Psycholinguistics studies interrelationship of psychological and linguistic behavior. It is a branch of cognitive science. The goal of psycholinguistics is to explain how people learn, speak and understand language. It is a multi-disciplinary field that combines psychology and linguistics. It also has ties to neuroscience and to education.
It is the study of how the mind processes and produces language. It uses linguistic concepts to describe the mental processes connected with the acquisition and use of language.
It is customary to distinguish six subjects of research within psycholinguistics.
1. Acquisition: How does a child acquire the language skills (first language acquisition) and how are they extended to other language (second/foreign language acquisition)
2. Comprehension: How is the acoustic or visual signals linguistically interpreted by the hearer or reader?
3. Production: How is the information that somebody wants to convey transformed into acoustic waves, or written characters?
4. Disorders: What causes the occurrence of transient or more permanent disturbances of the speech and language processing systems?
5. Language and Thought: What role does human language play in thinking? And what differences do different languages make to how we think?
6. Neurocognition: How is the cognitive architecture of language and language processing implemented in the human brain, i.e. what is the cerebral-functional architecture of our language faculty?
Here, we shall discuss the acquisition of language.
Language Acquisition
By the study of language acquisition is meant the process whereby children achieve a fluent control of their native language. Few people in the 1950s asked about the processes by which language was acquired. It was assumed that children imitated the adults around them and their speech gradually became more accurate as they grow up. There seemed to be some mystery attached to this apparently straight-forward process. Psycholinguistics have therefore attempted general theories of language acquisition and language use. Some have argued that learning is entirely the product of experience and that our environment affects all of us in the same way. Others have suggested that everybody has an innate language learning mechanism which determines learning or acquisition of language identically for each of us. These two schools are known as ‘Empiricists’ (Behaviorists) and ‘Rationalists’ (Mentalists).
The Behaviorist School/Behaviorism
Behaviorist school simply claims that language learning is the formation of a set of habits. B. F. Skinner and his colleagues (a group of psychologists known as behaviorists) say that learning, or change of behavior on the part of the learner is brought about by a process known as Operant Conditioning. Conditioned behavior is behavior which is the result of repeated training. Operant means that it is voluntary behavior; it is the result of the learner’s own free-will, and is not forced by any outside person or thing. The learner demonstrates the new behavior first as a response to a system of rewards or punishments, and finally as an automatic response.
In a typical experiment, a rat is put in a box containing a bar. If it presses the bar, it is rewarded with a pellet of food. Nothing forces it to press the bar. The first time it probably does so accidentally. When the rat finds that the food arrives, it presses the bar again. Eventually it finds that if it is hungry it can obtain food by pressing the bar.
Then the task is made more difficult. The rat only gets rewarded if it presses the bar while a light is flashing. At first the rat is puzzled. Eventually it learns the trick. Then the task is made more difficult again. This time the rat only receives food if it presses the bar a certain number of times. After initial confusion it learns to do this also.
Operant Conditioning can be summarized thus:
Stimulus > Response > Reinforcement > Repetition
Skinner and the behaviorists distinguish between positive and negative reinforcement. Praise and rewards are positive reinforcement, and rebuke and punishments are negative reinforcement.
The behaviorists claim that we learn by imitation and association. For example, a young child hears the word ‘biscuit’ every time he is given one. He soon associates the word ‘biscuit’ with the actual thing. He then makes this sound himself, imitating what he has heard. His parents are pleased that he has learnt another word and so his response is reinforced.
The Mentalist School/Mentalism
Chomsky, a linguist and psychologist, criticized Skinner’s theory and argued that he misunderstood the nature of language. He said that Skinner took language merely ‘stringing words together’. Chomsky pointed out that language makes use of ‘structure-depended operation’. Through this he implies that language consists of double structure, Surface structure and Deep structure. In order to understand the utterance, that listener has to comprehend both the structure.
Another quality of language that Skinner overlooked is creativity in human language. In this regard Chomsky says: ‘The normal use of language is a creative activity. The creative aspect of normal language is one of the fundamental factors that distinguish human language from any known system of animal communication’.
Chomsky’s point is that humans have freedom to create novel, and new utterance that is never used before yet one can understand it. For example, the sentence “Mars told that Pluto told him that he saw a Moon in the pocket of Sun which was crying for a new pair of shoes for he wanted to go to the fun fair in girls high school at Jupiter”, is a novel and never-before-heard sentence but any fluent speaker of English would be able to understand it. Thus, the behavior of rat, which is simple and contains no creativity or novelty, is irrelevant to the human language. In this regard he pointed out further lacks that are as following:
1. The conditions in rat experiment are simple, well defined, and predictable but human language is complex phenomenon and it is next to impossible to predetermine what a human is going to say.
2. The rat was repeatedly rewarded whereas children utter without any reward and even when nobody is around.
3. If approval and disapproval (reinforcement) worked in the way Skinner suggests, children should grow up always telling truth but speaking ungrammatically, since mother always approves ‘true statements of a child’ even though ungrammatical.
On these sound bases Noam Chomsky rejected ‘the verbal behavior’ of Skinner and purposed his own theory that is known as ‘The Mentalist Theory’. In contrast with behaviorists, the mentalists suggest that learning is connected with cognition, innovation and innate ability. According to Noam Chomsky humans are born with an innate knowledge of language. He presented his theory about the possibility of an innate structure ‘Language Acquisition Device’.
Everybody learns a language because they possess an inborn capacity which permits them to acquire a language. This capacity is by definition universal.
Producing a sentence in a language may be compared to the process of getting results out of a computer. The computer is programmed and arranges items according to the instructions given to it. It is equipped to process information in a certain way. Look at the following sentences of English.
(1) I went home.
This arrangement is known as syntax, and some rule in our brain tells us that the correct order is as in (1) and not as in the following sentence.
(2) Went home I.
Obviously (1) is a sentence in English, and your mind, can only tell you that it is correct (or well-formed) if you are a native speaker of English or know English quite well. Given any utterance in your own mother tongue, you will be able to judge whether it is well-formed or not. Chomsky is very much interested in these inward rules and principles of our mind and feels that we can understand how the mind actually works if we can find out how it produces language. This means that Chomsky’s approach to language is mentalist, i.e. it is based upon understanding mental phenomena.
Both the schools have said significant things, yet neither is perfect. The mentalists’ emphasis on the rule-learning is over enthusiastic; and the behaviorists’ rejection of meaning is entirely unjust. Language acquisition seems to be a process both of analogy and application, both nature and nurture.
The difference between the empiricists approach and that of the rationalists can be summarized in the following manner:
(1) Language acquisition is a result of experience. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language acquisition is a result of social environment. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(2) Language acquisition is a stimulus-response process. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language is an innate, inborn process. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(3) Language is a conditioned behavior. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language is not a behavior like other behaviors. But a specific mental process. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(4) Children learn language by imitation and analogy. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Children learn language by application. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(5) Language learning is based on practice. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language learning is analytical, generative and creative. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(6) The role of imitation, repetition, reinforcement and motivation is very significant in language learning. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
The role of exposure to language is quite vital. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(7) Language acquisition is the result of nature. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language acquisition is the result of nurture. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
The difference between the empiricists approach and that of the rationalists can be summarized in the following manner:
(1) Language acquisition is a result of experience. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language acquisition is a result of social environment. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(2) Language acquisition is a stimulus-response process. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language is an innate, inborn process. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(3) Language is a conditioned behavior. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language is not a behavior like other behaviors. But a specific mental process. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(4) Children learn language by imitation and analogy. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Children learn language by application. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(5) Language learning is based on practice. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language learning is analytical, generative and creative. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(6) The role of imitation, repetition, reinforcement and motivation is very significant in language learning. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
The role of exposure to language is quite vital. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
(7) Language acquisition is the result of nature. (Empirical / Behavioral Approach)
Language acquisition is the result of nurture. (Rationalistic / Mentalist Approach)
