PSYCHOLINGUISTICS The branch of knowledge which studies the mental aspects of language, combining
LINGUISTICS and psychology. It overlaps with a wider, more general field known as the
psychology of language, which includes the relationship of language to thought, and with an even wider one, the
psychology of communication. Psycholinguistics, as the study of language and the mind, is usually distinguished from
neurolinguistics, the study of language and the brain.
Many people date psycholinguistics proper from the mid-1960s, when an upsurge of interest followed on from the work of Noam
CHOMSKY, who argued that language was likely to be genetically programmed. Chomsky's ideas triggered an avalanche of work by both linguists and psychologists on
CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, and also an interest in finding out whether his theory of transformational-generative grammar had ‘psychological reality’, in the sense of reflecting the way people store or process language. Much of this early work turned out to be somewhat naïve and had disappointing results. Because Chomsky repeatedly revised his theories, a number of psychologists decided that linguistic theory was too changeable to provide a secure basis for their work. The field has therefore become somewhat splintered, even though it continues to expand. Considerable progress has been made in major areas like
CHILD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, speech comprehension, and speech production.
Child language acquisition
Children all over the world show similarities in the way they acquire language, whose development appears to be maturationally controlled (pre-programmed to emerge at a particular point in development, providing that the environment is normal and the child unimpaired). Moreover, at each stage, child language is not just a substandard form of adult language, but an independent system with rules of its own. The nature of the genetic input is still under discussion, as is the question of how children abandon immature rules, such as
What kitty can eat? for
What can kitty eat?, since they are apparently impervious to direct corrections. See
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION DEVICE.
Speech comprehension
Understanding speech is now known to be an active rather than a passive process, in which hearers reconstruct the intended message, based on outline clues and their own expectations. This can be demonstrated by presenting them with a confusing sentence such as
Anyone who shoots ducks out of the line of fire (Any person who uses a gun gets down quickly out of the line of fire). This is a so-called
garden path sentence, in which hearers are ‘led up the garden path’ (misled) as they try to impose their expectations of a subject–verb–object pattern on a sentence which requires a different interpretation. Further evidence of the active nature of comprehension comes from experiments with homonyms, such as
It's a rose/They all rose, when all meanings of a linguistic form turn out to be briefly considered before the unwanted ones are suppressed.
Speech production
Producing speech is a complex procedure, in which future stretches of speech are prepared while others are being uttered, as shown by slips of the tongue such as
The curse has walked for you (The course has worked for you). At the same time, more than one candidate is possibly being considered for each word slot: in an error such as
I looked in the calendar (catalogue), the speaker has possibly activated several three-syllable words beginning with
ca-, narrowed it down to those involving lists, then accidentally suppressed the wrong one. See
MALAPROPISM,
SLIP OF THE TONGUE. An important issue is to discover not only how the mind activates a required word or construction, but also how it suppresses the numerous alternatives which are subconsciously considered.
