physical component... |
Shadowing is more complex than only the use of the auditory system. A shadow response can reduce the delay by analysing the temporal difference between the pronunciation of phonemes within a syllable. During a shadowing task, the process of perceiving speech and a subsequent response by the production of speech does ... |
Speech perception also has links to phonological processing skills. This includes recognition of all phonemes in a language and how they can combine to form common syllables. A low understanding of phonological norms can negatively affect performance in a speech shadowing task. This is measured through the inclusion... |
The speech shadowing technique is part of research methods that examine the mechanics of stuttering and identifies practical improvement strategies. A primary characteristic of stuttering is a repeated movement, characterised by the repetition of a syllable. In this activity, stutters are made to shadow a repeated mo... |
Another primary characteristic of stuttering is a fixed posture, involving the prolongation of sounds. Speech shadowing research involving fixed postures produces no benefit in improving speech flow. The elongation of words in this stuttering characteristic does not align with the auditory system, which functions effi... |
Speech shadowing has also been used in research into pseudo-stuttering, a voluntary speech impediment. Pseudo-stuttering involves identifying primary stuttering characteristics and realistic shadowing. It is used as an activity when studying fluency disorders, for students to experience how psychological and social ou... |
The speech shadowing technique is used in dichotic listening tests, produced by E. Colin Cherry in 1953. During dichotic listening tests, subjects are presented with two different messages, one in the right ear and one in the left ear. The participants are instructed to focus on one of the two messages and to shadow th... |
Research into the effect of audio stimuli resulting from mobile phone use while driving, has used the speech shadowing technique in its methodology. Speech shadowing tasks that have combined a conversational stimulus with a visual stimulus while driving are reported by participants as a distraction that directs focus a... |
The speech shadowing technique had also been used to research whether it is the action of producing speech or concentration on the semantics of speech that distracts drivers. The task of simple speech shadowing had no effects on driving ability but the combination of simple speech shadowing with a content associated fo... |
When learning a foreign language, shadowing can be used as a technique to practice speech and to acquire knowledge. It follows an interactionist perspective of language development. The method of speech shadowing in a learning setting involves providing shadowing tasks of incremental semantic and pronunciation difficul... |
Remote learning of language can occur without the presence of a real-time speaker through text-to-speech applications and using the principle of speech shadowing. As part of the process to perceive sound, the auditory system distinguishes formant frequencies. The first formant characteristic perceived in the cochlear ... |
Speech shadowing can be used in the alternate form of vocal shadowing. It also requires the process of perception and production but with inverted energy distributions of a low input and a large output. Vocal shadowing perceives pure tones and focuses on the manipulation of the vocal tract to produce a shadowed respon... |
Letter frequency effect - the effect of letter frequency according to which the frequency with which the letter is encountered influences the recognition time of a letter. Letters of high frequency show a significant advantage over letters of low frequency in letter naming, same-different matching, and visual search. L... |
Majority of studies on letter frequency effect failed to find a significant letter frequency effect. These studies, however, used the same-different matching task in which the participants see two letters and are to respond if these letters are same or different. Therefore, the absence of letter frequency effect in the... |
The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language. |
Linguistic relativity has been understood in many different, often contradictory ways throughout its history. The idea is often stated in two forms: the "strong hypothesis", now referred to as linguistic determinism, was held by some of the early linguists before World War II, while the "weak hypothesis" is mostly held... |
The term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Sapir and Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later invention; Sapir and Whorf never set up ... |
The principle of linguistic relativity and the relation between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to psychology and anthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages. |
From the late 1980s, a new school of linguistic relativity scholars has examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for non-deterministic versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts. Some effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semanti... |
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea of the existence of different national characters, or "Volksgeister", of different ethnic groups was the moving force behind the German romantics school and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism. |
Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg inspired several of the German Romantics. As early as 1749, he alludes to something along the lines of linguistic relativity in commenting on a passage in the table of nations in the book of Genesis: |
In 1771 he spelled this out more explicitly: |
Johann Georg Hamann is often suggested to be the first among the actual German Romantics to speak of the concept of "the genius of a language." In his "Essay Concerning an Academic Question", Hamann suggests that a people's language affects their worldview: |
In 1820, Wilhelm von Humboldt connected the study of language to the national romanticist program by proposing the view that language is the fabric of thought. Thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinker's native language. This view was part of a larger picture in which the ... |
In Humboldt's humanistic understanding of linguistics, each language creates the individual's worldview in its particular way through its lexical and grammatical categories, conceptual organization, and syntactic models. |
Herder worked alongside Hamann to establish the idea of whether or not language had a human/rational or a divine origin. Herder added the emotional component of the hypothesis and Humboldt then took this information and applied to various languages to expand on the hypothesis. |
Boas' student Edward Sapir reached back to the Humboldtian idea that languages contained the key to understanding the world views of peoples. He espoused the viewpoint that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross-translation. Sap... |
On the other hand, Sapir explicitly rejected strong linguistic determinism by stating, "It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language." |
Sapir was explicit that the connections between language and culture were neither thoroughgoing nor particularly deep, if they existed at all: |
Sapir offered similar observations about speakers of so-called "world" or "modern" languages, noting, "possession of a common language is still and will continue to be a smoother of the way to a mutual understanding between England and America, but it is very clear that other factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, a... |
While Sapir never made a point of studying directly how languages affected thought, some notion of (probably "weak") linguistic relativity underlay his basic understanding of language, and would be taken up by Whorf. |
More than any linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he called the "linguistic relativity principle". Studying Native American languages, he attempted to account for the ways in which grammatical systems and language-use differences affected perception. Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of the... |
Detractors such as Lenneberg, Chomsky and Pinker criticized him for insufficient clarity in his description of how language influences thought, and for not proving his conjectures. Most of his arguments were in the form of anecdotes and speculations that served as attempts to show how 'exotic' grammatical traits were c... |
Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-stud... |
One of Whorf's examples was the supposedly large number of words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, an example which later was contested as a misrepresentation. |
Another is the Hopi language's words for water, one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that d... |
Whorf’s argument about Hopi speakers’ conceptualization about time is an example of the structure-centered approach to research into linguistic relativity, which Lucy identified as one of three main strands of research in the field. The "structure-centered" approach starts with a language's structural peculiarity and e... |
Whorf died in 1941 at age 44, leaving multiple unpublished papers. His line of thought was continued by linguists and anthropologists such as Hoijer and Lee who both continued investigations into the effect of language on habitual thought, and Trager, who prepared a number of Whorf's papers for posthumous publishing. T... |
In 1953, Eric Lenneberg criticized Whorf's examples from an objectivist view of language holding that languages are principally meant to represent events in the real world and that even though languages express these ideas in various ways, the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the speaker are e... |
Lenneberg's main criticism of Whorf's works was that he never showed the connection between a linguistic phenomenon and a mental phenomenon. With Brown, Lenneberg proposed that proving such a connection required directly matching linguistic phenomena with behavior. They assessed linguistic relativity experimentally and... |
Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated a formal hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated their own. Their two tenets were (i) "the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities" and (ii) "language causes a particular cognitive structure". Brown later developed them into the... |
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