Psycholinguistics and Its Theories

7/30/2019 Psycholinguistics and Its Theories

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PSYCHOLINGUISTICSPsycholinguistics investigates the mental mechanisms underlying

language processing. (Cognitive)

How to perceive words and store them in the mind, how to understand asentence, how to learn to read, how language and writing systems

influence mental organizations.

Language production is a process from idea generation to language

expression.

It is a mental process that is heavily influenced by language users

culture.

Idea: cross-cultural communication

People using the same language (i.e. English) but coming from

different cultures.

Example: Cultural differences in directness how explicitly and clearly

do we say what we mean.

Case study: letters of recommendation for a bright but immature

student, Peter Gore. (By John McCarthy)

Psycholinguistics

DEFINITION:

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the

psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire,

use, and understand language.

Psycholinguistics maintains two basic theories. They are as followed.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION THEORIES

Introduction

During the past forty years there have been two major theories of

language learning by children. But there are two major schools of thought


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known as, 'Behaviorists' and 'Mentalists'. One school is of the view that

language learning is entirely the product of experience and that our

environment affects all of us. Others have suggested that everybody has

an innate language learning mechanism. Let us discovery with the help of

these two schools of thought that how do children acquire their mother

tongue. How do they grow up linguistically and learn to handle the

stylistics varieties of their mother tongue? How much of the linguistics

system they are born with and how much do they discover from their

exposure to language?

a) The Behaviorist School

B.F. Skinner and his followers are known as behaviorist. According to

them language learning is process known as operant conditioning.

Conditioned Behavior is behavior which is the result of repeated training.

Operant means that it is voluntary behavior, it is result of learner's own

free will, and it is not forced by any outside person or thing. The learner

demonstrates the new behavior first as a response to a system of reward

or punishment, and finally as an automatic response. In order to prove

their theory they conducted an experiment.

EXPERIMENT


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They put a rat in a box containing a bar. If it presses a bar, it is

rewarded with a pellet of food. Nothing forces it to press the bar. The first

time it probably does so accidentally. When the rat finds that the food

arrives, it presses the bar again. Eventually it finds that if it is hungry it

can obtain food by pressing the bar. Then task is made more difficult. The

rat only gets rewarded if it presses the bar while a light is flashing. At

first rat is puzzled. Eventually it learns the trick. Then the task is made

more difficult again. This time the rat only receives food if it presses the

bar a certain number of times. After initial confusion it learns to do this

also. And so on, and so on.

Operant condition can be summarized thus

STIMULUS RESPONSE REINFORCEMENT

REPETITION

In operant conditioned, reinforcement plays a vital role. There are two

kinds of reinforcement:

A) Positive Reinforcement


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Praise and rewards are positive reinforcement. Experiments have

shown that positive reinforcement works much better in bringing

about good learning.

B) Negative Reinforcement

Rebukes and punishments are negative reinforcement.

The behaviorists also claim that we learn language by imitation and

association. For example, a young child hears the word "water" with

the actual thing. He then makes this sound himself, imitating what he

has heard. His parents are pleased that he has learnt another word and

so his response is reinforced.

The thoughts of behaviorist school can well be understood according

to following tree diagram.

The Behaviorist School

Language learning is Positive Imitation

Operant conditioning and and

Negative Association

Reinforcement


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Noam Chomsky explicitly rejects the behaviorists' position that

language should be thought of as verbal behavior, arguing that it

should be thought of as knowledge held by those who use language.

Chomsky suggests that the learner of any language has an inbuilt

learning capacity for language that enables each learner to construct a

kind of personal theory or set of rules about the language based on

very limited exposure to language.

b) The Mentalist School

Chomsky and his mentalist followers claim that a child learns his

first language through cognitive learning. They claim that language is

governed by rules, and is not a haphazard thing, as Skinner and his

followers would claim. According to Chomsky, the child is born with

a mental capacity for working out the underlying system to the jumble

of sounds which he hears. He constructs his own grammar' and

imposes it on all the sounds reaching his brain. This mental grammar

is part of his cognitive framework, and nothing he hears is stored in

his brain until he has matched it against what he already knows and

found a 'correct' place for it within this framework.

Chomsky argues that language is so complex that it is almost

incredible that it can be acquired by a child in so short a time. He says

that a child is born with some innate mental capacity which helps the

child to process all the language which he hears. This is called the


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Language Acquisition Device, and he saws it as comprising a special

area of the brain whose only function was the processing of language.

This function, he argues, is quite separate from any other mental

capacity which the child has.

When Chomsky talks about 'rules', he means the unconscious rules

in a child's mind these rules enables him to make grammatical

sentences in his own language. Chomsky does not mean that a child

can describes these rules explicitly. For example, a four or five year

old child can produce a sentence like I have done my work; he can

do that because he has a 'mental grammar' which enables him to

form correct present perfect structures and also to use such structures

in the right and appropriate situations. But he is unable to define the

formation ofpresent perfect tense.

The thoughts of Mentalists can well be understood with the help of the

following tree diagram.

The Mentalists School

Language learning Input Mental grammar

Is an (own rules)

Innate ability LAD

Grammatical

Output sentences


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Both the schools have said significant things, yet neither is perfect.

The mentalists' emphasis on the rule-learning is over enthusiastic, and

the behaviorists' rejection of meaning is entirely unjust. Language

acquisition seems to be a process both of analogy and application,

both nature and nurture. The differences between the empiricists

approach and that of the rationalist can be summarized in the

following manner:

BEHAVIOURISTS APPROACH MENTALIST APPROACH

1) Language acquisition is a

stimulus- response process.

Language is an innate, in-born

process.

2) Language is a conditioned

behavior.

Language is not a behavior like other

behaviors, but a specific mental

process.

3) Children learn language by

imitation and analogy.

Children learn language by

application.

4) Language learning is based on

practice.

Language learning is analytical,

generative and creation.

5) The role of imitation, repetition,

reinforcement and motivation is verysignificant in language learning.

The role of exposure to language is

quite vital.

6) Language acquisition is the result

of nature.

Language acquisition is the result of

nurture.


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Conclusion

This comparative study makes one thing clear: nature and nurture,

analogy and application, practice and exposure are important. Innate

potentialities lay down the framework. Within this framework, there is

wide variation depending on the environment. The kind of language that

children ultimately grow into shaped by the culture-based responses of

the family, if not in a way that can be called imitation, then at least in

terms of things the child chooses to do with its language. But we should

be wary of the idea that all children experience the same practices and

follow the same development path as they grow into their language.

Having been exposed to a small number of utterances, the child begins

to extract the principles underlying the utterances and compose new

utterances of his own. This is the way every child grammar to

communicate in an intelligent manner. He makes mistakes and produces

ungrammatical sentences. His elders correct him; he feeds the

information into his mini-grammar, modifies some of the rules, and again

produces new utterances. In a period of about four years, he is able to

master and internalize all the essential rules of language. This is a proof

that a child's own rules of grammar are more important to him than mere

imitation.

Psycholinguistics and Its Theories

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