Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics, in seeking to understand the properties of language acquisition has roots in debates regarding innate vs acquired behaviors (both in biology and psychology). For some time the concept of an innate trait, was something that was not present in the psychology of the individual[4] . However, with the redefining of innateness as time progressed, behaviors considered innate could once again be analyzed as behaviors that interacted with the psychological aspect of an individual. After the diminished popularity of the behaviorist model, ethology became once again a leading train of thought within psychology, and by these means language, as an innate behavior within humans, could be examined once more in the scope of psychology[4].

Even though psycholinguistics originated in terms of methodology, and in theoretical framework from a time before the end of the nineteenth century it was called only "Psychology of Language". The nomenclature for the science as Psycholinguistics did not begin to come about until 1936 when Jacob Kantor, a prominent Psychologist of the time, used the term ‘Psycholinguistic’ as a description within the book An Objective Psychology of Grammar.[5] The term only came to relevant usage, however in 1946 when the student of Kantor, Nicholas Pronko published an article by the title Psycholinguistics: A Review .[6] Pronko's desire was to unify the myriad of theoretical approaches within the realm of Psycholinguistics under a single name.[5][6] It was used for the first time to talk about an interdisciplinary science "that could be coherent"[7] as well as in the title of Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems, a 1954 book by Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok.[8]

There are essentially two schools of thought as to how children acquire or learn language, and there is still much debate as to which theory is the correct one. The first theory states that all language must be learned by the child. The second view states that the abstract system of language cannot be learned, but that humans possess an innate language faculty, or an access to what has been called universal grammar. The view that language must be learned was especially popular before 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. Likewise, the school of psychology known as behaviorism (see Verbal Behavior (1957) by B.F. Skinner) puts forth the point of view that language is a behavior shaped by conditioned response, hence it is learned.

The innatist perspective began with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959.[9] This review helped to start what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology. Chomsky posited humans possess a special, innate ability for language and that complex syntactic features, such as recursion, are "hard-wired" in the brain. These abilities are thought to be beyond the grasp of the most intelligent and social non-humans. According to Chomsky, children acquiring a language have a vast search space to explore among all possible human grammars, yet at the time there was no evidence that children receive sufficient input to learn all the rules of their language (see poverty of the stimulus). Hence, there must be some other innate mechanism that endows a language ability to humans. Such a language faculty is, according to the innateness hypothesis, what defines human language and makes it different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.

The field of linguistics and psycholinguistics since then has been defined by reactions to Chomsky, pro and con. The pro view still holds that the human ability to use language (specifically the ability to use recursion) is qualitatively different from any sort of animal ability.[10] This ability may have resulted from a favorable mutation or from an adaptation of skills evolved for other purposes. The view that language can be learned has had a recent resurgence inspired by emergentism. This view challenges the "innate" view as scientifically unfalsifiable; that is to say, it can't be tested. With the amount of computer power increasing since the 1980s, researchers have been able to simulate language acquisition using neural network models.[11] These models provide evidence that there may, in fact, be sufficient information contained in the input to learn language, even syntax. If this is true, then an innate mechanism is no longer necessary to explain language acquisition.

The structures and uses of language are related to the formation of ontological insights.[12] Some see this system as "structured cooperation between language-users" using "conceptual difference""semantic deference" in order to exchange meaning and knowledge and give meaning to language, examining and describing "semantic processes bound by a ‘stopping’ constraint which are not cases of ordinary deferring. Deferring is normally done for a reason, and a rational person is always disposed to defer if there is good reason.[13]

The theory of the Semantic differential supposes universal distinctions such as factors of "Typicality" (that included scales such as "regular-rare", "typical-exclusive"), "Reality" ("imaginary-real", "evident-fantastic", "abstract-concrete"), as well as factors of "Complexity" ("complex-simple", "unlimited-limited", "mysterious-usual"), "Improvement" or "Organization" ("regular-spasmodic", "constant-changeable", "organized-disorganized", "precise-indefinite"), Stimulation ("interesting-boring", "trivial-new"), calling it " in the measurement of attitudes.[14]"

Language production concerns 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. They include speech dysfluencies like false starts, repetition, reformulation and constant pauses in between words or sentences; also, slips of tongue, like blendings, substitutions, exchanges (e.g. Spoonerism), and various pronunciation errors. These speech errors yield significant implication on language production, in that they reflect that:[19]

1. Speech is planned in advance: speech errors like substitution and exchanges show that one does not plan their entire sentence before they speak. Rather, their language faculty is constantly tapped during the speech production process. This is accounted for by the limitation of the working memory. In particular, errors involving exchanges imply that one plans ahead in their sentence but only about significant ideas (e.g. the words that constitute the core meaning) and only to a certain extent of the sentence.
2. Lexicon is organized semantically and phonologically: substitution and pronunciation errors show that lexicon is organized not only by its meaning, but also its form.
3. Morphologically complex words are assembled: errors involving blending within a word reflect that there seems to be a rule governing the construction of words in production (and also likely in mental lexicon). In other words, speakers generate the morphologically complex words by merging morphemes rather than retrieving them as chunks.

It is useful to differentiate between three separate phases of production: conceptualization "(determining what to say), formulation (translating the intention to say something into linguistic form), and execution (the detailed articulatory planning and articulation itself)."[20] Most psycholinguistic research has largely concerned itself with the study for formulation because the phase of conceptualization largely remains an elusive and mysterious period of development.[20]

For models of speech production, see Psycholinguistics/Models of Speech Production.

Many of the experiments conducted in psycholinguistics, especially earlier on, are behavioral in nature. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with linguistic stimuli and asked to perform an action. For example, they may be asked to make a judgment about a word (lexical decision), reproduce the stimulus, or name a visually presented word aloud. Reaction times to respond to the stimuli (usually on the order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the most often employed measures of performance in behavioral tasks. Such experiments often take advantage of priming effects, whereby a "priming" word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related "target" word later.[21]

As an example of how behavioral methods can be used in psycholinguistics research, Fischler (1977) investigated word encoding using the 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 "yes" response, and other times they would be nonwords requiring a "no" response. A subset of the licit words were related semantically (e.g., cat-dog) while others were unrelated (e.g., bread-stem). Fischler found that related word pairs were responded to faster when compared to unrelated word pairs. This facilitation suggests that semantic relatedness can facilitate word encoding.[22]

Recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Beginning with Rayner (1978)[23] the importance and informativity of eye-movements during reading was established. Later, Tanenhaus et al. (1995)[24] used the visual-world paradigm to study the cognitive processes related to spoken language. Assuming that eye movements are closely linked to the current focus of attention, language processing can be studied by monitoring eye movements while a subject is presented auditorily with linguistic input.

The analysis of systematic errors in speech, writing and typing of language as it is produced can provide evidence of the process which has generated it. Errors of speech, in particular, grant insight into how the mind processes language production while a speaker is in the midst of an utterance. Speech errors tend to occur in the lexical, morpheme, and phoneme encoding steps of language production, as seen by the ways errors can manifest.[25] The types of speech errors, and some examples, are:[25][26][27]

• Substitutions (phoneme and lexical) – replacing a sound with an unrelated sound, or a word with an antonym, and saying "verbal outfit" instead of "verbal output", or "He rode his bike tomorrow" instead of "...yesterday", respectively,
• Blends – mixing two synonyms together and saying "my stummy hurts" in place of either "stomach" or "tummy",
• Exchanges (phoneme [a.k.a. Spoonerisms] and morpheme) – swapping two onset sounds or two root words, and saying "You hissed my mystery lectures" instead of "You missed my history lectures", or "They're Turking talkish" instead of "They're talking Turkish", respectively,
• Morpheme shifts – moving a function morpheme such as "-ly" or "-ed" to a different word and saying "easy enoughly" instead of "easily enough",
• Perseveration – continuing to start a word with a sound that was in the utterance previously and saying "John gave the goy a ball" instead of "John gave the boy a ball", and
• Anticipation – replacing a sound with one that is coming up later in the utterance and saying "She drank a cot cup of tea" instead of "She drank a hot cup of tea."

Speech errors will usually occur in the stages that involve lexical, morpheme, or phoneme encoding, and usually not the first step of semantic encoding.[28] This can be credited to how a speaker is still conjuring the idea of what to say, and unless he changes his mind, can not be mistaken in 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 works in 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 of epilepsy. Researchers could then study the ways in which the comprehension and production of language were affected by such drastic surgery. Where an illness made brain surgery necessary, language researchers had an opportunity to pursue their research.

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 their spatial and temporal resolutions (fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons per pixel, and ERP has millisecond accuracy). Each type of methodology presents a set of advantages and disadvantages for studying a particular problem in psycholinguistics.[29]

Computational modelling, such as the DRC model of reading and word recognition proposed by Max Coltheart and colleagues,[30] is another methodology and 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 in their hypotheses and because they can be used to generate accurate predictions for theoretical models that are so complex that they render discursive analysis unreliable. Other examples of computational modelling is McClelland and Elman's TRACE model of speech perception[31] and Franklin Chang's Dual-Path model of sentence production.[32]