Basic psycholinguistic factors

There can be three factors that are of primary importance for the speaking individual: the human factor, the situational factor, the experimental factor, the abnormal factor.

The human factor is extremely important in defining psycholinguistics as an independent science. In the center of analysis here is not the product of speaking (our speech) but the speaking person with all his/her merits and demerits, strong and weak points, creative abilities and disturbances.

The situational factor also plays an important role. If we look at any text more or less carefully, we will see that all the parameters of the communicative speech situations are somehow reflected in it. We can basically determine where and when this or that conversation takes place

The experimental factor is of primary importance as well. The experiment is recognized as a leading method of psychology. The experiment helps to create an artificial situation allowing the speaker to exercise certain linguistic devices which are of special interest for the researcher. Besides, the experimental situation may cause the speaker to exercise the certain linguistic abilities so that the scholar may determine whether these abilities are well developed, underdeveloped or impaired. Texts are extremely popular in psycholinguistic studies.

The abnormal factor should also be taken into consideration when dealing with language. Linguistics has always been a norm centric discipline. It means that linguistics have analyzed the “correct” texts only. It has never been clear what is to be done with the “wrong” texts. The texts produced by illiterate people, foreigners or mentally sick individuals were merely defined as “incorrect” and according considered not worth studying at all. These texts do exist, so something must be done with them. The term “wrong” is not very successful one because it gives nothing to our understanding what such texts are really like and what mental processes bring them into being.