Research paper on Scope of Psycholinguistics
Abstract:
This term paper deals with the scope of psycholinguistics. It aims at highlighting certain theories in relation to scope of psycholinguistics. It mainly covers the language acquisition, language comprehension and language production. Thus, it is seen in this paper that the scope of psycholinguistics is all about language and its relation with the brain in different ways. The paper gives a brief introduction of psycholinguistics, a short history of psycholinguistics to create a base and dives deep into the scope.
Introduction:
Psycholinguistics can be defined in many ways. Psycholinguistics is the study of psychological aspects of language, speech and thought. It is also the study of psychological and neurological factors that enable human beings to acquire, use and understand language. It is concerns itself with the ways in which language is produced, acquired, processed and stored in the brain. It is the study of mental processes that are involved in the production of language. It is a scientific discipline whose goal is a coherent theory of the way in which language is produced and understood," says Alan Garnham in his book, "Psycholinguistics: Central Topics”. It is the interrelationship between psychology and linguistics. Psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science. It consists of several subbranches like neurolinguistics and developmental linguistics. Psycholinguistic covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures.
History of Psycholinguistics:
Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary study started with the merging of two subjects that are psychology and linguistics. The term psycholinguistics was introduced by an American psychologist Jacob Robert Kantor in 1936 book, "An Objective Psychology of Grammar". The term was upraised by one of Kantor’s student named, Nicholas Henry Pronko, in his article published in 1946 article "Language and Psycholinguistics: A Review". Psycholinguistic as an academic discipline raised in an influential seminar at Cornell University in 1951. Until 1900s, psychologists used to define psychology as the science of mental life. The ability of humans to speak and understand language was highlighted by Noam Chomsky in 1950, which gave this discipline an arousal for the first time in history.
At the very start this discipline was known as the ‘Psychology of language’ and later it turned into Psycholinguistics. It did not appear as a planned subject, rather there were conferences, papers were presented on the relation between psychology and language, which then leads to the emergence of this subject. Most of these things arise in mid20th century. Chomsky gave his concepts of POV (poverty of stimulus) for acquisition of language in child, his view was supported by many linguists. Earlier the study of aphasia was considered to be psycholinguistics but gradually with time the view changed. The psycholinguists and linguists started to understand that there are other mental problems also, besides aphasia.
Scope of psycholinguistics:
Psycholinguistics lies under the tree of cognitive science, that is an interdisciplinary field that includes psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience and philosophy. The topics which are studied under cognitive science include problem solving, memory, imagery and language. There are three primary processes dealt in psycholinguistics that are:
Language Comprehension:
It is the understanding of what people say and write. Comprehending the language involves a variety of capacities, skills, processes, knowledge and dispositions that are used to derive meaning from spoken, written and signed language. Comprehension is mainly thought to occur in the Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area. Broca’s area is located in the left frontal lobe of the brain, and it is responsible for the production of speech. Whereas Wernicke’s area is located in the left temporal lobe, and it is responsible for the comprehension of sounds. Language comprehension is a complex process that takes place unconsciously. Language comprehension is a task that every human being performs several times a day once he had learned a language, no matter what that language is. The comprehension ability develops as the brain develops and is enhanced with the use of gesture. Gestures play a very important and useful role in understanding language.
Gunning is a one very well-known name in the area of language comprehension, he gave three main theories in context to comprehension of language that are schema theory, mental model theory, proposition theory.
1: Schema Theory
This theory was first proposed in 1932 by sir Frederik Bartlett but it was later on discussed by Gunning in detail. Gunning defines this theory in his 1996 studies, in which he explains that schema is the organized knowledge which we already have about people, places, things and events. Having background knowledge of things, places and events is very much important in order to understand a text. The knowledge which we have about the world is stored in our mind in the form of schemas.
2: Mental Modal Theory:
The second theory is mental modal theory, according to Gunning this theory is all about reading a text as a script and then creating a movie out of this script in one’s own mind. The reader mainly focuses on the main character together with other characters, forming their physical sketches in his mind. Another scholar, Perkins (1991) supports this idea and gave arguments about it. He stated that this creation of a movie inside a person’s mind, gives the teacher an idea about the knowledge gap and misconceptions about the student. Which helps him to correct the students and to recreate an imagination which is much better than the previous one.
3: Propositional theory:
This is the third theory, it involves the formation of a main idea after reading the text, it is the picking up of the crux of a text by the reader. After the formation of the main idea, the reader divides and ranks the important things on the top of the list and less important ones on the lower end of the list. These main ideas are organized in a hierarchical fashion with the most important things given the highest priority to be memorized (Gunning, 1996).
Gunning furthermore identifies four main comprehension strategies that are Preparational, Organizational, Elaboration and Monitoring.
Preparational Strategies
It involves the activation of our previous knowledge about a particular topic. This strategy is mostly helpful in case of students to brainstorm their previous knowledge on a particular topic they are going to learn. It is because it becomes easier for the teacher to explain a topic when a student already has some basic knowledge of it. The most important part of preparational strategy is predicting the text by observing some of its parts. Gunning states “as the students are thinking about what will happen based on their knowledge of the subject and the book, they focus their thoughts on the assignment to come, which leads to better comprehension”
Organizational Strategies
It involves the focusing on the important details in a text and then forming a sense out of it. Thus, here there are included these types of strategies: identifying the main idea and topic sentences, classifying information, deciding which information is relevant, sequencing and summarizing. All of these strategies are much complex.
Elaboration Strategy Monitoring Strategy Intended message Encoding
the intended message into a linguistic form encoding linguistic form into speech using motor system transfer of sound from speaker’s mouth to hearer’s ear through auditory system decoding of speech into linguistic form decoding the meaning into linguistic form. There are some stages involved in the production of language that are conceptualization, formulation, articulating and self-monitoring.
Conceptualization Formulation Grammatical encoding in which the proper words corresponding to the meaning of the concepts to be expressed are retrieved from the Mental Lexicon in the form of lemmas and put into a syntactic frame resulting in a surface structure; this is called grammatical encoding. Morphological encoding that is the processing of the morphologically complex words. Phonetic encoding is a part of the standardization process, and is the process of changing the value of a data field to its phonetic equivalent. It is used to retrieve records with similar field values from the database for matching. Articulation is the place of articulation. The manner of articulation nasality degree of lateralitySelf-Monitoringhttp://fanyaiiu.blogspot.com/2012/05/scope-of-psycholinguistics-studies.html
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