Exam 1 Introduction: Themes and History of Psycholinguistics

the field that studies the STRUCTURES and USE of language

• linguistics

The field of psychology that studies mental processes and representations

• cognitive psychology

the field that studies the manner in which the human mind processes language

• Psycholinguistics

the interdisciplinary field that studies minds and mental processes?

• cognitive sciences

What are semantics?

• meanings of sentences

what is a syntax?

• gramatical arrangements of words within sentences

what is phonology

• the systems of sounds in language

what are pragmatics?

• social rules involving language use

Analytic introspection: who developed it as a technique, and what was it?

• Wilhelm Wundt developed Analytic introspection

  • It was when participants were carefully trained to describe mental experiences while performing some task

How did behaviorists like Watson react to Analytic introspection?

• NOT HAPPY and said ….

  1. introspection is not a valid scientific method (variable from person to person; impossible to disprove)

  2. Consciousness removed from scientific endeavors to study psychology and along with it, all mental processes (by being aware of consciousness you're changing it)

  3. The only valid way to study psychology is by observing human behavior (strongly empirical)

How did behaviorists like BF Skinner react to Analytic introspection?

• Verbal Behavior (book; 'beginning to end to behaviorism)

• language learned through imitation and reinforcement

• No need to appeal to messy notion of “mind”

What is an Empiricist? what famous cognitive psychologists were one?

• believe more of a blank state: we are born an empty canvas and have to learn things from experience

  • Watson: Empiricist

  • Skinner: Empiricist

  • Also: Locke, Mill and Hume

What is a Natavist? what famous cognitive psychologists were one?

• believe that we are born with particular information and we can say knowledge is hard wired into the brain

  • Chomsky: Natavism

  • Also: Kant and Descartes

What are the key developments (writings/authors) that led to the decline of behaviorism ?

• BF skinner’s book called Verbal behavior

  • Children learn language through environment

  • Language is learned through reinforcement

• Chomsky’s critique on BF skinner

  • Argued that learning of language cannot just be about the environment

  • Kids have an innate ability to understand language as well

  • One example of this is how children overgeneralize grammatical rules like “he hitted me”

What is the poverty of the stimulus argument

• you cant explain how kids learn so much grammer as they do just though the environment

  • Children are able to learn grammar even though their exposure is limited they are able to extract out the grammar they need to communicate

what technique do linguistics use for data collection?

• be able to identify that technique with linguistics, psychology, rationalism, and/or empiricism.

• data collection is based on intuition and is deeply rationalist based

  • Because we are endowed with rationality then we can trust our own intuitions as to how the natural world functions

  • Many linguists will come up with these sentences and after judging if it does or doesn't work can make a theory about it “verb sleep can't take a recipient after it where as give can”

    • Intuition: what you feel is right—gut feeling

    • Rationalist: we can trust our own judgement on how we make decision

what technique do psychologists use for data collection?

be able to identify that technique with linguistics, psychology, rationalism, and/or empiricism.

• data collection is empirical and comes from behavioral and physiological methodology (based in empirical data)

  • Behavioral → Inferring mental processes from carefully observed behaviors/physiological events taking place in the brain

    • We can infer mental processes through behaviors thought reaction times

  • Physiological → Relationships between stimuli and brain responses, and brain responses with behavior

    • Electrical activations in brain/ FMRi

What is the derivational theory of complexity

1. if transformational grammar theory explains the way human minds process language, then we can predict how hard it will be for people to understand sentences

   • In simple terms—it’s the idea that the longer, with more grammatical rules, the harder it is to understand bc it would need more cognitive steps to understand

     • Example: The dog chased the cat

     • The cat, which was chased by the dog, ran away.

2. This idea has issue, because deletions of preposition takes less time to process

   • The rat was killed by the cat

   • The rat was killed

     • The second sentence takes less time to progress, despite no preposition (meaning participants should tak elonger to understand/read it)

how is DTC historically related to the relationship between linguists vs psycholinguistics?

• as people started testing DTC Psycholinguistics separated from linguists due to the failure of DTC and their growing complex theories (70s)….

  • Psycholinguists found more and more problem examples for DTC and it became a problem because psycholinguists realized if we have a theory on how language is processed it can not be solely based on the findings of Chomsky is giving