Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, mainly due to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned).
Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that consists of researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, including psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, speech and language pathology, and discourse analysis.
Psycholinguists study how people acquire and use language, according to the following main ways: A researcher interested in language comprehension may study word recognition during reading, to examine the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text.
Linguistics-related areas include: In seeking to understand the properties of language acquisition, psycholinguistics has roots in debates regarding innate versus acquired behaviors (both in biology and psychology).
In 1936 Jacob Kantor, a prominent psychologist at the time, used the term "psycholinguistic" as a description within his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar.
[8] Though there is still much debate, there are two primary theories on childhood language acquisition: The innatist perspective began in 1959 with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior (1957).
Chomsky posited that humans possess a special, innate ability for language, and that complex syntactic features, such as recursion, are "hard-wired" in the brain.
[10] The view that language must be learned was especially popular before 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap.
Likewise, the behaviorist school of psychology puts forth the point of view that language is a behavior shaped by conditioned response; hence it is learned.
Under this theory, as the reader is reading a sentence, he or she creates the simplest structure possible, to minimize effort and cognitive load.
In this example, readers typically recognize their mistake by the time they reach "by the lawyer" and must go back and reevaluate the sentence.
One of the most effective ways to explain the way people represent meanings using rule-governed languages is by observing and analyzing instances of speech errors, which include speech disfluencies like false starts, repetition, reformulation and constant pauses in between words or sentences, as well as slips of the tongue, like-blendings, substitutions, exchanges (e.g. Spoonerism), and various pronunciation errors.
Reaction times to respond to the stimuli (usually on the order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the most often employed measures of performance in behavioral tasks.
[21] As an example of how behavioral methods can be used in psycholinguistics research, Fischler (1977) investigated word encoding, using a lexical-decision task.
The analysis of systematic errors in speech, as well as the writing and typing of language, can provide evidence of the process that has generated it.
For example, severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) was at one time a treatment for some forms of epilepsy.
Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission tomography (PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG); and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Such programs are useful because they require theorists to be explicit in their hypotheses and because they can be used to generate accurate predictions for theoretical models that are so complex that discursive analysis is unreliable.
For example, the cohort model seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input.
[21][33] Using new non-invasive imaging techniques, recent research seeks to shed light on the areas of the brain involved in language processing.
Studies in aphasiology can offer both advances in therapy for individuals suffering from aphasia and further insight into how the brain processes language.