Psycholinguistics: Definition and Examples

Psycholinguistics is a branch of human knowledge that studies the mental or psychological aspects of language and speech. It combines aspects of psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and other fields of knowledge to understand how language is represented and processed in the human brain. In view of this, many consider it an interdisciplinary science.

Also known as the psychology of language, psycholinguistics seeks to understand how language is produced and understood, as well as how it is acquired during development and lost due to language disorders.

Origin of psycholinguistics

Etymologically, psycholinguistics comes from the Greek term psykhé , meaning soul or mind, and the Latin term lingua , meaning tongue or language. The first to coin the term psycholinguistics was the renowned American psychologist Jacob Robert Kantor in his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar , published in 1936.

The popularization of the term and the development of the discipline as such is due to an article published in 1946 by a student of Kantor named Nicholas Henry Pronko, and a book published years later by Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok. Pronko was the first to postulate psycholinguistics as a new area of ​​study separate from both linguistics and psychology. On the other hand, Osgood and Sebeok were responsible for shaping the discipline, by clearly delimiting its main theories and its study problems.

Psycholinguistics as an experimental science

Psycholinguistics is based on the application of the scientific method to establish cause-effect relationships that allow researchers to deduce how language is constructed, understood, learned, and forgotten. For this, it requires contrasting its hypotheses with data and observations in a systematic way to guarantee the validity of its conclusions. In this sense, psycholinguistics is considered an experimental science.

Key areas of study of psycholinguistics

As mentioned above, psycholinguistics studies four well-defined key aspects of the psychology of language:

language coding

It refers to the process by which verbal and written language are produced in the human mind. Psycholinguistics seeks to study how the concept of a message is formed in the mind, and then the whole process of how it is translated or encoded in a linguistic form such as a sentence.

application example

The understanding of this process obtained from psycholinguistics has been essential for the development of computerized systems for the generation of natural languages. These allow computers to compose automated messages posing as people quite convincingly.

The decoding of language

It is the opposite of encoding, that is, it refers to the process by which language is interpreted at the time of listening or reading it, that is, it has to do with language comprehension.

application example

The study of decoding has great applicability in the field of artificial intelligence and in data mining or exploration, since it has allowed the development of algorithms capable of understanding natural human language.

This understanding can be used, for example, to present relevant results to someone who has done a Google search, since the computer must be able to decode the user’s message to understand the question, and in turn decode the content of the web pages to understand the question. be able to search and present the answer.

language acquisition

This branch of psycholinguistics tries to understand, mainly, the way in which human beings learn language throughout our development from birth. It tries to answer the question of how a baby is able to fully learn a language, apparently without any effort. In other words, it studies how we learn the mother tongue, although it also studies the learning of second languages.

application example

Language acquisition studies are particularly useful for learning and teaching new languages, both in children and adults. They have also led to the development of important theories, such as Chomsky’s Theory of Universal Grammar, which has important philosophical implications.

Psycholinguistics and language disorders

This subdiscipline of psycholinguistics studies problems during language acquisition, which in turn lead to problems with encoding or decoding of language. He also studies the processes of language loss in adults after having acquired it. This is common in cases of brain damage due to disease, infection, trauma, etc.

Application Examples

Psycholinguistics has made it possible to understand and treat different types of language development disorders such as:

• The dyslalia.
• dyslexia.
• dysphasia.
• Different types of aphasias.

Other examples of topics studied by psycholinguistics

slip of the tongue

The term refers to small errors in speaking. It is a type of stumbling during the locution that can result in using the wrong word, inversing letters or complete syllables, etc. Slips of the tongue are an important source of information about the way we encode language. The following table shows some examples of slips of the tongue:

The evolution of language in the human species

As mentioned above, many psycholinguists are interested in the development of language in the individual. However, others study the development of language in humans throughout their history as a species.

Effects of lexical frequency

Among the different variables that psycholinguists consider in their studies, one of them is the frequency with which each word is used in the language. This frequency is also related to the ease or difficulty with which words are recognized when reading or listening to them.

Sources

Carroll, David. Psychology of Language . 5th ed., Thomson, 2008.

Field, John. Psycholinguistics: A Resource Book for Students . Routledge, 2003.

Garnham, Alan. Psycholinguistics: Central Topics . Methuen, 1985.

Kantor, Jacob Robert. An Objective Psychology of Grammar . Indiana University, 1936.

O’Grady, William, et al. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction . 4th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.

Pronko, Nicholas Henry. Language and Psycholinguistics: A Review . Psychological Bulletin, vol. 43, May 1946, p. 189-239.