Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics

Eva M. Fernández, Helen Smith Cairns

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781444392784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Introducing the fundamental issues in psycholinguistics, this book explores the amazing story of the unconscious processes that take place when humans use language. It is an ideal text for undergraduates taking a first course in the study of language.

• Topics covered include the biological foundations of language; acquisition of first and second languages in children and adults; the mental lexicon; and speech production, perception, and processing
• Structured as an engaging narrative that takes the reader from an idea in the mind of a speaker to its comprehension in the mind of the hearer
• Reflects the latest empirical developments in psycholinguistics, and is illustrated throughout with examples from bilingual as well as monolingual language processing, second language acquisition, and sign languages
• Student-friendly features include chapter-by-chapter study questions and discussion summaries; the appendix offers an excellent overview of experimental designs in psycholinguistics, and prepares students for their own research
• Written by an internationally-regarded author team, drawing on forty years of experience in teaching psycholinguistics

1 Beginning Concepts

The Creativity of Human Language

Language as Distinct from Speech, Thought, and Communication

Some Characteristics of the Linguistic System

The Distinction between Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar

The Universality of Human Language

Implications for the Acquisition of Language

How Language Pairs Sound and Meaning

Linguistic Competence and Linguistic Performance

The Speech Signal and Linguistic Perception

Origins of Contemporary Psycholinguistics

How This Book Is Organized

New Concepts

Study Questions

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study in which the goals are to understand how people acquire language, how people use language to speak and understand one another, and how language is represented and processed in the brain. Psycholinguistics is primarily a sub-discipline of psychology and linguistics, but it is also related to developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, neurolinguistics, and speech science. The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to some of the central ideas, problems, and discoveries in contemporary psycholinguistics. In this chapter, we explore key concepts about language that serve to distinguish it from related aspects of human behavior and cognition, and we identify the basic characteristics of language as a system. We also provide a brief account of how psycholinguistics emerged as a field of inquiry.

The Creativity of Human Language

A good place to begin is by thinking about some of the unique features of human language. Language is a system that allows people immense creativity. This is not the same creativity of people who write essays, fiction, or poetry. Instead, this is the linguistic creativity that is commonplace to every person who knows a language. The creativity of human language is different from the communication system of any other animal in a number of respects. For one, speakers of a language can create and understand novel sentences for an entire lifetime. Consider the fact that almost every sentence that a person hears every day is a brand new event not previously experienced, but which can be understood with little difficulty. Similarly, when speaking, people constantly produce novel sentences with no conscious effort. This is true for every person who speaks or has ever spoken a language. We can extend this observation to every person who uses a signed language to produce and comprehend novel sentences.

This remarkable ability to deal with novelty in language is possible because every language consists of a set of principles by which arbitrary elements (the sounds of speech, the gestures of sign language) are combined into words, which in turn are combined into sentences. Everyone who knows a language knows a relatively small number of principles, a small number of sounds put together to create words, and a large but finite vocabulary. This finite knowledge provides the person who knows a language with infinite creativity. The set of possible sentences for a given language is infinite. Everyone who has ever lived and known a particular language has produced and heard a miniscule subset of that infinite set. Knowledge of language confers upon every person the creativity to produce an infinite number of novel sentences. When that knowledge is shared with others in a given language community, speakers and hearers are able to produce and understand an indefinitely large number of novel sentences.

A second important kind of creativity humans possess is that we can use language to communicate anything we can think of. No other animal communication system affords its users such an unlimited range of topics. Many mammals have complex sets of calls and cries, but they can communicate only certain kinds of information, such as whether danger is coming from the ground or the air, who is ready to mate, where food is located, and so forth. The philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “No matter how eloquently a dog may bark, he cannot tell you his parents were poor but honest” (Gleason and Ratner 1993: 9). Language is so flexible that it not only allows people to say anything they can think of; it also allows people to use language for a vast array of purposes. Language is used to communicate, to interact socially, to entertain, and to inform. All cultural institutions – schools, communities, governments – depend upon language to function. Written and audio-recorded language allows people to communicate and convey information – as well as interact and entertain – across vast spans of space and time. It is probably the case that human dominance of the planet has been possible because of the power of human language as a medium for transmitting knowledge (Dennett 2009).

Language as Distinct from Speech, Thought, and Communication

Language is the primary communication system for the human species. In ordinary circumstances it is used to convey thoughts through speech. It is a special system, however, that functions independently of speech, thought, and communication. Because one of the main themes of this book is to identify the unique aspects of the human linguistic system, it might be helpful to distinguish between language and the other systems with which it usually interacts: speech, thought, and communication.

Before we discuss those other systems, let us emphasize that here and throughout this book our discussion of human language includes the signed languages of the deaf, unless explicitly noted. Sign languages are just as structured as any spoken language and are just as capable of conveying an unlimited range of topics (as discussed in the previous section). Sign languages also operate under principles distinct from thought and communication. What differs between signed and spoken languages is the transmission mode: gestural for the former and articulatory-phonetic (speech) for the latter.

Speech ought not to be confused with language, though speech is indeed the most frequent mode for transmitting linguistic information. Other modes for transmission include the gestures used in sign language and the graphic representations used in writing. Later in this chapter (and later in the book), we will address the differences between the signal (speech, signs, written symbols) and the abstract information carried by that signal, and we will demonstrate that producing or perceiving a speech signal is possible and efficient because of knowledge of language. For now, consider the “linguistic” abilities of parrots and computers. Both can produce speech that might sound very human-like (promising new technologies are also able to create gestural sequences, using computer-animated figures, in sign language). But animal or computer-generated speech (or signing) differs from true human language production in one crucial respect: it is not based on knowledge of language as a finite system that yields an infinite set of possible sentences. Notice in particular that parrot and computer speech will fail to be creative in the senses described above.

Another mode for transmitting linguistic information is writing, but writing is markedly different from both speaking and signing. Writing systems are invented by people who already use language, so the central difference is that writing is a cultural artifact, while speaking and signing are biological; we will examine this point in more detail in Chapter 3. Writing is always dependent on spoken language, though the connection differs from language to language. In some languages, like English, the written symbols – also called graphemes – are linked to the language’s sound system (consonants, vowels); in other languages, like Chinese, the symbols represent words. Writing has had a very different historical trajectory than speech: humans have been using spoken language to communicate for tens of thousands of years, while writing is a relatively new development, with the earliest examples dating back to only about 5,000 years ago. Children learn to speak spontaneously and without explicit instruction, yet require hours and hours of teaching and practice when they are learning to read and write. While all human communities have some form of spoken (or gestural) language, in the majority of the world’s languages a writing system has not been invented. It is important to remember that languages without a writing system are no less complex than their counterparts with standardized writing systems. The complexity and sophistication of all human languages is independent of whether speakers have developed a way to write the languages down.

It is tempting to confuse thought and language, because we verbalize our thoughts using language. The distinction between language and thought (or general intelligence) becomes clear when one considers the many kinds of individuals who can think but cannot communicate through language. Among these kinds of individuals are infants and people who suffer from neurological pathologies that have impaired their language ability. Moreover, many animals can think but cannot communicate using language. In the language pathologies, we observe pronounced mismatches between level of intellectual development and linguistic ability. Specific language impairment (SLI) is not a rare disorder in children without any neurological or motor pathology. In children with SLI, language development lags far behind that of their peers. While there are numerous cognitive deficits associated with children with SLI, their non-verbal intelligence is within normal range and their cognitive deficits are not sufficient to account for their language disorder (Leonard 1998). The flip side of SLI is Williams Syndrome, a genetically based disorder causing severe retardation. Children with Williams Syndrome are deficient in many other aspects of cognition. While some aspects of their language are impaired (Jacobson and Cairns 2009), these children have surprisingly good language skills, in both vocabulary and in the ability to form grammatical sentences (Lenhoff et al. 1997). Pathologies such as SLI and Williams Syndrome, that demonstrate a dissociation of language and general intelligence, are of interest because they demonstrate the independence of language and thought.

The thoughts that people have are distinct from the language (or languages) in which they encode them. Bilinguals can use either of their languages to transmit the thoughts they want to convey. It may be that one of the languages of a given bilingual will have a richer vocabulary for conveying certain thoughts, as in the person who prefers to speak about art in English and about soccer in Portuguese. Perhaps it is more convenient to convey information in one of the two languages; for example, memorizing word lists in one language will facilitate recall in that same language (Cabeza and Lennartson 2005). But neither of these phenomena alters the basic point: when required to, bilinguals are able to convey any thought in either of their languages, or in both. This observation can be extended to all human languages, of which there are close to 7,000 (Ladefoged, Ladefoged, and Everett 1997; Gordon 2005): any thought can be conveyed in any human language. A corollary of this is that any sentence in any human language can be translated into any other, even by ordinary bilinguals, as opposed to experienced translators or trained interpreters. It may take more than one sentence to do the job, and the translation may not be as elegant as the original, but all languages possess an ability to formulate equivalent meanings with precision. Thus, one can think of general intelligence as the system responsible for generating the “language of thought” (Fodor 1975), and this in turn is translated into speech by our linguistic system, which we describe in the following section and, in more detail, in Chapter 2.

Language is the primary communication system for human beings, but it is not the only way to communicate, so language can be distinguished from communication in general. Many forms of communication are not linguistic; these include non-verbal, mathematical, and aesthetic communication through music or the visual arts. Frequently, language is not used to communicate or transfer information; language can be used aesthetically (consider poetry or song lyrics) or as a means to negotiate social interactions (consider how Yo, whassup! might be the preferred greeting in some contexts but quite inappropriate in others). One of the wonde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Prologue
• 1 Beginning Concepts
• 2 The Nature of Linguistic Competence
• 3 The Biological Basis of Language
• 4 The Acquisition of Language
• 5 The Speaker: Producing Speech
• 6 The Hearer: Speech Perception and Lexical Access
• 7 The Hearer: Structural Processing
• 8 Remembering Sentences, Processing Discourse, and Having Conversations
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Experimental Designs in Psycholinguistics
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index