Psycholinguistics James Myers February 20, 2003 Introduction to psycholinguistics OVERVIEW: 1. What is psycholinguistics? 2. Linguistics vs. psychology 3. Why linguistics and psychology can work together 4. An information processing model of language 5. Sign language as human language ============================================================== 1. What is psycholinguistics? 1.1 Psychology and language are both huge topics, so it's not surprising that psycholinguistics is a very big area, with many researchers doing many different kinds of things that are difficult to summarize. I hope this class demonstrates just how diverse psycholinguistic research can be. 1.2 The four dimensions of psycholinguistics: 1.2.1 Level of processing: discourse, syntax, morphology, phonology, etc. 1.2.2 Depth of processing: Descriptive linguistics: description of language Psycholinguistics: study of language behavior Neurolinguistics: study of relationship between language behavior and the physical brain 1.2.3 Direction of processing: comprehension vs. production 1.2.4 Development of processing: language acquisition 2. Interdisciplinary research: linguistics vs. psychology. 2.1 Good psycholinguistics cannot be done by linguists alone, nor by psychologists alone, but must involve the collaboration of both. 2.1.1 Linguists have long believed that their studies had something to do with psychology, but they didn't use methods that psychologists could respect (e.g. relying on "grammatical intuitions"). 2.1.2 Psychologists have long studied language, but they often asked questions or came to conclusions that linguists found silly, boring, or naive (e.g. assuming that English was the only language in the world). 2.2. The "Scientific method" as practiced in psychology and linguistics: Psychology Linguistics ----------- ----------- (1) Be puzzled by some issue Memory, Language: learning, structure, perception, history, development, acquisition, language, etc use, etc (2) Come up with a hypothesis Processing Grammar or model (performance): (competence): perception, rules, production, constraints, memory representations (Often learning (Often assumed is central) to be innate) (3) Collect data in an attempt Experiment, Native speaker to falsify your hypothesis observational intuitions, study descriptive grammars (Often uses (Reading is reading!) taboo.) (4) Interpret your results Cause-and-effect, Simplicity, statistics argument [Empiricism] [Rationalism] 3. Why linguistics and psychology can work together 3.1 Both believe in the "mind" (as abstraction of action of the brain) 3.1.1 Formerly taboo among Behaviorists. Thus B. F. Skinner's book Verbal Behavior (1957) tried to describe the psychology of language entirely in terms of physical inputs (stimuli) and physical outputs (the behaviors, or responses), with no "mind": "In teaching the young child to talk, [at first] [a]ny response which vaguely resembles the standard behavior of the community is reinforced. When these begin to appear more frequently, a closer approximation is insisted upon. In this manner, very complex verbal forms may be reached." 3.1.2 An important blow against behaviorism was struck by Chomsky (1959) in a review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior: "A typical example of 'stimulus control' for Skinner would be the response ... to a painting with the [utterance] Dutch. [Such] responses are asserted to be 'under the control of extremely subtle properties' of the physical object or event.... "Suppose instead of saying Dutch we had said Clashes with the wallpaper, I thought you liked abstract work, Never saw it before, Tilted, Hanging too low, Beautiful, Hideous, Remember our camping trip last summer?.... Skinner could only say that each of these responses is under the control of some other stimulus property of the physical object.... This device is as simple as it is empty.... "In the bar-pressing experiment, response strength is defined in terms of rate of emission [of behavior].... [Skinner claims that this concept works for language too.] "For example, [Skinner writes that] 'if we are shown a prized work of art and exclaim Beautiful!, the speed and energy of the response will not be lost on the owner.' It does not appear totally obvious that in this case the way to impress the owner is to shriek Beautiful in a loud, high-pitched voice, repeatedly, and with no delay (high response strength)." In short, Chomsky argued that Skinner's view was either: correct, but meaningless -- OR -- meaningful, but incorrect. 3.1.3 Associationism: the claim that psychology consists merely of complex associations between stimuli and responses; the internal structure of the "mind" was considered irrelevant. This view has influenced work in "connectionism", as we will see later. One example: "Associative chain theory": A theory which was used by behaviorists to explain many aspects of human behavior, including how people create sentences; sentences were just a chain of words, each one associated to the next one. "Healthy young joggers run quickly" (strong associations) "Quickly run joggers young healthy" (weak associations) "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" (weak associations) Conclusion: mere associations are not sufficient to explain the psychological processing of language. We also need a theory of structure (here, syntax), which is psychologically real, and thus we must posit a mind to hold this structure. 3.2 Both linguistics & psychology view themselves as grounded in biology: "Chomsky theorized that language has something to do with the brain." (the "language organ") Psychologists talk a lot about synapses and neural networks. 3.3 Both love kids: Linguists see the study of language acquisition as key to a central mystery: where do worldwide linguistic diversity and universals come from? Psychologists see development of language as important window into the big question of development in general 3.4 ***MOST IMPORTANT*** Both model the mind with information processing models: "Information processing" is like "word processing" or "food processing": it takes information and changes it into a different form, or "(re)encodes" it. 4. An information processing model of language production (time goes down in this figure): THOUGHTS | SEMANTIC STRUCTURE / \ SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE LEXICAL INFORMATION \ / PHONOLOGY | PHONETICS THINK: How can you test this model? What empirical predictions does it make? Other perspectives on this model: How would this system develop in children? How might this system be instantiated in the brain? 5. Sign language as human language See Carroll (1999: 28-34)! REFERENCES Carroll, D. W. (1999). Psychology of language (third edition). Brooks/Cole. Chomsky, N. (1959). Review of Verbal Behavior by B. F. Skinner. Language, 35, 26-58. Skinner, B. F. (1957). Verbal behavior. Appleton-Century-Crofts.