ENG511 Midterm Short Notes by MAS All Rounder

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Lesson-01

Topic001: Introduction to Psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics is the study of how individuals comprehend, produce, and acquire language. The study of psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science. Cognitive science reflects the insights of psychology, linguistics, and, to a lesser extent, fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Psycholinguistics stresses the knowledge of language and the cognitive processes involved in ordinary language use. Psycholinguists are also interested in the social rules involved in language use and the brain mechanisms associated with language. Contemporary interest in psycholinguistics began in the 1950s, although important precursors existed earlier in the 20th century.

Topic-002: The Nature of Language: Psycholinguistics Language in general is important not only because it distinguishes human beings from all other animals on the earth but because, directly or indirectly, it makes possible the elaborate organization of a civilized society and language in general is interesting because although everyone knows and uses a specific language, few people understand what they know. Becoming self-consciously aware of what is known unself-consciously carries a special brand of excitement.

Topic-003: The Scope of Psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics is part of the emerging field of study called cognitive science. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary venture that draws upon the insights of psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers to study the mind and mental processes. Some of the topics that have been studied by cognitive scientists include problem solving, memory, imagery, and language. Anyone who is seriously interested in any of these topics must be prepared to cross disciplinary lines, for the topics do not belong to any one field of study but rather are treated in distinctive and yet complementary ways by various disciplines. As the name implies, psycholinguistics is principally an integration of the fields of psychology and linguistics. Linguistics is the branch of science that studies the origin, structure, and use of language. Like most interdisciplinary fields; however, psycholinguistics has a rich heritage that includes contributions from diverse intellectual traditions.

Topic-004: Language Processes and Linguistic Knowledge At its heart, psycholinguistic work consists of two questions. One is, what knowledge of language is needed for us to use language? In a sense, we must know a language to use it, but we are not always fully aware of this knowledge. A distinction may be drawn between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge of how to perform various acts, whereas explicit knowledge refers to the knowledge of the processes or mechanisms used in these acts. We sometimes know how to do something without knowing how we do it. For instance, a baseball pitcher might know how to throw a baseball 90 miles an hour but might have little or no explicit knowledge of the muscle groups that are involved in this act. Similarly, we may distinguish between knowing how to speak and knowing what processes are involved in producing speech. Generally speaking, much of our linguistic knowledge is tacit rather than explicit.

Four broad areas of language knowledge may be distinguished. Semantics deals with the meanings of sentences and words. Syntax involves the grammatical arrangement of words within the sentence. Phonology concerns the system of sounds in a language. Pragmatics entails the social rules involved in language use. It is not ordinarily productive to ask people explicitly what they know about these aspects of language.

Topic-005: The Historical Context The history of psycholinguistics can be divided into two periods of interdisciplinary activity separated by several decades of behaviorism. The first period was dominated by Wundt who presented a cognitive view of language. The behaviorist position later held that verbal behavior can be explained in terms of environmental contingencies of reinforcement and punishment. This view was criticized by Chomsky, leading to a second wave of psycholinguistic activity. This period was characterized by an effort to incorporate linguistic theory in psychological research as well as by the view that innate linguistic mechanisms are necessary to explain child language acquisition. Psycholinguistics is presently a more diverse field of study that draws insights and methodologies not only from psychology and linguistics but also from adjacent fields of study.

Topic-006: Early Psycholinguistics When we turn around the time, we find Wilhelm Wundt as a major figure in early scientific psychology. He wrote about different aspects of language with a focus on grammar, phonology, language comprehension, first language acquisition, sign language, reading as well as other topics related to contemporary concern. Out of many other contributions towards language psychology, his major contribution is to develop theory of language production.

In his theory of language production, he has regarded sentence as the core unit of language instead of a word. He considered speech production as the transformation of a complete thought process into sequentially organized speech segments. After his theory, the interest of researchers continued, to investigate the speech production from both perspectives i.e. word by word process and whole sentence process. The second period of interdisciplinary psycholinguistics really took hold in the late 1950s, beginning with the emergence of the linguist Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has also played a powerful role in how psychologists perceived language because he argued that the behaviorists’ accounts of language were inadequate. Major concerns presented in that period consist of associative chain theory, discontinuous constituents, and poverty of stimulus.

Lesson-02

Topic-007: The Information-Processing System The general strategies by which the human mind encodes, stores, and retrieves information can be described independently of language. Working memory provides a temporary repository of information that is relevant for ongoing cognitive tasks. It is divided into three components: the central executive, the phonological loop, and the visuo spatial sketchpad.

Long-term memory is divided into semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory holds general knowledge, whereas episodic memory stores our experience from our personal perspective. Studies of individuals with various forms of brain damage suggest that these memory systems are controlled by distinct regions in the brain. These concepts provide a framework for understanding how language processing occurs.

Topic-008: Working Memory and Long Term Memory Working memory: Working memory is only able to hold about seven units of information. This could simply be seven words, but because many sentences are longer than this, we need some way to deal immediately with more than seven words. One way we do this is to chunk the words into grammatical constituents such as noun and verb phrases, thereby reducing the