PSY101 - Psycholinguistics - An Overview

[0:03] This unit provides an overview of the field of psycholinguistics. First, we will define the hybrid term "psycho-linguistics" and look at the main goals of the two disciplines. Then, We will examine the main branches of psycholinguistics in more detail. Here is how we will proceed. First of all, we will look at the central definitions of the two component parts of this hybrid term.

[0:34] Then we will look at the main branches of psycholinguistics and their goals. And finally, we will then concentrate on the main branches of the field. Bye. Let's look at some definitions first. Linguistics is defined as the scientific study of language. Psychology The other term. signaled by this mind here Psychology, studies scientifically the human mind.

[1:13] Now, psycholinguistics is a combination of both. *knocking* The goals are to study The psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, to use, to comprehend and to produce language. I... Let's briefly look at linguistics first of all, to see where psycholinguistics within linguistics can be located.

[1:46] Now here you see the main branches of linguistics, everything that has to do with sound, Well, phonetics and phonology are the main branches. if you want to investigate the structure of sentences or words, you're concerned with morphology or syntax, Meaning is the big area where you look at the meaning of words, the meaning of sentences or even the meaning of utterances. semantics and pragmatics are these two branches of linguistics. Now linguistics can be combined with the number of...

[2:22] well, you might call them hybrid disciplines, that introduce their scientific approaches and combine it with linguistics, for example, social linguistics. sociolinguistics deals with the position and the use of language in society, dialectal variation, all sorts of things. Historical linguistics looks at the historical development of language and some historical cultural influences maybe. Computational linguistics, well everything that has to do with computers, things like speech processing, machine translation and many more are dealt with in computational linguistics.

[3:04] Well and here is our term psycholinguistics, psychology and linguistics. One of these hybrid or combinatorial disciplines that combine two fields. with their insights with linguistics. Well, here are the main branches of psycholinguistics. And the central questions are in language processing, for example, The question is what happens in the human mind when we speak?

[3:37] Or when we listen, what is going on? What are the central processes and mechanisms underlying this very complex activity? In language acquisition, we're looking at young children and ask the question, "How do they learn to speak? How does a child acquire his mother tongue?" And last but not least, in neurolinguistics we are no longer concerned with the human mind. like in language processing and language acquisition. But here now with the physical counterpart of the mind, the human brain.

[4:13] And the central question is: How is language represented in the human brain. So these are the main branches of psycholinguistics. Let's now look at them in more detail. Language processing Well, two activities of language processing constitute the core area or the core of much of the work that is done in psycholinguistics. Speech production? Signaled.

[4:43] by this little symbol, speech production. That is the question: What is going on from thought to output. to the actual production of a sound wave that is coming out. And the opposite or the opposite complementary activity Comprehension, it's not just perception. There's a precise distinction drawn in psycholinguistics between perception and comprehension, but we will deal with that in another unit.

[5:14] Comprehension, that is, how do we interpret the input string And how do we identify linguistic units within it? and how do we interpret this eventually in a conceptual way? How do we understand what is being said to us. It is really fascinating, not only from my point of view, To find out the phases and modules in... These activities, which in reality well last for less than a few Well, less than a second, but are extremely complex, perhaps the most complex activity of human cognition.

[5:54] Well, the next big area is language acquisition. As you can see here, we are dealing with children. And The Central amazing fact is that children, despite their limited mental abilities, acquire a language during Well, just a few years of their lives. And what is even more interesting is that they are confronted with an input That is degenerated, that is not complete, that is sometimes even grammatically incorrect. So if you think about how parents address their children very often, then you find that it is some sort of very Well, simplistic way of addressing them So the language is not complete yet.

[6:44] they manage to acquire the grammar and all the rules of their mother tongue in a very brief span. So there are some central issues in language acquisition. First of all we have to deal with acquisition studies. So how can we study young children? They cannot answer our questions at a very early age so we have to perform experiments with them. What are the central strategies that children have? apply when they acquire their mother tongue. For example, they overgeneralize morphological aspects in what they produce.

[7:19] And then finally, what are the central phases? So what comes first? What happens next? How long are these phases? When do children start let's say pronouncing their first words. and so on and so forth. So these are central goals in language acquisition. Well, and last but not least, here we have the big field of neurolinguistics, where we study the human brain. And as you know, the use of speech is based on two central biological foundations. First of all, the central nervous system, and then the vocal tract. Now the vocal tract is not really so interesting for neurolinguistics, so it's the central nervous system. And in particular the function of language in the human brain.

[8:10] Well, among others the following questions are discussed in neurolinguistics. What are, you know, we have two hemispheres in the human brain, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. So what are the central functions of these hemispheres? Are they both? equally well employed in the processing of natural language. Are there any brain centers here, centers in the human brain? Or this diagram indicates that there must be something in the human brain sort of centers.

[8:43] in the human brain that are responsible for natural language. What is the effect of brain damage? So this little picture here illustrates brain damage and there are two physiologists of the 19th century, Carl Wernicke and Paul Broca, who first investigated such brain damages. And then of course a question: How does the brain develop during infancy? - Oh, my God. Let's summarize this. psycholinguistics with its three main branches Okay.

[9:14] Language processing Bye. *knock* Oops. Language Acquisition I'm sorry. Bye. at neurolinguistics *knocking* Thank you. is an extremely complex field. You have to apply the entirety of linguistic knowledge from phonetics, to pragmatics. But we will try and tackle this field in our Virtual Linguistics Campus class "Psycholinguistics" with numerous animations, simulations, in order to make the complexity of this field clear to all of you.