PSYCHOLINGUISTICS PELN DULDA MURAT BORAZAN WHAT IS PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS PELİN DULDA MURAT BORAZAN

WHAT IS PSYCHOLINGUISTICS? • Psycholinguistics is a study that combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. • It is concerned with the relationship between the human mind and the language. • It explores the processes occuring in the brain while producing and perceiving both written and spoken discourse.

Questions in Psycholingusitics • What is language? • What are its natural components? • How are there components interconnected structured, and processed? • How is language structure processed in the brain? • How does that structure develop?

SLA • It is a different discipline including topics drawn from sociolinguistics and Psycholingusitics VS • It bases heavily upon cognitive psychology. educational psychology. • Studies are more eclectic in the methods they employ • It uses a limited range of established experimental techniques

LANGUAGE and THE BRAIN Three important issues releated to language and brain: 1. Comparasion: In what ways do our brain differ from those of other primates that do not possess language? Nativists: Humans have genetically transmitted language faculty to acquire language; for his reason, human brain is accepted as being different in structure from those of primates not capable of language. Cognitivist: Differences differences in the operation of the human brain are what enabled us to evolve language when other species could not.

2. Localisation: • Where is language located in the brain? Language must be an independent faculty and not part of our general powers of thought and reason. Evidences come from individuals who have serious learning difficulties but in whom the language faculty appers to be spared.

3. Lateralisation: • Is there a difference in the way the right side and left side of the brain contribute to language? • At what age does that differance become established? Damage to the left side of the brain impaired language in a way that damage to the right did not. Sometimes the powers of speech is fully recovered before the age of about five. Hence, a theory that, in infancy, the relationship between the two parts of the brain is flexible enough for language to relocate itself on the right when necessary. This arouses discussions whether the period of flexibility constitutes a Critical Period for learning a first language, after a child is not able to achieve full competence.

PARTS OF THE BRAIN

UPPER VS. • It consists of ‘grey matter’ LOWER • It deals with: known as the cortex. • Reflex actions • It deals with; • Controlling • making connections functions such as with stored information breathing and • analysing input heart beats • controlling sophisticated muscular movements.

LEFT VS RIGHT • They are joined by a complex web of nevre connections known as the corpus callosum. Left hemisphere in the brain is responsible for Right hemisphere is associated with: language ability. Perceptual Left Spatial representation. hemisphere is associated with: Analytic processing Symbolisation

Front VS Back 4 major regions in each hemisphere known as lobes. • Frontal lobe: The temporal lobe running from front to back and the occipitial and parietal at the back. • Pre-frontal areas: Responsible for recognising similarities between objects and grouping them into categories.

The Specific Parts in the Brain Related to Language Functions

1. Broca’s area: It is involved in the production of speech. 2. Wernicke’s area: It is involved in the understanding of speech. 3. The motor cortex: It is the area that controls movement of muscles. This area is involved in the physical articulation of speech. 4. Arcuate fasciculus: It is a bundle of nerve fibers which form a crucial connection between Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas

The Localization View Specific locations in the brain are responsible for specific aspects of language ability. It is called localization view. Brain activity follow a definite pattern: • The word is heard and comprehended via Wenicke’s area. • This signal is transferred via the arcuate fasciculus to Broca’s area where preparations are made to produce it. • A signal is sent to motor cortex to articulate the word

Errors in Speech Production

The Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon Sometimes we feel that some word is eluding us, that we know the word but it just do not come to the surface. It has shown that speakers generally have an accurate phonological outline of the word, can get the initial sound correct and mostly know the number of syllables in the word. It suggests that our word storage system may be partially organized on the basis of some phonological information and that some words in the store are more easily retrieved than others. There are phonological similarities between the word we are trying to say and the mistake we make.

Slips of the Tongue • Spoonerisms: a long shory stort instead of make a long story short. • Sound being carried over from one word to the next: • Ex: Black bloxes instead of black boxes. • Sound used in one word in anticipation of its occurence in the next word: • Ex: Noman numaral instead of roman numaral. • Interchange of word-final sounds: • Ex: Beel fetter instead of feel better • It has been suggested that they may result from ‘slips of the brain’ as it tries to organize linguistic messages.

Slips of the Ear For ex; in our hearing great ape and wondering why someone should be looking for one in his office. In fact, it is grey tape.

Aphasia It is impairment of language function due to localized brain damage that leads to difficulty in understanding or producing linguistic forms. The most common cause of it is a store, though tramuatic head injuries from violence or an accident may have similar effecets. Someone who is aphasic has interrelated language disorders, difficulties in understanding so difficulties in production, for example.

Broca’s aphasia: • Reduced amount of speech distorted articulation and slow, often effortful speech. • The grammatical markers are missing. Ex: I eggs and eat and drink coffee breakfast. Wernicke’s Aphasia The type of language disorder resulting in difficulties in auditory comprehension. People suffering from this disorder can create fluent specch, but it is often difficult to make sense of. Ex: I can’t talk all of the things I do, and part opf the part I can go alright, but I can’t tell from the other people.

Conduction aphasia: It is the type that associated with the damage to the arcuate fasciculus. Someone sufering from it sometimes mispronounce the words, but do not have articulation problems. They are fluent but may have disrupted rhythm because of pauses and hesitations. Repeating a word or phrase is difficult fort hem. What the speaker hears and understands cannot be transferred very successfully to the speech production area.

Dichotic Listening Test The technique that has demonstrated a left hemisphere dominance for syllable and word processing. According to this test: • Anything experienced on the right side of the body is processed in the left hemisphere and anything experienced on the left side is processed in the right hemisphere. • That is, The language signal received through the left ear is first sent to the right hemisphere and then sent to the left hemisphere for processing. therefore, it can be concluded that the signal coming from the right ear is perceived more correctly. This is called right ear advantage. • Also, the test shows that non-verbal sounds are recognized more often via left ear, meaning they are processed faster via the right hemisphere.

The Critical Period: During the childhood, there is a period when the human brain is most ready to receive input and learn a particular language. it is called the critical period. A child does not acquire a language during this period, it is almost impossible to lerarn a language later. Genie’ case: She had no left hemisphere language facility but she was able to learn a language even in a limited way. Therefore, it supports the ides that: • Part of the left hemisphere of the brain is open to accept a language program during childhood and ıf no program is provided then the facility is closed down. • Our capacity for language is not limited to only one or two specific areas, but is based on more complex connections throughout the whole brain.

Knowing a Word Lexical entries: What information do we need to store in our mind about a lexical item? Lexical storage: How are lexical items stored in relation to each other? Lexical access: What is the process that enables us to retrieve lexical items when necessary?

Each language user has a personal vocabulary store, or lexicon consisting of a set of lexical entries. These lexical entries include both content(nouns, verbs, adjectives etc. ) and function words(prepositions, auxiliaries etc. ). Evidences show that function words may be stored and processed separately from content words. A lexical entry for a content word provides two different information: • Form • Meaning

Lexical Storage and Lexical Access • Storage assists Access Words are not stored in the mind independently. On the contrary, very content word appears to have close links to others. • Connectionism: When a connection is used a great deal, it gets stronger. When a connection is little used, it gets weaker. Ex: FISH and CHIPS (strong one because two often occur together) • The notion of connection strength is useful because: • Frequency: the word we use most are the ones that are easiest for us to retrieve. Collocation: we retrieve word together because they are so closely connected. We talk about a heavy smoker, not a large smoker

Spreading Activation Part of the evidence for associative links between the words come from this phenomenon. When we see the word doctor, we recognize words such as, patient hospital or medicine.

INFORMATION PROCESSING APPROACH How language is processed by the user? Identify the words Organize the words into a syntactic pattern Turn the pattern into an abstract idea Search your memory for information Retrieve the information Turn the information into words Utter the words

The Storage of Data 3 types of memory store: v. Sensory storage: an exact trace of current stimulus. v. Short term storage: of information currently being processed temporary information needed for immediate purposes. v. Long term storage: of knowledege.

WRITING SYSTEMS • A witing system: a method of writing such as tha alphabet • A script: a form of writing ( arabic scipt etc) • An orthograpy: the writing conventions of a particular language

READING PROCESSES Lower level processes: include decoding and accessing lexical entries. They are highly automatic in a skilled reader. That is, they make few demands on Working Memory; thus, leave capacity for higher level processes such as building overall meaning. Higher level processes: include applying background knowledge to the text, inferring meaning, interpreting the writer’s intentions and constructing a global meaning of the text.

REFERENCES Yule, G. ( 2006 ). The study of Language. Cambrigde University Press, New York

THANK YOU…