Submitted by: Rabia Abid

Roll no: ENG-16032

Submitted to: Dr. Sabboor
Course Title: Psycholinguistics
Course Code: ENG-361
Submission Date: February 11th, 2019
BS (Hons.) English 6th Semester
Session 2016-20

Government College Women University Sialkot

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Psycholinguistics: An Overview
Psycholinguistics is the branch of study that has its roots in both psychology and
linguistics. It is concerned with the relationship between the human mind and language as it
examines the process that occurs in brain while producing and receiving both spoken and
written discourse. It studies psychological and neurobiological factors that effects language
competence and performance. It encompasses different aspects of language acquisition to
syntax and semantics, phonology and morphology.
Psycholinguistics involves language processing, lexical storage and retrieval. It
includes internal and external factors that impact language development (how damage to the
brain can effect certain aspects of language), evolutionary explanations of why humans have
the capacity to use language and the parts of brain (including hemispheres) concerned with
different areas of language, language acquisition (how language is first used by children: learn
grammar rules and communicate with other people, and second language acquisition and use.
So, psycholinguistic study gives knowledge of underlying processes of language in the human
mind, how come we store linguistics information and understand each and other in
communication.
In short, Psycholinguistic intends to study biological and neurological factors
that enables humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce knowledge.
Psycholinguistics in relation to linguistics:
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It deals
with sound, structure and meaning. There are branches of
linguistics that deals with different aspects of language:
Phonetics and Phonology deals with the sounds,
Morphology and Syntax deals with structures of words and
sentences, while meanings of words, sentences and utterances
are studied in Semantics and Pragmatics.
Linguistics has been joined with number of hybrid disciplines that introduced
their scientific approaches and combined it with linguistics as follows:

 Sociolinguistics deals with use of language in society.

 Historical linguistics intends to study historical development of language.
 Computational linguistics create tools for important practical tasks such as machine
translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, information extraction from text,
grammar checking, text mining and more.
 Psycholinguistics interdisciplinary approach to study human mind and the relationship
between the human mind and language
Branches and Goals of Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics studies the complex processes in human mind while listening and
reading, and mechanisms involved in those processes. It studies the way children acquire their
mother tongue (L1) and also different parts and language representation in human brain. These
aspects are studied under the following branches of Psycholinguistics:
1. Language Acquisition
Language acquisition studies the processes by which children acquire the capacity to
perceive and comprehend language as well as to use and produce the words and sentences to
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communicate. It refers to first language acquisition which study infants’ acquisition of their
native language with grammatical rules despite of their limited mental abilities and that too in
a very brief span of their lives. It is a process which can take place at any period of one's life.
In the sense of first language acquisition, however, it refers to the acquisition (unconscious
learning) of one's native language (or languages in the case of bilinguals) during the first 6 or
7 years of one's life (roughly from birth to the time one starts school). The central issues
discussed in Language acquisition are:

 Acquisition Studies: How to study children and what experiments can be used.
 Strategies: what are the central strategies that children apply when they acquire their
mother tongue. For example, if they overgeneralize morphological aspects in what they
produce.
 Phases: what are the phases involved in language acquisition at different ages and what is
their order like, for instance, cooing, babbling, one-word stage, two-word stage and so on.

2. Language Processing
Language processing is the study of how humans comprehend and produce language.
It involves the analysis, classification and interpretation of a stimulus. In psycholinguistics,
particularly used for the cognitive operations underlying (a) the four language skills (speaking,
listening, reading, writing); (b) the retrieval of lexical items; and (c) the construction of
meaning representations. The term sometimes refers more narrowly to the receptive process of
listening and reading. It involves:

 Speech production: Research in speech production has aimed to identify the stages
through which a speaker passes in assembling an utterance.
 Comprehension: Understanding what other people say and write (i.e., language
comprehension) is a complex process. It involves a variety of capacities, skills, processes,
knowledge, and dispositions that are used to derive meaning from spoken, written, and
signed language. It is thought to occur in the Wernicke’s area of the brain which is located
in the left temporal lobe.

3. Neurolinguistics
The study of the with the relationship between language and the structure and
functioning of the brain is called Neurolinguistics. It is the study of how the brain stores and
transmits language. Important areas of research in neurolinguistics include where language is
localised in the brain (cortex, hemispheres, cerebellum) which parts of the brain are active
during different linguistic processes and the effects of brain damage or disease on language. It
aims at clarifying how language structures can be instantiated in the brain, i.e. how patterns
and rules exhibited in human languages are represented and grounded in the brain. In addition,
neurolinguistics has a fundamental clinical impact for assessment and treatment of patients
suffering from aphasia and other language pathologies. Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke were
the early psychologists who studied such damage. Nowadays this research domain is totally
integrated and a very vital area in the neuroscience of language.
Conclusion
Psycholinguistics is an area of study which draws from linguistics and psychology and
focuses upon the acquisition, processing, comprehension and production of language. It is the
discipline that investigates and describes the psychological processes that make it possible for
humans to master and use language.
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REFERENCES

 (Routledge Key Guides) John Field - Psycholinguistics_ The Key Concepts (Routledge
Key Guides)-Routledge (2004)
 (Oxford Introduction to Language Study Series) Thomas Scovel - Psycholinguistics
(Oxford Introduction to Language Study Series)-Oxford University Press, USA (1998)
 https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/neurolinguistics
 https://www.linguisticsociety.org/resource/neurolinguistics
 https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Psycholinguistics/Theories_and_Models_of_Language
_Acquisition
 https://www.mpi.nl/world/materials/publications/levelt/Levelt_Psycholinguistics_199
2.pdf
 https://www.slideshare.net/tikarampoudel35/12-ku-grsem-2013