Psycholinguistics

Introduction

• History shows humans' urge to explore, name, and map.
• Astronomy is the oldest science, while psychology is the newest, due to the difficulty of objectively studying the human mind.
• Desire for physical evidence leads to mistaking the mind for the brain.
• Psycholinguistics studies the human mind through language and speech.
• Psycholinguistics is the study of language and speech as a window to understand the nature and structure of the human mind.
• This book is an introduction to the psychology of language.

Psycholinguistic Sub-Fields

• Four sub-fields:
  • Language and speech acquisition
  • Language and speech production
  • Language and speech comprehension
  • Language and speech loss (attrition/dissolution)
• These sub-fields can be viewed within a two-by-two matrix.

Figure 1.1: Psycholinguistic Framework

• Diachronic View:
  • Acquisition: Putting a new language together.
  • Dissolution: Language falling apart.
  • The natural process of disintegration in old age may recapitulate the period of integration during infancy.
• Synchronic View:
  • Production: Synthesis of language structures.
  • Comprehension: Analysis of language structures.
  • Production requires selecting ingredients and stirring them creatively.
  • Comprehension requires breaking down language into individual compounds.

Acquisition: when I was a child, I spoke as a child

• Children evoke sociolinguistic familiarity and wonder when speaking their native tongue.
• Developmental psycholinguistics examines how speech emerges and how children construct their first language.
• Researchers previously assumed children had no language until their first word.

\'… no language but a cry\'

• Crying is not only communicative but also a precursor to language and speech.
• Crying is a kind of language without speech in the first few months, communicating discomfort without normal speech sounds.
• This earliest form of utterance is also a precursor to speech, helping the child learn how to produce linguistic sounds.
• Initially, crying is an autonomic response to noxious stimuli, hard-wired as a primary reflex.
• Crying trains babies to time their breathing patterns, learning to play their lungs, crucial for successful speech communication throughout life.
• Crying initially is completely iconic.
• There is a direct and transparent link between the physical sound and its communicative intent.
• As a baby becomes hungrier, the louder, longer, and increased in pitch the crying.
• The degree of discomfort is directly proportional to the intensity of the acoustic signal.
• In the first month or two, crying becomes more differentiated and more symbolic.
• The cries are subtly, indirectly, and almost randomly associated with its needs, baby may not cry to express discomfort or pain, but rather to elicit attention.
• Even at this rudimentary stage of linguistic evolution, there is a significant transformation from using sound as an iconic or direct reflection of an internal state to using it as a symbolic, indirect manifestation of increasingly complex internal feelings.
• After several weeks of interaction with its caretaker, the child starts to coo, making soft gurgling sounds, seemingly to express satisfaction.
• Crying and cooing affect, and are affected by, caretaker behavior.
• It is difficult to surmise whether the coos and gurgles of a just-fed baby reinforce the mother's contentment in caring it, or whether the mother's sounds of comfort when nurturing her baby reinforce the child's babbling.
• Nobuo Masataka showed that there was a clear similarity between the sounds made by mother and child which had emerged by the time the infants were only five months old.
• Obviously then, even these earliest attempts at communication underscore the importance of social interaction in the acquisition of human language.
• At about two months of age, the cooing stage emerges, but is succeeded when the child is about six months old, by a babbling stage.
• Babbling refers to the natural tendency of children of this age to burst out in strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters, almost as a kind of vocalic play.
  • Marginal babbling: an early stage similar to cooing where infants produce a few, and somewhat random, consonants.
  • Canonical babbling: emerges at around eight months, when the child's vocalizations narrow down to syllables that begin to approximate the syllables of the caretaker's language.
• Segmental Phonemes: Even when infants begin to babble consonants at the canonical stage, they do not necessarily produce only the consonants of their mother tongue.
• A six-month-old infant, raised by English speakers, may very well babble a sound that is not in her mother tongue - say the unaspirated /p/ sound in Spanish pico ('beak'), which sounds more similar to the English /b/ in 'by' than the aspirated English /p/ in 'pie.'
• The term suprasegmental refers to the musical pitch, rhythm, and stress which accompany the syllables we produce and which play such an important role in marking grammar, meaning, and intention.
• Eight-month-old babies reared in English-speaking families begin to babble with English-sounding melody; those of a similar age who are brought up in Chinese-speaking homes begin to babble with the tones and melodies of Chinese.
• Babbling is the first psycholinguistic stage where we have strong evidence that infants are influenced by all those many months of exposure to their mother tongue.
• As the babbling stage begins, a half a year into life, the lack of suprasegmental accuracy in the babbling of a deaf baby is often the first overt signal of the child's disability.

First Words

• Idiomorphs: Is when children invent words when they first catch on to the magical notion that certain sounds have a unique reference.
• First words tend to refer to prominent, everyday objects that can be manipulated by the child.
• If the child cannot manipulate the object during this early period of physical development, it does not appear to be worth naming.
• Parents spend a lot of time putting diapers on and taking them off their one-year-olds, but because babies themselves (quite fortunately!) don't handle them, 'diapers' or 'nappies' do not become part of a child's early linguistic repertoire.
• First cry, coo, or babble is often ignored, but the first word is recorded by proud parents.
• The first few words demonstrate to the mother and father that their child has successfully made the transition from an iconic creature to a symbolic human being.
• Once the first few words are acquired, there is an exponential growth in vocabulary development, which only begins to taper at about the age of six, when, by some estimates, the average child has a recognition vocabulary of about 14,000 words.
• It represents a step into symbolic communication, and it signifies the start of the rapid vocabulary growth with which thoughts, feelings, and perceptions, as well as other areas of linguistic development, are framed.

The Birth of Grammar

• Holophrastic Stage: Is the use of single words as skeletal sentences, intonational, gestural, and contextual clues provide insight.
• Holophrastic speech transports the child from cries, words, and names to phrases, clauses, and sentences.
• The acquisition of grammar has been studied most intensively due to the influence of Transformational-Generative (TG) grammar.
• Unlike tape recordings of cooing and babbling gleaning information on how children create sentences is manageable and discrete.
• Children progress through different stages of grammatical development, measured by the average number of words per utterance.
• After the holophrastic stage, children create sentences, first with two words, then more.
• In early two-word stage, children demonstrate grammatical precocity.
• Certain words (pivots) tend to be used initially or finally, other words fill in slots.
• Word order follows normal adult word order, showing sensitivity to the mother tongue.
• Rarely do youngsters repeat the same word twice; children are parsimonious with language.

Differences between a human child and a chimpanzee (Nim Chimsky):
Comparison is skewed in Nim's favor-two-word utterances by the child are contrasted with four-word phrases by the chimp—it is clear that in terms of conveying meaning, the child's language is far more developed.

Evidence for Innateness

• Innate part of early linguistic learning, Chomsky suggests: humans have genetic predisposition to learn language.
• Learning your mother tongue is a very different enterprise from learning to swim or learning to play the piano.
• Humans have a genetically determined ability to ‘learn' to stand upright or to walk. Also an LAD, a ‘Language Acquisition Device' (now replaced with the more linguistically accurate UG or ‘Universal Grammar’).
• Chimps do not use language the same way as children, can not