Introduction to Psycholinguistics

• Psycholinguistics is a subfield of cognitive science devoted to the study of language. ¹¹

• It focuses on language comprehension rather than production, and covers topics such as language development, language production (speech), and reading. ⁴

Language Features and Processing

• Language processing involves low-level perceptual processing, word recognition, parsing, semantic interpretation, mental models, and pragmatic interpretation. ⁴

• The word superiority effect shows that context is the best guide for identifying letters. ¹²

Chomsky's Theory of Universal Grammar

• Chomsky's theory of universal grammar challenges the behaviorist view that language is mostly learned or modeled. ¹²

• Universal grammar proposes an innate potential for language learning, with specific grammar rules constraining possible sentences in any particular language. ⁵

• The distinction between deep and surface structure shows how meaning and grammar are independent. ⁶

Language Comprehension

• Language comprehension involves moment-by-moment decoding, as evidenced by speech shadowing studies and "garden path" sentences. ¹³

• Word recognition uses the mental lexicon, which contains information about spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and semantics. ⁷

• Parsing, or assigning sentence elements to grammatical classes, can be difficult without clear clause markers. ¹⁴

• Inference is essential for comprehending longer texts. ¹

Behaviorist Critique and Problems with English

• Skinner's behaviorist theory of language development has been criticized. ⁸

• The English language has inconsistent grapheme-phoneme conversion rules, as illustrated by the various pronunciations of "ough." ¹⁵

Memory and Linguistic Relativity

• Text comprehension requires context or an interpretative frame to make sense. ¹⁶

• The linguistic relativity hypothesis suggests that language structures thought, as seen in differences between languages like Hopi and Eskimo. ²

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