Introduction to Linguistic; Definition of Psycholinguistics

Definition of Psycholinguistics

Lim Kiat Boey, in his book “Introduction to Linguistic for the Language Teacher” :

As its name suggests, psycholinguistic is a field of study that combiness psychology and linguistics. The term itself was coined in 1951 though the study had been going on even in the nineteenth century in the form of the study of language development. (Boey, 1975:103)

Scope psycholinguistics

                  ·        How people use language as a system

                  ·        How people learn a language or how people can acquire a language and use it for communication

A.     Theories of Language Acquisition

      Language is both complex and systematic. It is composed of many layers-phonology, morphology, and so on – each of which contains sets of rulers, and elements manipulated by those rules. It should be clear by now that a speaker’s linguistic competence consistsof much more than just knowing a list (however long) of words. A speaker’s knowledge of not only words, but also elements of other “sizes” (sounds and morphems, for instance) and rules for combining all of these enable him or her to understand and produce sentence he or she may never have heard or uttered before.

Thus, given that a speaker’s grammar consists of linguistic element and rules, we can understand the infinitive productivity of language. How does the child learn a language? If knowing a language were simply and matter of knowing a lot of words, language acquiciton would just be a proces of memorization. Instead, a child must acquire a grammar with all its component and rules. How does the child learn these rules? For instance, how does it learn to make the plural of some nouns by adding [-s], others by adding [-z], and still others by adding [-әz] ? how does it learn theun- attaches of adjectives to form other adjectives having the opposite meanings? How does it learn to compose a sentence of an NP and a VP? Rules, unlike words, are never explicitly stated, so the child cannot just memorize them. It must somehow figure them out on its own-a remarkable intelectual feat.

      Various theories have arisen which attempt to account for how children  acquire language. We will consider three of these: the Imitation Theory, the Reinforcment Theory, and third which has no standard name but which we will call the Active Construction of a Grammar Theory.

      The Imitation Theory claims that children learn language by listening to the speech around them and reproducing what they hear. According, to this theory, language acquisition consist of memorizing the word and sentence of some language. The idea that acquiring a language is a process of learning to imitate the speech of others is at least partly true. Because of the largely arbitrary nature of the connewction between the way a word sounds and what it means, children cannot guess what the words of theirs target language are. They must hear those words used by other speakers, and then reproduce or “imitate” them. Furthermore, this theory helps explain the children learn the language that is spoken around them by parents and others, no matter what the language of their ancestors may have been. Thus an American child (for instance) will speak English if raised in an English-speaking environment, or Arabic in an Arabic-speaking environment, and so on. In other words, a child’s generic makeup has nothing to do with which language the child will acquired.

      The Imitation Theory also cannot account for the fact that even when a child attempts to repeat an adult’s utterance, it is often unable to do so accurately. Consider the following exchanges, which are typical of young children trying to imitate an adult:

Adult: He doesn’t want a drink.      Child: He not want drink.

Adult: That’s the dog’s toy              Child: That dog toy

      In fact, the child’s imperfect imitations exhibit regular petterns, because they reflect the child’s internal grammar. For a child at a particular stage of linguistics development, he no want drinkis the grammatical way of expressing he doesn’t want a drink. However, the Imitation theory fails to acknowledge that a child has any short of gammar thet includes rules for combining words and other elements in systematic ways.

The Reinforcement Theory asserts that children learn to speak like adults because they are praised, rewarded, or otherwise reinforced when they use the right foms and are corrected when they use wrong forms. This theory fails to explain the mechanisms by which children learn to produce utterances in the first place. Furthermore, the claim that parents and other caretakers frequently correct their children children’s grammatical mistakes and praise their correct forms is unfounded. Such corrections seldom happen, for altough parents often do correct their children, their corrections generally have more to do with the accurary or truth of a statement and not its grammatical form. Adults also correct children’s grammatical sentences if they are no true. Thus, the dig want to eat may receive the response no, the dog doesn’t want to eat if the dog has just finished his dinner,  where as the sentence leegoes to school today may receive the response yes, he did if Lee did go to school that day.

        The Reinforcement Theory is also contradicted by the fact that even on the rare occasions when adults do try to correct a child’s grammar, the attempts usually fail entirely. Consider the following conservations.

          Child:              nobody don’t like.

          Mother:           no, say “nobody likes me”.

          Child:              nobody don’t like me.

          (repeated 8 times)

        Mother (now exasperated): now listen carefully! Say, “nobody likes me”.

          Child:              oh! Nobody don’t likes me.

        Notice that althought the child does not form negative sentences in the same way the adult does, the child’s utterances follow a pattern just as the adult’s do. The child’s way of forming negative sentences involving nobody is completely regular: every such sentence contains nobody + a negative auxiliary verb – for example, nobody can’t spell that or nobody won’t listen. The child must possess a rule which defines this pattern, but the rule is not the same as that in the grammar of an adult. The Reinforcement Theory cannot explain where the child’s rule came from or why the child seems impervious to correction.

The Active Constructions of a Grammar holds that children actually invent the rules of grammar themselves. Of course, their inventions are base on the speech they hear around them; this is their input or data for analysis. Children listen to the language around them and analyze it to determine the patterns which exist. When they think they’ve discovered a pattern,  they hypothesize a rule to account for it. They add this rule to their growing grammar and use it in constructing utterances. For example,, a child’s first hypothesis about how to form the past tense of verbs will be to add /-ed/. All past tense verbs will then be constructed with this rule, producing forms such as holded and eated alongside needed and walked. When the child discovers there are forms in the language which do not match those produced by this rule, it modifies the rule or adds another one to produce the additional forms. Eventually, the child has created and edited its own grammar to the point there are no significant discrepancies between the forms produced by the child and those produced by the adults around it. However the child has a complete working grammar all long, it is essentially adult-like. The child uses this grammar to produce utterances in the grammar underlying them.

          1. Acquisition Of Phonology

     When en eighteen-month-old child attempts to pronounce the word water, it might say [wawa], considerably short of the adults pronunciation of that may sound like [dæt].  Errors like these may persist for some time, despite constant drilling by the child’s parents, and despite the child’s own realization that its less than perfect. All children make mistakes like these before they have mastered the phonological system of their native language. Yet such errors reveal that they have already learned a great deal, and in another two-and-a-half years or so, their speech will resemble that of their parents in all important respects.

           

2. Babbling

At the age of six months or so, normal children in all culture begin to babble, producing long sequences of vowels and consonants. Though babbling is far from being a true language, it resembles adult language in a number of important respects. For one thing, babbled sequences are not linked to immediately biological needs like food or physical comfort, and are thus frequently uttered in isolation foe sheer pleasure. Moreover, babbled sequences have many physical characteristics of adult speech. In a sequence like [g,ŋ, etc.] syllables can be identified, and in longer sequences, intonation patterns which might be interpreted as questions in some language.

-          First words

The first words show tremendous variability in pronunciation. Some way be perfect adult productions; other may be so distorted that they are comprehensible only to the child’s closest companions. Still others vary considerably in their pronunciations from one occasion to the next. Because of this instability, linguists have come to believe that children do not show and understanding of phonemes in their first words. Consider the one-year-old child who pronounces bottle as [ba] and daddy as [da]. We might conclude that [b] and [d] belong to separated phonemes because [ba] and [da] constitute to animal pair-just as they would be if this words existed in adult English. But [b] and [d]  may not be members of separated phonemes in the speech of one-year-old children, if they are not used consistently to distinguish among words. Thus the same child may pronounce bottle either as [ba] or [da] on different occasions, and do the same with daddy. What seems to be going on is that children first learn entire words as single units, and pay link attention to parts of the word. Therefore, there are unaware of meaning distinctions induced by changes in single sounds.