Psycholinguistic evidence.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 364.

Psycholinguistics is often defined as the study of language and the mind. It explores what goes on in the human mind as an individual acquires, comprehends, produces and stores language. Such a study covers an enormous range of topics, and no two psycholinguists agree on exactly the ground which it covers.

Recognizing words

Understanding speech is not the simple mattter it appears to be at firstsight. Most people assume that comprehension involves being a pas­sive recipient of someone else's message. Hearers, it is often sup­posed, behave like secretaries taking down a mental dictation. They mentally record the message, then read it back to themselves. This assumption turns out to be quite wrong. For a start, it is physi­cally impossible to recognize each separate sound, speech is just too fast. Understanding language is an active, not a passive process. Hearers jump to conclusions on the basis of partial information. This has been demonstrated in various experiments. For example, listen­ers were asked to interpret the following sentences, in which the first sound of the final word was indistinct:

Paint the fence and the? ate.

Check the calendar and the ?ate.

Here's the fishing gear and the ?ate.

The subjects claimed to hear gate in the first sentence, date in the sec­ond, and bait in the third.

Since recognizing words involves quite a lot of guesswork, how do speakers make the guesses? Suppose someone had heard 'She saw a do -'. Would the hearer check through the possible candidates one after the other, dog, doll, don, dock, and so on (serial processing)? Or would all the possibilities be considered subconsciously at the same time (parallel processing)?

The human mind, it appears, prefers the second method, that of parallel processing, so much so that even unlikely possibilities are probably considered subconsciously. A recent interactive activation theory suggests that the mind is an enormously powerful network in which any word which at all resembles the one heard is automatically activated, and that each of these triggers its own neighbours, so that activation gradually spreads like ripples on a pond. Words that seem particularly appropriate get more and more excited, and those which are irrelevant gradually fade away. Eventually, one candidate wins out over the others.

Understanding syntax

We now know quite a lot about word recognition. But it is still unclear how separate words are woven together into the overall pattern.

To some extent, the process is similar to word recognition, in that people look for outline clues, and then actively reconstruct theprobable message from them. In linguistic terminology, hearers uti­lize perceptual strategies. They jump to conclusions on the basis of outline clues by imposing what they expect to hear onto the stream of sounds. For example, consider the sentence:

The boy kicked the ball threw it.

Most people who hear this sentence feel that there is something wrong with it, that there is a word left out somewhere, and that it would preferably be:

The boy who kicked the ball threw it.

However, they realize that it is in fact perfectly well-formed when shown a similar sentence:

The boy thrown the ball kicked it. (The boy to whom the ball was thrown kicked it.)

The problem arose because when interpreting sentences, people tend to impose a subject-verb-object sequence on them. It is hard to counteract this tendency, and accounts for a number of garden-path sentences, situations in which hearers are initially led 'up the garden path' in their interpretation, before realizing they have made a mis­take, as in:

Anyone who cooks ducks out of the washing-up.

Speech production

Speech production involves at least two types of process. On the one hand, words have to be selected. On the other, they have to be inte­grated into the syntax.

Slips of the tongue - cases in which the speaker accidentally says something such as par cark instead of ‘car park'

Selection errors usually involve lexical items, so they can tell us which words are closely associated in the mind. For example, peo­ple tend to say knives for 'forks', oranges for 'lemons',

Speech disorders

'Lovely rabbit' said a woman who had had a stroke, when shown a picture of an apple. By chance, she had been talking about rhubarb previously, and so had somehow blended the words apple and rhubarb into rabbit. She was suffering from aphasia, the general word for serious speech disorders, which literally means 'without speech'. In fact, such speakers usually have some

speech, but speech of a rather odd kind.

It's important to distinguish them from those who simply have a problem in 'spitting out' what they want to say, such as stutterers.

15 Language and the Brain/Mind. Psycholinguistics.

Child language: language as a maturationally controlled behavior; the hypothesis about the nature of language; the rule-governed nature of child language; learning the meaning of words (Aitchison, p. 122-126; Masters' presentations).

One point in particular has become clearer: language has all the hallmarks of maturationally controlled behaviour. It used to be thought that animal behaviour could be divided into two types: that which was inborn and natural (for example, dogs naturally bark), and that which was learned and unnatural (dogs may be taught to beg). It turns out, however, that this division is by no means clear-cut and may be misleading. Many types of behaviour develop 'naturally' at a certain age, provided that the surrounding environment is adequate.

On the other hand, there are those who support a process approach, and argue that children could not possibly contain specific language universals.

Motherese or caregiver language has fairly similar characteris­tics almost everywhere: the caregivers slow down their rate of speech, and speak in slow, well-formed utterances, with quite a lot of repetition. People who stress these social aspects of language

claim that there is no need to search for complex innate mechanisms: social interaction with caring caregivers is sufficient to cause language to develop.

This latter view is turning out to be something of an exaggeration. The fact that parents make it easier for children to learn language does not explain why they are so quick to acquire it: intelligent chimps exposed to intensive sign language rarely get beyond 200 words and two-word sequences. Furthermore, language seems to be due to something more than a desire to communicate. There is at least one strange child on record who acquired fluent language, but did not use it to communicate. He spoke only monologues to himself, and refused to interact with others.

The whole controversy is far from being solved, though psycho­linguists hope that the increasing amount of work being done on the acquisition of languages other than English may shed more light on the topic. It is possible, however, that we shall never unravel the mys­tery entirely: it seems likely that children use an inbuilt linguistic abil­ity to solve general intelligence problems, and also their natural puzzle-solving abilities to solve linguistic problems. With this kind of intertwining, the various strands may be inextricably interwoven.

Learning the meaning of words

At first, children may be able to use words only in a particular con­text. One child agreed that snow was white, but refused to accept that a piece of paper was also white. This tendency to undergeneralize usually passes unnoticed. But it is probably commoner than over-generalization, which attracts much more attention.

People often remark on children's overgeneralizations. Youngsters may call any type of small thing a crumb: a crumb, a small beetle, or a speck of dirt, or they may apply the word moon

to any kind of light. An idea popular in the last century was that children see the world through a mental fog. They are able only to grasp broad outlines, which they then narrow down. But this turns out to be an oversim­plification, because children's overgeneralizations are often quite specific, and quite odd. One child referred to a shiny green leaf as a moon! A possible explanation is that she was working from a proto­type (Chapter 8) which was unlike the adult's prototype. This child had apparently

taken a picture of a shiny yellow crescent moon as a

prototypical moon, and re-applied the word moon to anything which had the approximate shape of the original, as well as one of its other characteristics. The leaf was vaguely crescent shaped, and also shiny. This interesting idea is currently being explored by researchers.

16Language and the Brain/Mind. Cognitive linguistics vs. psycholinguistics.

In cognitive linguistics, the center of attention shifts from the Externalized Language (EL) represented with material signs to the Internalized Language (IL), or language as it exists in the mind. The basic notions of cognitive linguistics are the Conceptual Model of the World and the Linguistic Model of the World. The Conceptual Model of the World (CMW) is the totality of concepts – ideas, opinions, beliefs, etc. – existing in the mind and constituting the information system, or the system of our knowledge. The Linguistic Model of the World (LMW) is that part of the CMW which is manifested through linguistic signs. Beyond the LMW are “pure thoughts” that cannot be represented with language, e.g. various practical skills (driving, swimming, etc.), visual cognition, apprehensions. The LMW is presumed to integrate two types of knowledge:

(1) the knowledge of (about) language as a system of signs;

(2) the knowledge in language, i.e. the results of our cognizing the world

that are represented in the meanings of language and speech units.

The most debated question is the relation between these two domains of knowledge: they may be either rather autonomous, as Noam Chomsky maintains; or they may be mapped one upon another – the idea favored by cognitive semantics.

Knowledge of language (linguistic competence) has been described by Noam Chomsky within the framework of Universal Grammar (UG) Theory. The UG, being genetically inbuilt in humans, comprises a number of alternative options that surface in human languages. These options, relevant for the organization of any language, are called the principles. The choice of particular options is triggered from the outside; it depends upon the exposure of a child to the patterns of a particular language. These patterns are called the parameters. Besides Chomsky's model of UG, there are other models proposed by linguists. Chomsky's model is the most popular one.

The structures are propositions (пропозиції), frames (фрейми), scripts (скрипти), networks (мережі), etc., with the frame being the most applied conceptual model. A frame is a sort of skeleton, something like an application form with many blanks, or slots, to be filled with the specified information. A frame may be construed by several propositions. Several frames, when linked, form a network. To explain various phenomena of language and speech, cognitive linguistics may apply linguistic and psycholinguistic findings, as well as the insights of other related fields.

Cognitive linguistics is a part of cognitive science. The latter includes a number of disciplines that study the human mind – its organization and work. Some of these disciplines (neuroscience and neurolibguistics, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, philosophy and anthropology) are theoretical. They aim to develop appropriate models of information processing in the human mind. The other disciplines (artificial intelligence theory, computer science, and information science) are practical, or technological. Their objective is to simulate the organization and work of the human mind in the computer. These theoretical and practical disciplines constantly interact, sharing their findings and methodologies. In cognitive science, linguistics is considered to be one of the key branches, as its object – the language—provides the most accessible data for the mind studies.

17Pragmatics: definition. Branches of pragmatics.