REPUBLICA BOLIVARIANA DE VENEZUELA

MINISTERIO DEL P.P PARA LA EDUCACION SUPERIOR

UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL EXPERIMENTAL SIMON RODRIGUEZ
NUCLEO PALO VERDE

PSICHOLINGUISTICS; CONCEPTS AND HISTORY

Facilitador:

Participantes:

Ros Elizabeth

Yerimar Echeverria C.I 20595091

Julio Vetancourt C.I. 18097194

In the first part of this summary we will explain briefly concepts, topics, disciplines
and branches of the science related to psycholinguistics. The study of how individuals
comprehend, produce and acquire language is called psycholinguistics. This branch of the
science that stresses the knowledge of the language and the cognitive processes involved in
ordinary language use is part of field of the cognitive science that includes insights of
psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience and philosophy. In the
psychology of language (how is also known psycholinguistics) consists of three processes
are of primary interesting: (1) language comprehension (how we perceive and understand
speech and written language), (2) language production (how we construct an utterance,
from idea to completed sentence) and (3) language acquisition (how children acquire
language).
Psycholinguistics deals with two important questions: the first one would be What
knowledge of language is needed for us to use language? It refers to tacit knowledge (The
knowledge of how to perform something but not aware of full rules) and explicit
knowledge (The knowledge of the processes or mechanism used in the acts). So, much of
our knowledge is tacit rather than explicit knowledge but we can transform our tacit
knowledge into explicit knowledge. In the language knowledge is important name four
areas: semantics (The meanings of sentences or words), syntax (the grammatical
arrangement of words within the sentence), phonology (the systems of sounds in a
language) and pragmatics (the social rules involved in language use).
The other important question would be What cognitive processes are involved in
the ordinary use of language? Understanding a lecture, reading a book, writing a letter and
holding a conversation are considered ordinary use of language; the perception, memory
and thinking are considered cognitive processes. Therefore, these cognitive processes are
always implicated in the ordinary use of language and vice versa.
To extend a little our linguistic knowledge, it is need to know four language
concepts: (1) garden path sentences (a sentence that is temporarily ambiguous or
confusing because it contains a word or words which appears to be compatible with more
than one structural analysis), (2) indirect request (an aspect of language that forces us to
considerer language in a social context), (3) direct command (to give instruction in a

authoritative manner) and (4) Wernickes aphasia (a language disorder due to brain
damage) is one type of aphasia that involves a breakdown in semantics. In this language
disorder the aspects disrupted are the relationships between words, and the aspects intact
are the phonological knowledge and syntactic structure.
The concepts named above are related with two sciences: sociolinguistics (study the
relationships between language and social behavior) and neurolinguistics (study the
relationship between the brain and language), Another topic of considerable concern to
psycholinguists is language in children (language acquisition) that deal with aspects of the
processes of acquisition in the mother tongue and the processes in which the children is
grow up; in some way the children know how to communicate using one or two words and
eliminating function words and use content words, this is something intuitive knowledge,
but the children comprehension and production abilities cannot be divorced from the social
context in which parents simplifying their speech to children and teaching specific words.
According to Skinner the behavior of speaking correctly was, it was assumed, the
consequence of being raised in a environment in which correct models were present and in
which childrens speech errors were corrected by the parents and the manner in which the
parents corrects the errors, but, Chomsky was not agree he argument is this: the language
children acquire is intricate and subtle, and the sample of speech given to them during the
course of language development is anything but. Therefore, although parents may assist the
childs language development in some way and influence the rate of development
somewhat the pattern of development is based not on parental speech but on innate
language knowledge.
In this second part we will consider some historical developments in
psycholinguistics. According to Carroll this historical context cold be divided into two
periods. A first period was dominated by Wundts ideas; he was who developed the theory
of language production from the field of the psychology in the early 1900s. He held two
notions in his theory; the first one would be the sentence as the principal unit of language
and leaving the word as a component of the sentence (the sentence represents a whole at the
cognitive level during the speech production) and the second one would be the
production of speech as the transformation a complete thought process into sequentially

organized speech segments, i.e. the sound spoken is a cognitive processes that involve to
structured parts of the speech.
Some decades later by the 1920s, the behaviorism appeared as the mainstream of
experimental psychology. In this period there was little interest in language. The
behaviorists spoke of verbal behavior instead of language because considered that
language was developed in environmental contingencies of reinforcement and punishment,
in other words, the childrens speech errors were corrected by the parents (the verbal
behavior could be conditioned by reinforcement and punishment). B. F. Skinner explained
this same theory in his book Verbal Behavior (the parents shape the childrens utterances).
More later, Verplanck found more evidences of this premise in the opinionated statements
of college students, where some words could be increased by reinforcing only.
Another topic of interest for behaviorists was meaning. Noble and McNeely made
an index of the meaningfulness of individuals words by measuring the number of
associations a person could say in a determined period of time. About the time Osgood and
his associates developed a tool for measuring the associative meanings of words by asking
people to rate words on dimensions called semantic differential. Besides, some
developments occurred in linguistics but despite the similarity between two fields
(linguistic and psychology) there was little activity or interest. During this period linguists
followed the ideas of behaviorism. The linguist Leonard Bloomfield (Wundts student) took
Wundtian themes and behaviorist arguments in his works.
By the early 1950s, there were two conferences (1951 and 1953) where the term
psycholinguistics arose. These conferences were sponsored by The Social Science Research
Council that included psychologists, linguists, anthropologists and communication
engineers. The two conferences established agreements among participants to incorporate
the tools developed (methodologies and theories) by psycholinguists to be used in the
investigations and explications corresponding to the linguistic areas discovered by linguists.
The second period of psycholinguistics began with the linguist Noam Chomsky
known as the most important figure in twentieth-century linguistics. He argued that the
behaviorism views of language were unacceptable. He disagreed with the theory that

affirmed that a sentence consists in a chain of associations between individual words in a

sentence called associative chain theory by behaviorists. Chomsky considered that in
specific sentences the associations among words were not possible. Even if some sentences
are syntactically acceptable, the association could not exist either. He indicated that words
have a determined relationship but these are separated, the relationships among some words
are more complicated in certain cases. Put another way, there are long- range dependencies
among word in a sentence. Moreover, a theory that stresses a simple association between
adjacent words is inadequate.
Chomsky was also against another important behaviorist argument that tried about
language acquisition, he said that language acquisition cannot be explicated in terms of
childrens language experience. On the other hand he affirmed that there was not enough
information of language samples given to children to fully account for the affluence and
difficulty of childrens language. This primary argument created by Chomsky is known as
the poverty of stimulus argument.
In the late 1960s the Chomskys ideas had influential achieves on psychological
thinking about language. During this period the language development became an
especially popular of investigation. Consequently, psychologists became very interested in
linguistic in general and in Chomskys transformational grammar in particular. A
psycholinguist called George Miller made a significant connection between psychology and
linguistics by introducing psychologists to Chomskys ideas and their psychological
implications. These theoretical analyses of language development stressed the role of
innate factors becoming in an important stream. The most dominant person in this area
was Eric Lenneberg, together with Chomsky.
The revolution of the 1960s and early 1970s emphasized the role of linguistic theory
in psycholinguistic research and the role of innate mechanism in language acquisition. In
the following years these themes would continue but the interest in linguistic theory was
decreased.
It is viable to determine some aspects of psycholinguist work over the last 15 to 20
years: (1) Psycholinguistics is the field that has become more interdisciplinary (It has

contributed in the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science such as computer science,

philosophy, neuroscience and related fields); (2) The wave of interest in syntax causing
interest in other aspects of language (One area deals with how people understand,
remember and produce discourse, the another is lexicon, or mental dictionary). Other theme
of importance tries with the ways psycholinguists look at child language acquisition.
To end, psycholinguistics has been the most diverse area of studies that complement
and help to others fields of cognitive science from its perspectives and methodologies,
achieving the integration of insights among different disciplines.