Introduction to Psycholinguistics

A.  What Is Psycholinguistics?

Schmitt (2010) explains psycholinguistics is the study of the cognitive process that supports the acquisition and use of language. While, Simpson (2011) tells that psycholinguistics is the study of how the mind equips human beings to handle language. Besides, Taylor (1999) explains that psycholinguistics, as the term indicates, is a marriage of psychology and linguistics, though not necessarily as equal partners. Linguistics studies language as a formal system.  Its three main branches are phonology, the study of speech sounds and their patterns; semantics, the study of meaning; syntax, the study of sentence structure; and morphology, the study of words and word formation. Sometimes morphology and syntax are combined as morphosyntax.  Linguistics establish units of language; they search for rules that organize sound into words, words into sentence, and possibly sentences into discourse; and they establish language families.

Initially, psycholinguistics describes the structure of language, including its grammar, sound system and vocabulary. It is concerned with discovering the psychological process by which humans acquire and use language. In conclusion, psycholinguistics is the study of the mental aspects of language and speech a branch of both linguistics and psychology. Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. It is focused upon the comprehension and production of language. Then, it emphasizes on three major components. First component is comprehension. It studies how people perceive and understand spoken and written language. Second component is language production. It studies how people produce, create, and express meaning through language. Last component is language acquistion. It studies how people learn language. It refers to the learning and development of a person’s language. The learning of a native or first language is called first language acquisition, and the learning of a second or foreign language is called second language acquisition.

B.  The Characteristics of Human Language

Block and Trager explains that language is a system of arbitrary, vocal symbols, by a means of people to interact and to cooperate. Arbitrary is social convention (kesepakatanmasyarakat) for example “Tree”, Indonesian people say “pohon”, English “Tree”, Arabic “Syajarah”, Sundanese “Tangkal” and Javanese people say with “wiwitan” etc. Besides, Sapir tells that language is a purely human and non instinctive method of communication ideas, emotions and desires by a means of voluntarily produced symbols. The characteristics of human language are as follows:

Language Is Social Tool

Language is social tool means that language is not essential for communication. Communication is the purpose of language. Language enables us to communicate ideas and desires to other people, with people in our own culture, with people from other cultures, with ancient cultures.

Language Must Be Learned

Animal communication is innate. Human babies must hear and speak a language in order to learn it.

The Relationship Between The Sounds of A Language and Their Meaning Is Arbitrary and Dual

Human language is arbitrary (Sounds and meaning 1). It means that there is no connection between the sound and the message. Animal language is not arbitrary (Sounds and meaning 2). It means that an animal’s message and the sound cannot be separated. Human language has duality. Human sounds have basic sounds (English: /k/, /m/, /p/, /a/, etc). English basic sounds can be combined to create many other different sounds (Cat, mat, pat, etc).

Language Has Rules

All languages have rules that guide how the parts of languages can be combined. Animal sounds can be combined in almost any order and they will still have the same meaning. Sound rules, e.g combinations of sounds are /s/, /p/ and /r/ can be combined to form spray, spread and spring /f/, /l/ and /b/ cannot be combined. Grammar rules, e.g word order, take the words: ate, I and lunch, (OK:  I ate lunch, X: ate I lunch, X: lunch ate I). Language rules and meaning means knowledge of language rules changes the meaning of the person’s message e.g english word order (SVO. E.g Dog bites man and Man bites dog). Language allows humans to be creative means that humans can talk about topics that are displaced e.g time (now, the past, the future), place (things that can be seen when talking, things that cannot be seen, things that are abstract).

C.  Language of The World

“An exotic language is a mirror held up to our own,” said the noted linguist-anthropologist Whorf (1941).  This book, though it concentrates on the English Language, will occasionally peek into other languages.  After all, psycholinguistics is about how people learn and use any language, not just English.

            About 5,000 different are spoken in the world today (Ruhlen 1987).  Of this multitude of languages, only about 140 are used by over one million speakers (Muller 1964).  Even 140 is somewhat arbitrary.  National boundaries do not always define language boundaries: Switzerland has four official language (German, French, Italian, and Romansch), and Canada, two (English and French).  Nor is mutual intelligibility always a reliable criterion for defining language boundaries: on the one hand, some language that are mutually intelligible are counted as different, such as Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish; on the other, one language, Chinese, consists of many mutually unintelligible dialect, such as Mandarin and Cantonose.  Dialects are regional variations of one language, involving differences in vocabulary, syntax, and especially in speech sounds.

            First, considering a few different dialects of English.  Then, it will survey the languages of the world, and marvel at their differences.  True, all languages share the characteristics of human oral-auditory communication (“Human Language: Its Characteristics,” above) and other possible language universals, but here the thing which are interested in the differences that can make languages mutually unintelligible.

            English Dialects

            A language often has several dialect and one standard language, which is the dialect spoken by announcers on nation TV and radio, and which serves as a link among speakers of different dialects.  A standard language is often, but not always, the language of the capital or central city.  For example, one variety of French spoken in and around Paris is standard French.  In England standard English is King’s/Queen’s English (or “Received Pronunciation”), which is not native to any particular region but is close to many dialects of south central England; in London in coexists with dialect Cockney.  (King’s/Queen’s English has an interesting origin.  King George I did not speak English, and his son King George II spoke with a heavy German accent.  To avoid embarrassing the king, the courtiers learned to speak in his way, namely, King’s English.)

            Oscar Wilde observed: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays expect, of course, language.”  Wilde’s humor notwithsttanding, differences between British English and American English are minor, not enough to hamper communication seriously.  The differences are mostly in the sound system, so that even a simple sentence spoken by a British person and an American can betray its speaker’s linguistic background.  In vocabulary, there are a few discrepancies, such as “fall” in the United States and “autumn” in Britain.  In idioms, one says “spend a penny” in Britain, but “powder one’s nose” in the United States; knock up means “wake someone up” in Britain but “make a girl pregnant” in the United States.  There are hardly any syntactic differences to speak of.

            What about dialects within the United States? Thanks to the physical and social mobility of the population, dialects involving substantial differences have not developed in the United States.  A southern drawl is by and large intelligible; the archaic English spoken by small groups of mountain people in Appalachia may by less so.

            One dialect in the United States that differs substantially from Standard English (midwertern in the United States) is Black English (BE), which is used by some black people in the United States (Dillard 1972).  BE called Gullah is still spoken by the descendents of slaves who settled on the Sea Islands and coastal regions of South Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida.

            BE originated three centuries ago with African slaves, who as speakers of a multitude of mutually unintelligible languages, had to find a common tongue, a pidgin.  A pidgin is a hybrid and simplified language that mixes two or more languages, incorporating European words into the sound system and sentence structure of an indigenous of Africa, Asia, or Oceania.  It can develop when speakers of different languages come into contact with each other.

            The following is a sample of BE taken from one of the three experimental reading books, entitled Ollie, prepared at the Education Study Center in Washington, headed by William A. Stewart.  (The necessity of such BE reading books is debatable.)

Ollie big sister, she name La Verne.  La Verne grown up now, and she ain’t scared of nobody.  But that don’t mean she don’t never be scared.  The other day when she in the house, La Verne she start to screaming and hollering.  Didn’t nobody know what the matter . . .

(for another example of BE, see “How Mothers talk to Infants and Toddlers,” chap. 8.)

            Vocabulary and sound differences between BE and standard English are not large.  BE syntax tends to simplify or regularize some syntactic features, as in

Ray sister seven year old go to school at Adams.

            In spite of some differences, BE is usually intelligible to speakers of standard English (see the above box), perhaps because of the common vocabulary.  BE can occasionally cause misunderstandings (Dillard 1972).  A young field hand brought into the kitchen was instructud to heat (“eat”) a dish of “hopping John.”  (Instructions in the youth’s own dialect shound have been to hot the dish.)  Striving to obev the orders, the youth ate the food.

            Language Families

            The many language of the world can be grouped into language families based on their historical linguistic relations.  Related languages tend to share linguistics features such as sentence structures, words, and sounds.  Similarities and differences among language affect language acquisition by children and language learning by adults.  They also influence the world views of speakers of these language (“LanguageThe World Views,” below).

            By far the most intensely studied family is the indo-european (IE) language family, which includes most languages used in Europe, India, and the Americas, by about half of the world’s population.  The IE languages seem to have a common ancestor, called proto-Indo-European, spoken some eight thousand years ago.

            In most IE languages, the numerals from one to ten, the words for immediate family members, and other basic words are recognizable as coming from the same origin.  Table 1-1 shows IE words for three and mother.  All words for three start with “thr-,’ “dr-,” or “tr-,” and all words for mother start with “mo-,” “ma-,” “mu-,” or “me-.” (By comparison, three and mother in one non-IE language, Japanese, are mitsu and okasan, respectively IE language with some instructions on the patterns odf sound and meaning change between different tettitories (Hogben 1964).

In IE languages, words inflect by changing their forms, often by adding endings, according to their grammatical functions, such as past tense in verbs: walkED.  If words inflect heavily, then word order is not needed for specifying the roles of the words.  Latin sentences 1 and 2, have the same basic meaning, “Peter sees Paul” (though with different emphasis), because –us and –um endings of nouns designate the actor and the acted upon regardless of the word order:

TABLE 1-1.   “Three” and “Mother” in Indo-European Languages

WORD		LANGUAGE	BRANCH
Three Drie Drei Tre Tre Tre	Mother Moeder Mutter Moder Moder Moren	English Dutch German Swedish Danish Norwegian	Germanic
Tres Tre Tres Tres Trois Tri	Mater Madre Madre Mae Mere Mama	Latin Italian Spanish Portuguese French Romanian	Italic- Latin
Tri Trzy Tris	Maht Makta Motina	Russian Polish Lithuanian	Balto Slavic
Trayas	Mata	Sanskrit	Indian
Tri	Mathair	Irish	Celtic

1.      Petrus videt Paulum

2.      Petrus Paulum videt

A few other langauge families are covered in this paper.  The Sino-Tibetan language family includes Chinese and a few other Asian Languages, such as Tibetan, which are tone language (“Spoken and Written Language,” above).  Chinese alone has over one billion speakers.  Its words do not inflect, and hence their order in a sentence is important.  Sentence 1, “Dog bite man,” differs from sentence 2, “Man bite dog”:

1.      Goou yeau len

2.      Len yeau goou

The Altaic language family includes languages spoken in some parts or Europe (e.g., Turkish) and Asia (Mongolia and possibly Japan and Korea).  The Altaic family is less cohesive than IE and Sino-Tibetan, and the linguistuct similarities among its members are not so obvious.  Some Altaic language have postpositions, particles that follow nouns in a sentence to signal the roles of these nouns, such as the actor and the acted upon.  In the Japanese sentence (“John gives Mary a book”), the postpositions are in uppercase.

Conclusion

Psycholinguistics is the study of the mental aspects of language and speech a branch of both linguistics and psychology. Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. In conclusion, psycholinguistics is an area of study which draws from linguistics and psychology and focuses upon the comprehension and production of language. It emphasizes the mental or cognitive processes involved in acquisition, and the representation of language(s) in the brain.

References

Taylor, Insup. Psyhcholinguistics : Learning and using language. USA : Practice Hall, Inc., 1990.

Victoria Fromkin, David Blair, and Peter Collins. An introduction to language. Australia :Harcourt, 1999.

Clark, Herbert and Clark Eve. Psychology and Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. New York :Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1998.

David Crystal. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

SIMPSON, J. (ed). 2011. The Routledge Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Routledge.

SCHMITT, N. (ed). 2010. An introduction to applied linguistics. Hodder Education