Relations Between Psycholinguistics
& Linguistics
Linguistics
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the
interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological
aspects.
The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms in
which languages are processed and represented in the mind
and brain.
The three primary processes investigated in psycholinguistics -
Language Comprehension
Language Production
Language Acquisition
Psycholinguistics is a branch of cognitive science
Linguistics
Linguistics is concerned with the nature of language and communication.
It deals both with the study of particular languages, and the search for
general properties common to all languages or large groups of languages.
It includes the following subareas :
Phonetics (the study of the production, acoustics and hearing of speech sounds)
Phonology (the patterning of sounds)
Morphology (the structure of words)
Syntax (the structure of sentences)
Semantics (meaning)
Pragmatics (language in context)
Linguistics
It also includes explorations into the nature of language
variation (i. e., dialects), language change over time, how
language is processed and stored in the brain, and how it is
acquired by young children.
Relations Between Psycholinguistics and
Linguistics
Relationship between Psycholinguistics
& Linguistics
According to The Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
(Bussmann, 2006), It defines Macro-linguistics as the “scientific
investigation of language in the broadest sense, i.e., in the context of all
related disciplines such as sociology, psychology, and philosophy”
In this sense, we can specifically refer to
Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, or Neurolinguistics among many others are
strongly related with the scientific study of language.
Linguistics studies, the linguistic representations entertained by a speaker of a particular
language.
Psycholinguistics focuses on the way these representations are retrieved or constructed in
real-time language comprehension and production (Phillips & Wagers, 2007).
The psycholinguistic perspective of real-time processing is sometimes linked to
performance factors, justified in consideration of the great ambiguity and indeterminacy in
the input (such as garden-path sentences), and constraints on the real-time sentence
processing imposed by cognitive systems such as attention, memory, and executive
control (Ferreira, 2005).
For example, this ‘garden-path sentence ’:
The horse raced past the barn fell.
Here, main verb is ‘fell’, and ‘raced past the barn’ is a modifier (technically,
it is known as a restrictive relative clause).
This is a famous sentence because it is actually grammatical, but most people
don’t feel that it is grammatical when they first see/hear it.
As reviewed by Ferreira, (2005), the relationship between Linguistics and
Psycholinguistics is a controversial one, with lots of excitements followed by
many frustrations.
Lexical and syntactic ambiguity
The field of sentence processing also deals with the processing of ambiguity.
An example of an ambiguous sentence is given below:
‘The man saw the spy with binoculars’
This sentence is ambiguous. There are clearly two actors - a man, and a spy.
Just as clearly, the man saw the spy somehow.
The question is, did the man use binoculars to see the spy, or was the spy holding binoculars?
The two interpretations are given below:
‘The man used binoculars to see a spy.’
‘The man saw a spy that was holding binoculars.’
This ambiguity is called ‘structural ambiguity’ because-under conventional theories of
syntax/semantics-it depends on whether the modifier with binoculars is interpreted as
modifying the direct object (spy) or the verb phrase (saw the spy).
The Derivational Theory of Complexity
Sometimes ‘surface structure’ of a sentence was not enough to understand a
sentence.
Take the (a and b) sentences in the sequence below as an example.
a. John is eager to please.
b. John is easy to please.
While the two sentences are similar in their surface structure, according to
the theory, their ‘deep structure’ should be very different.
1a. *It is eager for someone to please John.
1b. It is easy for someone to please John.
In sentence (b) John is actually the object of the sentence, as shown in the
extended sentence (2b)
In (a) John is the subject of the sentence, as illustrated with the
unacceptability of (1a).
This theory is summarized as follows
by Fodor and Garrett (1967):
“A number of early psycholinguistic studies of generative grammar appear to
have been motivated by the hypothesis that, insofar as sentential complexity
is a function of syntactic variables, the complexity of a sentence is measured
by the number of grammatical rules employed in its derivation. We shall refer
to this as the Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC).” (p. 5)
In spite of the initial optimism about the testability of this theory, the
empirical findings in psycholinguistic research failed to correlate the number of derivations with
sentence complexity, as measured with reaction times and comprehension scores (Fodor, Bever, &
Garrett, 1974; Fodor & Garrett, 1967). This frustration with Generative Grammar is taken to be one
of the motivations behind separating Linguistics from Psycholinguistics (Marantz, 2005), endowing
the latter with an area of research independent of Linguistics.
At last we can say that,
psycholinguistics is a sub-branch of
linguistics;
psycholinguistics = language cognition
Presented by:
Sree. Sanjoy Sarker
Roll:46
4th year, 8th semester
Department of
Linguistics,
University of Dhaka.
