Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of the human language faculty and is a branch of linguistics. Content of psycholinguistics is the study of human language acquisition, the conditions for producing and understanding language and the representation of language in the brain. The art is closely connected with other scientific disciplines such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and cognitive science. Psycholinguistics and psychology of language differ to the extent that the former works from the perspective and with the methods of linguistics, psycholinguistics during their theories are integrated as part field of psychology and use their methods. With the increasing convergence of the two approaches, the two expressions are very often understood as synonyms.

The psycholinguistics as a scientific discipline

Traditionally, the psycholinguistics three research areas:

• The language acquisition research investigated the acquisition of linguistic knowledge for both primarily of adolescent children, but also in the context of second language acquisition.
• The linguistics research asks for the acquired knowledge that must have a competent speaker of a language. This includes not only the meanings of individual words and their mental structuring, but also away its principles to merge these words to superordinate units such as sentences or texts.
• The language process research examines the circumstances under which the acquired knowledge is successfully brought to implementation, or the tasks that must be mastered in order to understand or produce an utterance can.

Psycholinguistic theories and hypotheses are developed based on different linguistic data that are systematically collected. These already include the vocalizations of Brabbelns that have some characteristics of normal words, but still have no fixed meaning. Of great importance are children speech data collected as part of the acquisition of a mother tongue or a second language, recorded and ultimately child language corpora summarized the scientific community are provided. Also features of the language skills of adult humans are considered in the development of theory. Of particular interest are errors in language production and language understanding. From successful psycholinguistic theories it is required that they are consistent with neuroscience, particularly neuropsychological findings. Psycholinguistic research results are also relevant to the work in Clinical Linguistics.

There is no general agreement as to whether the psycholinguistics for general linguistics or applied linguistics is to count as the terms are commonly used and understood in this context partly different. On the one hand psycholinguistics is considered "general" discipline, as their results are to be valid regardless of the individual speakers in general, so for any people, on the other hand psycholinguistics is seen as " Applied " tray because it is the study of language in its application and their results are ( Clinical linguistics, creating language proficiency tests, etc. ) are important in the context of applied subjects.

The psycholinguistics untscheidet in any case of theoretical linguistics as to when they explicitly ask about the psychological mechanisms that make the speech processing possible. However, the theoretical linguistic analyzes the structures of natural languages ​​, without taking into account such events.

The psycholinguistics is usually distinguished by the Neurolinguistics, but with which it has many points of contact. The Neurolinguistics seeks, among other things for neural correlates, ie after the brain activities that are associated with each linguistic processes, and investigated about the basis of the Dissoziationsmethode the impact of particular brain damage on language processing. Psycholinguistic research draws the data While with a, but their goal is not the localization of brain regions. Psycholinguists concluded from the survey data on the language disorders, reaction time, language development and speech production errors about that there are various systems for word recognition and syntax analysis. Such an abstract psychological assertion composed of the waiting psycholinguistics does not necessarily imply that two different brain regions can be found, which are responsible for word recognition or parsing. Rather, the relationship between psychological and neuroscientific data is highly controversial, as it is often disputed whether the psycholinguistics can basically be reduced to Neurolinguistics.

Psycholinguistic issues are also addressed in the neighboring disciplines of speech science and speech training.

The psycholinguistic research has far worked in cognitive science and in the philosophy of mind. The language ability plays a central role in these disciplines, as it presupposes, numerous cognitive skills such as thinking or memory, on the other hand is itself constitutive of various cognitive abilities that seem to be linguistically structured, at least in parts. Comprehensive psycholinguistic theories therefore often contain hypotheses about human thought or memory, as they are expressed in Jerry Fodor's idea of ​​the language of the spirit. There is also many researchers hope that a comprehensive psycholinguistic theory could be a centerpiece of a general theory of human cognition.

Therefore, there is also a significant proximity of the subject to the phylogenetic theory of language development. It examines not primarily language acquisition or language disorder an animal of which a human individual, but asks about the course of language learning of species in millions of years ( for example, by comparing the so-called language genes or their expression factors). By comparing the phenomena of language in humans and animals is given by Konrad Lorenz a look at the back of the mirror - so a deeper understanding of Becomeness of language over millions of years.

Linguistic knowledge

Overview

The human language faculty is based on knowledge, which must be present in any competent member of a linguistic community. An example: To use the sentence ". Jana loves her colleagues for many years," understand, you have to have different information: Firstly you have to know the meaning of words. Alone, however, the meaning of the word is not enough to understand that Jana is the subject ( the lover ) and the colleague the object ( the beloved) is. You must also therefore have grammatical knowledge ( syntax). In psycholinguistics, this is reflected by the distinction between a mental lexicon and the mental grammar. In the mental lexicon information about the individual units are stored, the mental grammar gives information about how these units can be combined.

But even in the mental lexicon one can again distinguish between different levels. A competent speaker has different things about a word like to know, " sun." First, it is of course necessary that the speaker knows the meaning (semantics) of the corresponding word. However, it is also necessary that the syntactic properties of the word are known, for example, that "sun" is a noun and the genus is feminine. The syntactic and semantic information about a unit in the mental lexicon are referred to in psycholinguistics as " Lemma ". Finally, the expression must be known, the fact of how to pronounce a word ( sound knowledge ) or write down ( graphematisches knowledge). This information is referred to as " lexeme " in the jargon of psycho- linguists.

This rough outline of linguistic knowledge is plausible, but you have to wonder if the processing steps shown actually correspond to different psychological processes. The psycholinguistics can be based in answering this question to different sources. Here are various experiments and observations are available: So it can be found in neuropsychology about that patients with certain disorders only make errors in successive stages of processing, suggesting separate processing in the brain. Also helpful is often the view of slip of the tongue, which in certain contexts only permutations on some level. In addition, you can try to influence in experiments certain aspects of linguistic knowledge selectively. A typical example is the "tip of the tongue " - phenomenon which may be generated experimentally. Such a phenomenon occurs when a word " on the tongue is ", so you have to the semantic ( meaning charged) and syntactic information access, however, does not have the phonetic knowledge. This phenomenon suggests that the phonetic knowledge is actually processed differently than the syntactic and semantic knowledge.

Compositionality

The basic idea of ​​the psycholinguistic analysis of linguistic knowledge, then, is that the basic linguistic units are stored in the mental lexicon, which can be combined according to the specifications of the mental grammar to a complex linguistic structure. This naturally raises the question of how the basic units look in the mental lexicon. Are there sentences, phrases, words, or the smallest meaningful units ( morphemes )?

It can be easily see that sentences can not be the basic units in the mental lexicon. The number of possible sets is so enormous that no man can have all already be stored. A closer look at the number of sets and is indeed a potentially infinite. You can always add new clauses, thus creating ever more complex sentence structures to sentences. A trivial example arises from the association with the word "and": "He took a step and another step and another step and another step and then another step ... " There is not fixed in the language that only a certain complexity is permitted, one can already produce potentially infinite many different sets with such simple examples. People can understand these sentences, but they can not all have already been saved. Rather, these records must be generated from more basic units.

If not every sentence in the mental lexicon is stored, so smaller units must be available from the combination of sets can be created. In linguistics, this phenomenon is discussed under the heading of compositionality. Formulated by the logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege compositionality states that there is the importance of complex linguistic structures from the meaning and arrangement of parts. For example, the meaning of the sentence. " This house is green " is derived from the meaning and arrangement of the terms "This ", " house", "is", "green" and the arrangement of these words. With the compositionality can you explain how people can understand sentences without having it stored itself in the mental lexicon.