Psycholinguistics Research Paper Example

Applied Linguistics. Psycholinguistics.
Every person is born being endowed with an ability to complete mastery of the language. However, this possibility has yet to be realized. Psycholinguistics studies the development of a child’s speech in order to understand how it works. Psycholinguistics also examines the reasons for the development of speech and its operation that deviate from the norm. Psycholinguistics, as a main branch of the Applied Linguistics, is aimed in order to answer these questions. In this essay, I would like to make a general view of this branch of the Applied Linguistics, because it’s study is vibrant and causes the scientific interest.

The Notion of Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is a branch of the Applied Linguistics that studies primarily a language as a phenomenon of the mind. From the viewpoint of psycholinguistics, language exists to the extent that is an inner world of speaker and listener, the writer and the reader. Therefore, psycholinguistics is not engaged in the study of the “dead” languages ​​- such as Old Church Slavonic or Greek, where we have access only to the text, but not the mental worlds of their creators.
Psycholinguistics should not be considered as a part of linguistics or partly of psychology. This is a complex science that refers to the linguistic disciplines, such as studying the language, and to the psychological disciplines, as it examines a specific aspect - a mental phenomenon. In addition, the reason that the language is a sign system that serves society, the psycholinguistics includes a range of disciplines that study social communication, including registration and transfer of knowledge. On the basis of in-depth analysis of this issue the scholars identified several successive stages in the development of psycholinguistics as a science, which they defined as the concept of psycholinguistic “generation”. Representatives of the first generation of psycholinguistics are Charles Osgood, John. Carroll, T. Sebeok, F. Lounsbury and others. The most outstanding representatives of the second generation are J. Miller and N. Chomsky. The third generation of psycholinguistics, or as a prominent American psychologist and psycholinguist J. Wertsch had called it a “new psycholinguistics”, was formed in the mid-70s of the 20th century. It is linked to the United States with the names of J. Bruner and J. Wertsch; to France with J. Mehler, N. Georges, D. Dubois; to Norway with the name of a talented psycholinguist R. Rommetveit. Over the last decade, a lot of attention has been given to the problem of creating an educational, scientific and popular literature on psycholinguistics in higher education. However, unfortunately, the problem of active implementation of psycholinguistic knowledge in the theory and methodology of speech therapy remedial work is far from being resolved. In the past decade, speech therapy and remedial pedagogy have developed a series of methodical systems of correctional and speech therapy work with children of pre-school and primary school age, based on the data of psycholinguistics.
The basis of these methodological systems and training programs put psycholinguistic approach to the analysis of the features of the formation of speech violations under various forms of speech pathology; some psycholinguistic experimental techniques are used in them (in modified form), and the system of work is constructed with the psycholinguistic laws of formation of speech in ontogenesis.

Psycholinguistic as an independent science

In psycholinguistics there is a number of scientists who contributed to this science in the 19th century. Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767 -1835) developed the idea of ​​speech activity; language in his works was seen as a mean of relationship between a man and society. “His disciples interpreted the language and as a process and as a given”, as part of the mental life of man, and as a social phenomenon, language is a sign and reflection. They introduced the concept of linguistic consciousness.
C. Steinthal was considered as the founder of the most famous representative of psychologism in linguistics. Following Humboldt, Steinthal saw in the language the term “spirit of the people”, that is a folk psychology, thereby emphasizing the social nature of language.
Ferdinand de Saussure wrote that speech was an individual act that implemented the language ability through language as a social system. That means that the concepts of “language” (grammatical system and vocabulary), “speech” (implementation of means of language in communication and thinking, consisting of individual acts of speaking and listening) and “speech activity” (a system of expressive possibilities of the people) are different. The scientist introduced criteria of differentiation of “language”, such as codes, regulations, absorbed in the finished form, it is the potency of speech, durable and resistant, abstraction, system purely linguistic relations and “speech”, for example such as individual, depends on the will and understanding of a person, it is unstable and momentary.

American School of psycholinguistics

It is considered that psycholinguistics originated about 40 years ago in the United States. Indeed, the very term “psycholinguistics” was proposed by American psychologists in the late 1950s in order to give formal status to scientific direction established in the USA. Yet, psycholinguistics has not become a science with clearly defined boundaries so far, so it is hardly possible to indicate unequivocally which aspects of language and speech are studied and by what methods and for what purpose they are used. Proof of this is the content of any textbook on psycholinguistics. Unlike a textbook on linguistics, where there should be said necessarily about phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, etc., or a textbook on psychology, where the problems of perception, memory and emotion will certainly be highlighted, the content of a textbook on psycholinguistics is determined largely in what kind of scientific and cultural traditions this textbook was written.
The research practice of US scientists affected the formation of the concept “descriptivism” in psycholinguistics, it crucially influenced on the study of languages ​​and cultures of American Indians. These languages ​​can only be described simultaneously, the researchers did not have any data about their history; great difficulties caused division of the text into words, grammatical and lexical meanings were obscure, the researcher could not freely master to learn the language and had to constantly ask questions of its carrier-informant because of the large difference in cultures. Moreover, the fact that the scholars had managed to learn about these languages, did not fit well with the usual ideas about how the world was displayed in the language, the Eurocentric semantic models seemed lost their universal status with the results that seemed to be natural and therefore the only possible.
In addition, “behaviorism (J. Watson and E. Thorndike) is one of the leading trends in American psychology, which became widespread in other countries” - the doctrine, which as a matter of psychological studies that considered only human behavior and its dependence on the external and internal financial incentives (necessity and possibility of scientific study of mental phenomena actually denied).
The Generative grammar by N. Chomsky in its various versions is usually considered as the most influential in the US linguistic theory for most of American and English-speaking psycholinguists. Accordingly, psycholinguistics in the American tradition is focused on trying to verify the extent to which psychological hypotheses, which are based on the ideas of Chomsky, are consistent with observed behavior. From this perspective, some authors study a child’s speech, while others study the role of language in social interactions, and others learn the relationship between the language and cognitive processes. Therefore, the preferred area of ​​interest is the formation of a child’s speech and the role of language in the development of intelligence and cognitive processes.
It seems productive to consider psycholinguistics not as a science with its own subject and methods, but as a special angle, which studies language, speech, communication and cognitive processes. “This view gave rise to a lot of research programs, heterogeneous targets theoretical assumptions and methods”. The following groups of factors items are common to these programs. Firstly, there is a dissatisfaction with purely cybernetic, functional models of speech activity. Functional models allow us to study it with the help of the “Black box”; the researcher makes conclusions only by comparing the data on the “input” and “output” data, thus refusing to raise the question of what is “real”.
 Secondly, there is a change of value orientations generated by this dissatisfaction. In accordance with the new value orientations, the research interest is primarily aimed at understanding the real (although not directly observable) processes occurring in the mind of the speaker and the listener. Thirdly, a special attention is paid to research methods, including the unconditional preference experiment, as well as carefully managed by observation of the processes of generation and education of speech in real time.
In its applied aspect, psycholinguistics may be associated with all application areas of psychology: “a pedagogical and medical psychology, abnormal psychology, neuropsychology, psychiatry and correctional pedagogy, engineering, aerospace and military psychology, psychology of labor, judicial and legal psychology, finally, political psychology and the psychology of mass communication, psychology, advertising and promotion”. In essence, these applications and emerging discipline tasks are currently a stimulus to the development of psycholinguistics as an independent scientific field.

Conclusion

Nevertheless, since the late 1970s, the problem field of psycholinguistics was influenced by the state of affairs both within linguistics, and in the sciences, which with time have become for linguistics - and thus for Psycholinguistics – adjacent studies. Essentially, this is a complex of sciences about knowledge on the nature and dynamics of cognitive processes. Natural language is the main form that reflects our knowledge of the world, but it is also the main instrument, by which a person acquires and generalizes his or her knowledge, captures and transmits them into the society.
Basically, every kind of knowledge (as opposed to skills) requires a linguistic processing. In this way, the interests of psycholinguistics intertwined with the objectives of cognitive psychology and developmental psychology. Language is an essential tool for the socialization of the individual. It is a full command of the language provided by the inclusion of an individual in a particular layer of socio-cultural space. The globalization of world cultural processes, mass migration and expansion of areas of regular interpenetration of different languages ​​and cultures (multiculturalism), the emergence of global computer networks - these factors are of special importance for research processes and mechanisms of mastering a foreign language. All these points have substantially broadened the understanding of the areas of knowledge, research interests intersect with psycholinguistics.

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