Lecture 9 Psycholinguistics

The branch of knowledge which studies the mental aspects of language, combining linguistics and psychology is often defined as the study of language and the mind. It explores what goes on in the human mind as an individual acquires, comprehends, produces and stores language. Such a study covers an enormous range of topics. It overlaps with a wider more general field known as psychology of language, which includes the relationship of language to thought, and with an even wider one, the psychology of communication.

Psycholinguistics, as the study of language and the mind, is usually distinguished from neurolinguistics, the study of language and the brain. Psycholinguistics occupies the borderline between General Psychology and General Linguistics. Psychology studies the nature and function of the human soul. Its scope of interest lies in the human ability to use language.

Psycholinguistics began to emerge as a distinct discipline in the 1950s. Many people date psycholinguistics proper from the mid 1960-s, when an upsurge of interest followed on from the work of N. Chomsky, who argued that language was likely to be genetically programmed. N. Chomsky’s ideas triggered an avalanche of work by both linguists and psychologists on child language acquisition, and also an interest in finding out whether his theory of transformational-generative grammar had “psychological reality”, in the sense of reflecting the way people store or process language. Much of this early work turned out to be somewhat naïve and disappointing results. Because N. Chomsky repeatedly revised his theories, a number of psychologists decided that linguistic theory was too changeable to provide a secure basis for their work. The field has therefore become somewhat splintered, even though it continued to expand. Considerable progress has been made in major areas like child language acquisition, speech comprehension, and speech production.

Child language acquisition

Language has all the hallmarks of maturationally controlled behavour. It is used to be thought that animal behaviour could be divided into two types: that which was inborn and natural (dogs naturally bark), and that which was learnt and unnatural (dogs may be taught to beg). It turns out that this division is by no means clear-cut and may be misleading. Many types of behaviour develop “naturally” at a certain age, provided that the surrounding environment is adequate. Such behaviour is maturationally controlled. Arguments as to whether it is inborn or learnt are futile. Both nature and nurture are important. Innate potentialities lay down the framework, and within this framework, there is a wide variation depending on the environment. When individuals reach the crucial point in their maturation, they are biologically in a state of readiness for learning the behaviour. They would not learn it at this time without a biological trigger, and conversely, the biological trigger could not be activated if there was nobody around from whom they could learn the behaviour.

Human infants pay attention to language from birth. They produce recognizable words at around 12 to 15 months, and start putting words together at around 18 months. The urge for language to emerge at this time is very strong, and only very extraordinary circumstances will suppress it – as in the case of Genie, a Californian teenager who from the age of 20 months had been confined to one small room, and had been physically punished by her father if she made any sounds. Naturally, she was without speech when she was found. But all normal children, and some abnormal ones, will begin to speak if they hear language going on around them.

Children all over the world show similarities in the way they acquire language, whose development appears to be maturationally controlled (pre-programmed to emerge at a particular point in development, providing that the environment is normal, and the child unimpaired). Moreover, at each stage, child language is not just a substandard form of an adults language, but an independent system with rules of its own. The nature of the genetic input is still under discussion as is the question how children abandon immature rules, such as What kitty can eat? for What can kitty eat?, since they are apparently impervious to direct corrections.