Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics can be seen as a branch of cognitive psychology that resulted from the attempt to apply experimental methods to the study of language. It is difficult to describe its subject, as it can be considered to stretch from formal linguistics to social psychology. It has been heavily influenced by the work of Noam Chomsky, and it mostly concerns with the encoding and decoding of meaning in speech. An important especial case is language acquisition, because children must learn to assign meanings to sentences.

To use a behaviorist term, psycholinguists can be considered to be of a mentalist orientation. Behaviorists considered that linguistics should be independent of psychology. Mental operations were of no interest, and they were not open to scientific study because of their being internal acts. To construct a grammar, the linguist should circumscribe to formalizing the implicit knowledge of the people who speak the language. His task was to study what behaviorists called 'speech behavior.' The emphasis was on phonetics and syntax, while semantics was given little consideration.

The book of B. F. Skinner, "Verbal behavior," published the same year that Chomsky published "Syntactic structures," gave a new role to psychology in the study of a language. He argued that the occurrence of speech should be explained, but of course from a behaviorist point of view. According to Skinner, language was not different from other behaviors that, behaviorism maintained, were all learned. So, an utterance was not produced because the speaker gave a meaning to it, but because he had observed in the past that the utterance had a particular effect. The laws of reinforcement (positive and negative) applied to speech as to other types of behavior. When a speech was rewarded with a certain response, the speaker learned to use it again to get the same response.

To the contrary, the position of Chomsky was a mentalistic one. He proposed the so-called generative-transformational paradigm, which argued that speakers managed information that the behaviorist approach did not account for. A sentence can have more than one meaning, because there are words that can act as different parts of the sentence. For example, the meaning of a sentence is different if a word is taken as a verb or as an adjective. In addition, different sentences can have the same meaning, as is the case of an action expressed in the passive and in the active voices.

Psycholinguistic research has attempted to confront many issues at the phonological, syntactic, and semantic levels. At the phonological level, issues investigated include why different signals are perceived as being the same, and which relation exists between speech perception and production. At the syntactic level, much investigation has been directed at understanding sentence comprehension--how ambiguous phrases are recognized using cues such as rhythm and intonation. Efforts have also been centered on the way in which meaning influences syntactic processing.

At the semantic level, what is meaning and how it affects encoding and decoding has been researched. The nature of meaning is controversial: there are researchers who define meaning as a set of features and try to find what these features are and their universality; other researchers, instead, assume that meaning is individually derived from past experience and other kind of knowledge.

Language acquisition

The early concept that children learned a language by imitating those around them can no longer be sustained. The opposite cases of children hearing ungrammatical sentences and correctly inducing grammar rules; and of children hearing grammatical utterances and (at some period of development) generating syntactically incorrect speech, both assert that reality is more complex than that simple principle. Chomsky postulated the existence of a language acquisition device that would use some concepts universally accepted as the subject-predicate pattern. While the existence of this device has not been demonstrated yet, most scientists think that some level of language understanding is innate.

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