Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics

Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics

Eva M. Fernández

and Helen Smith Cairns

The Distinction between Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar

Descriptive Grammar gives a reason which means true but grammar is uncorrected.

Prescriptive Grammar analyzes about the grammar which is correct or uncorrect but cannot give reason.

For instance:

(1) Me and John went to the movies.

(2) John and me went to the movies.

These sentences are generated by a person’s internalized grammar of English, which licenses those constructions, but which would not generate an ungrammatical sentence like the following:

(3) *Me went to the movies.

The universality of human language has profound consequences for the way psycholinguists analyze the human use of language.

A syllable is a group of sounds which must contain a nucleus (usually a vowel), and may have an onset (one or more syllable-initial consonants) and a coda (one or more syllable final consonants)

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prosody, which could roughly be defined as the rhythm and intonation of speech. With prosody, signed languages and spoken languages are similar in that both have rules to capture regular prosodic characteristics, like the insertion of pauses in sentences, or the grouping of words into rhythmic phrases. Prosodic rules apply to units such as syllables, prosodic, words, and intonational (prosodic) phrases.

Languages like English and Dutch are often described as stress-timed languages, because of the role that stressed syllables appear to play in organizing the rhythm of an utterance. Languages like Spanish, French, and Italian, in contrast, are categorized as syllable-timed, and languages like Japanese are categorized as moratimed.

For instances:

(2).      a. My computer has wireless.

 b. My computer has wireless?

Declarative, like (2a), tend to be uttered with falling intonation, from the beginning to the end of the sentence; in contrast, interrogatives, like (2b), are pronounced with rising intonation at the end of the sentence.

The Morphological Component

Phonemes are completely meaningless by themselves, yet they combine to form morphemes, the smallest units of meaning or grammatical function in a language.

like the –s in plays or the re– in rewrite – must be affixed to other words. Bound morphemes are called affixes in general – or, more specifically, prefixes (dis– in disbelief ) or suffixes (–sion in suspension), depending on how they attach to the stem (or root) of the word.

 The morphemes  contribute in some way to the insertion of the words agrees withthis context in terms of tense, number, person, etc. The changes in meaning that these morphemes bring are minimal. These are called Inflectional morphemes , note that these are all suffixes.

 The morphemes bring considerable semantic changes to the word,often word class is changed, e.g. medern ( adj.)> modernize (v); drink (v)> drinkable (adj); nation (n)> national(adj). These are called derivational morphemes because they are used to derive new words. Derivational morphemes may be prefixes and suffixes.

Inflectional and derivational morphemes that create new words for a variety of syntactic and semantic functions.

 Race is a verb that refers to a particular kind of locomotion; adding –ing does not change the part of speech nor the meaning of race, but it changes the verb’s aspect to progressive: racing in It was racing down the street performs

a different grammatical function than does raced in It raced down the street.

Intransitive verbs, like sleep or snore, require only a subject. Transitive verbs, like hit or include, require two arguments: a subject and a direct object. Other verbs require three arguments. Ditransitive verbs requires subject , direct object and indirect object

The Biological Basis of Language

Lenneberg (1967: 371-4) a system of a language biological if:

1. Cognitive function is species specific: assumed every human has a brain

2. Replicated in every member of species: has a brain like the other human

3. The cognitive process and capacities associated and differentiated spontaneously with maturation: the capacity that human has the more the human grows the more mature he thinks

4. Certain aspect or cognitive function emerge only during infancy (since the infancy)

Social phenomenon comes in spontaneous adaptation: how the capacities of the brain adapt in social phenomenon (environment) of the individual around him.

Language is species specific

Language is species specific: it's unique for that species. Means, the other ways human based his own and so the animal Genetic makeup: the genetic of human. Children acquire language on a similar development schedule.

Language Is Universal in Humans

Lenneberg’s second criterion - Universal to all members of the species – is met by language in two ways. First,all human babies are born with a brain that is genetically prepared to organize linguistic information; thus, the psychological processes involved in both acquiring and using language are at play, no matter  the person. Secondly, all human languages have universal properties.

They learn the same all in similar age, for example in learning how to crawl, sit up, stand on similar age around the world. And the age of 5 they learn more complex sentence.

For children everywhere they seems to be critical period in acquiring their first language. Critical period is a specific time or period during someone's development in which skills and ability are sensitive to readily used usually before the early teen years.

There was a phenomenon from Genie, a California girl who was locked by her abusive father for the first of 13 years of her life. After she was rescued the researchers of Los Angeles help her to acquiring language. Genie's hearing was normal and also the articulation, but they speak English unwell and ungrammatically, from this phenomenon, we're sure Genie never talk to the other people for a long time, that's why she is difficult to acquire English because it's out of her Critical Period. The example of sentence she had talked: Genie full stomach, want Curtiss play piano

Anatomical and psychological correlates for language

Neurolinguistics is the study of the representation of language in the brain, and the discovery of aphasia led to the birth of this interdisciplinary field.

Broca’s aphasia, also known as non-fluent aphasia, is characterized by halting, effort ful speech; it is associated with damage involving Broca’s area in the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere. They can speak well, but meaningless

Wernicke’s aphasia, also called fluent aphasia, is characterized by fluent meaningless strings; it is caused by damage involving Wernicke’s area in the temporal lobe of the left hemisphere.

Agrammatic consists of primarily content words, lacking syntactic and morphological structure . the disease is for native speakers.

Aphasia is disease damaging the frontal lobe of the brain.

Sylvian fissure is associated of langauges function. Sylvian fissure is a line – the part of human brain that separete between frontal lobe and temporal lobe.

Broca’s area is located near the motor area of the cortex, while Wernicke’s is near the auditory area.

language is lateralized means that the language function is located in one of the two hemispheres of the cerebral cortex . Located frontal left hamispere

Global aphasia: The damage is in the auditory, reading comprehension, oral and written expression (severely-impaired)

Dichotic listening is language skills of two positions.

Event-related potentials (or ERPs, for short) are changes in the electrical patterns of the brain that are associated with the processing of various kinds of linguistic stimuli.

Producing speech

Speech perception and lexical access.

working memory span to understand how working memory supports or limits processing. ( memory can  have  in some time in the brain).

Memory for sentences

Longterm memory. First, information about structure and even individual lexical items is lost, while meaning is retained. Second, meanings of many sentences are combined, so individual sentences no longer have independent representations. Third, inferences are added to  representations of meaning. So while your friend gives explanations but she  cannot give exmples and other friend can give example

An anaphor is a linguistic device that refers to someone or something that has been mentioned in the previous context. An anaphor can be either a pronoun or a definite noun phrase (a noun phrase introduced by a definite

article), like the bold elements in the following two examples:

John came home yesterday for spring break. He spent the afternoon telling Dad all about college life.

He is anaphor because previus sentence explain the informations. Pronouns are anaphors because they cannot be interpreted without locating an antecedent for them; they have no independent meaning, except as indicated by their gender, number, or case, all given by their grammatical form.