PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

GROUP 8

NURUL AZIZAH

MEGAWATI

ST JUSTIKA
A. Definition of Psycholinguistic

Psycholinguistic is an integration of psychology ana linguistic. Psychology is the

study of the mind and how it influences behaviour and linguistic is the scientific study of the
language. As for Psycholinguistic, it is the study of how individuals comprehend, produce
ana acquire language. That is to say, Psycholinguistic deals with how people use language.

B. The Scope of Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics focuses on the knowledge of language ana the mental processes

involved in the ordinary language use. Therefore, there are two fundamental questions lying
at the core of Psycholinguistics. Psycholinguistics tries to answer ‘What knowledge of
language is needed for us to use in language?’ and ‘What cognitive processses are involved in
the ordinary use of language ?’
Firstly, we must know a language in order to use it. Generally, we must have a tacit
knowledge because we can use unconscious process that involves the naturalistic
development of language proficiency through understanding language anf through using
language for meaningful communication. That is to say we unconsciously know how to
perform various acts. On the other hand, we refer to a processin which conscious rules about
a language are developed ana it results in explicit knowledge about the language ana the
ability to verbalize this knowledge.
For example; we might know how to speak, meanings of the sentences in a language
but we don’t know what processes are involved in comprehending ana producing that
language. Finally, much of our linguistic knowledge realizes tacitly.
Also, when we say ‘we know a language ‘we must know its semantics, syntax,
phonology and pragmatics. Semantics is the study of the meanings of sentences and words.
Syntax is the study of what speakers mean ana social rules involved in language use. In order
to use a languge, we have enough linguistic competence.
Apart from these, we ordinarily use a language by writing a letter, reading a novel or
understanding a lesson but we have some processes such as perception, memory and thinking
while doing these. It seems as if we did few things while listening or speaking but these
processes are going on.
Psycholinguistics is a field of cognitive science. Cognitive Science is an
interdisciplinary one that includes the insights of psychology, linguistics, neurolinguistic,
sociolinguistic ana philosophy.
Firstly it cooperates with the philosophy. Philosophy is a field interested in questions
that are difficult to answer. Psycholinguistcs also asks questions about how human mind
works, how people use a language.
Linguistic knowledge and language processes affect each other in the same way. The
interplay of linguistic knwledge and language proscesses have a central role in
psycholinguistic work. For example; in some sentences some polysemous words are used and
these words cause to ambiguity. To solve this problem, we should know the whole context in
which words are used.
C. Stages in Language Acquisition
As has been stated above, a new born child does not automatically have ability to speak a
language. Linguistic knowledge develops by stages.
 First sounds
At the time an infant is born, he can only produce sound through crying. When he is
hungry or thirsty, he cries. When he is sick, he cries. When he wants her to accompany
him, he cries. After several weeks (8 weeks), beside crying, he can coo; he can produce
squealing-gurgling sounds. The kind of sound is vowel-like in character and pitch-
modulated. The vowel-like cooing sounds begin to be interspersed with more consonantal
sounds. In this stage, cooing changes into babbling.

 Babbling , At the age of six months, children in all cultures begin to babble. Babbling
refers to the child’s effort to produce sounds by using his speech organs. According to
Fromkin and Rodman (248), the sounds produced in this period seem to include
the sounds of human languages. Most linguists believe that in this babbling period infants
produce a large variety of sounds, many of which do not occur in the language of the
household. Deaf children also babble and it is reported that their babbling up to the age of
around six months seems very similar to that of normal children. Nondeaf children born of
deaf parents who do not speak also babble. Thus, babbling does not depend on the presence of
acoustic, auditory input. Hearing children born of non-peaking parents also
babble. There are however at least two different schools of thought concerning babbling.
One group believes that babbling is a necessary prerequisite for normal language
acquisition. Others consider babbling to be less crucial.
 Holophrastic Stage

In this stage of language acquisition, a child begins to understand a word as a link between
sound and meaning. The words they acquire are the words that are most common in his
everyday environment. The words show tremendous variability in pronunciation. Some may
be perfect adult productions; others may be so distorted that they only to child’s closest
companions. Still others vary in their pronunciation from one occasion to the next. Because
of his instability, psychologists have come to believe that children do not show an
understanding of phonemes in their first words. Let us consider the one-year-old child who
pronounces bottle as [ba] and daddy as [da].

A child begins to use the same string of sounds repeatedly to “mean” the same thing.
At this point he has learned that sounds are related to meanings and he is producing his first
words. Most children seem to go through the “one = one sentence” stage. These one-word
sentences are called holophrastic sentences.
  Two-Word Stage
In this stage, around the time of a child’s second birthday, he begins to produce two-
word utterances. At first these appear to be strings of two of the child’s earlier
holophrastic utterances (one-word sentences). At 18 months or so, many children start
to produce two-and three-word utterances. These kinds of utterances are used for
some purposes such as requesting, warning, answering to question, informing
refusing, etc . For isntance, an utterance ‘want cookie’ (= I want a cookie) is meant to
request; and ‘red car’ is meant to inform that the car is red (Steinberg, 1997 : 7-8)
 Telegraph Speech
The utterances of children longer than two mords have a special characteristics. The
small function words such as to, the, a, can, is etc. are missing; only the words that
carry the main message, namely: the content words are used. The utterances like ‘cat
stand up table’, ‘what that?’, and ‘ no sit here’, etc. are lakc of the function words.
These are why they are called telegraphic speeches.

D. Language and the Brain

In relation to human ability for language it is necessary to know something about the say the
brain controls language. The following discussion shows some of aspects of the way our
brains store and use language.

 Physical Features of the Brain

There are four major parts of the brain. They are –from the top of the spine upwards- medulla
oblongata, the pons Varolii, the cerebellum and the cerebral cortex (cerebrum). These parts of
the brain form an integrated whole by means of connected tissue in that order. The first three
are concerned with essentially physical functions, including breathing, heartbeat,
transmission and coordination of movement, involuntary reflexes, digestion, emotional
arousal, etc. The cerebral cortex is a layer of grooved, wrinkled and winding tissue.
  Lateralization

Lateralization of language is related to the areas of the brain which are involved in the use of
language. Language centers predominate in the left hemisophere in right-handed people and
sometimes in the right hemisphere for left-handed people. The main language centers in the
left hemisphere are Broca’s areas (in the front part of the brain), Wenicke’s area (towards the
back), and the angular gyrus (which is even futher back). (Seinberg, 1997 : 180).

 The Critical Period

By a critical period or age is meant here an age beyond which language learning will be
difficult or even impossible (Seinberg, 1997 : 184). It is also referred to as ‘the period of time
from birth to puberty’. A child must learn a language during this period to gain normal, native
competence in the language. In this period, the children’s left hemisphere is open to language
learning. As the child’s brain matures and the patterns of neural activity become set, the
readiness for language learning which was once present becomes less and less available. This
will result that it becomes much more difficult to learn a second language after the critical
period than it was as a child; that children who learn two or more languages during the
critical period usually can speak the languages without an accent; and that if a child is not
exposed to language during childhood he/she may become impossible to learn language
(Language Files, 229).

E. Psychological Mechanisms

Psychological mechanisms are involved in using language. These mechanisms provide basis
for an integrated understanding of language use. Language processing is a product of
linguistic principles ana psychological mechanisms. Comprehending ana producing language
are performed within the limitations of our information-processing system. People have some
storages for processing their iformation. The first storage is Working Memory.
a. Working Memory
This the temporary storage of the information being processed of the cognitive tasks. This
memory holds information for a short period of time. It has fixed capacity. It is limited in
size. It is used to organize words into constituents. We remember sentence structures by
chunking.
b. The Baddeley Hitch Model
This model of working memory has three components.These are the central executive, the
visuospatial sketchpad,the phonological loop. Phonological loop contains phonological
represantations for a period of time. Visuospatial system allows us to form visual images.
Central executive systems determines what tasks the slave system realizes it is administrative
because human mind is limited. For example; we don’t drink water while playing football.
c. Long Term Memory
It is known as permanent memory. It is a storage of our knowledge of the world. This
includes general knowlege. This memory has two types:
 Semantic Memory: This includes our organized knowledge of words,
concepts,synbols.That is to say; it includes our general knowledge such as grammar
and social knowledge. For example; That we know when the independent war
became is related to the semantis memory.
 Episodic Memory: This memory holds knowlege and experience. We use it to keep a
record of our personal experiences. It varies from person to person. For example;
what we were doing when we learned when Atatürk died is related to the episodic
memory.

d. Serial and Parallel Processes

 Serial Processing: takes place one at a time while parallel processing takes place two
or more simultaneously. Serial model is processed stage by stage. It occurs without
overlapping. It processes from simple to complex. For example, the word ‘MFN’. In
this word, the rest of the letter ‘E’ is obscured When we look at this word, we can
identify all letters and then try to understand the whole word.Then we look at the
meaning of the word within sentence.
 Parallel model occurs at the same time. For example; the word ‘MFN’ . When we
look at the word, if we understand it as men, this means rhat we know its letters, its
meaning and its usage in the sentence.
e. Top-down and Bottom-up Processing

 Bottom up processing proceeds from the lowest level to the highest level of
processing. In this processing, lower levels don’t influence from higher levels.It
proceeds from specific to general. Firstly, we identify phonemes then we use these to
retrieve the lexical entries of the words from our memory to the next level. At the last
level, we are linking the meaning of a given sentence.
 Topdown Processing proceeds from general to specific.Some information of the
higher levels may influnce processing at the lower levels. For example, Can you open
the door?. A sentence context may influence the identification of the words within
that sentence.
f. Automatic and Controlled Processes

 Automatic processes don’t require extensive capacity.These tasks don’t require

substantial resources.They are unintentional, unconscious and fast.These become
automatic by frequency,memorization and repeating many times.
 Controlled Processes
These are related to complex tasks. They draw substantial resources from this limited
pool of resources.That is to say, developing a phrase structure for a sentence is a more
controlled process because working memory has fixed capacity.
g. Modularity
Modularity refers to the independence of the different linguistic subsystems within the
grammer. Here, there is a view that there are’t specific modules for learning a language in the
brain. It is acquired by everybody. I mean to figure out things and comprehend a sentence
there is not a specialized ability related to language. Language is viewed as common sense.
 REFERENCE

https://dykaandrian.blogspot.com/2014/09/psycholinguistics.html
http://likashmanes.blogspot.com/2013/05/psycholinguistics.html
https://www.slideshare.net/LiaRatna1/psycolinguistic-38248249