Introduction to Psycholinguistics

• Psycholinguistics studies the psychological aspects of language, including how people understand, produce, and acquire it.
• Language is a shared symbolic system for communication.
• All humans speak, and children learn a language without formal instruction.

Core components

• Language involves a system of symbols and rules.
• Language is symbolic, using sounds, signs, and gestures to form and transfer mental representations.
• Language has structure where symbols combine to create meaningful units.
• Language demonstrates generativity such that symbols create an infinite number of meaningful messages.
• Language allows for displacement, which is symbolically representing and communicating about past, future, and imaginary events.

Language Structure

• Surface structure involves symbols and syntax, which are rules governing word order.
• Sentences with different surface structures can have the same meaning.
• Deep structure refers to the underlying meaning of combined symbols.
• Semantics relates to the meaning of words and sentences.

Processing Approaches

• Bottom-up processing analyzes small details to form a complete picture.
• Top-down processing uses existing knowledge to understand new information.

Pragmatics

• Pragmatics involves knowledge of the practical aspects of language use.
• It includes rules surrounding the social context of language.
• It ensures effective communication.

Sensitive vs. Critical Periods

• The sensitive period is a time when a person is more responsive to certain stimuli and learns skills more quickly.
• The critical period is a developmental stage where the ability to learn a skill is severely diminished or lost if not developed.

Structure Levels

• Discourse is the sixth level of the hierarchical structure of language.
• Sentences combine into larger units like paragraphs and conversations within discourse.
• Speech segmentation involves perceiving the beginnings and ends of words in spoken sentences.

Brain Areas

• Language function is distributed across multiple brain areas.
• Broca’s area is in the left frontal lobe and controls motor aspects of speech.
• Broca's area aids grammar structure and sentence formation.
• Wernicke’s area is in the left temporal lobe and interprets words and language meaning.
• Wernicke's area is involved in understanding spoken and written language.

Aphasia

• Aphasia is a language disorder affecting the ability to speak, understand, read, or write.
• Aphasia does not affect intelligence but disrupts language processing.
• Receptive aphasia results from damage to Wernicke’s area, causing fluent but nonsensical speech and difficulty understanding language.
• Productive/expressive aphasia results from damage to Broca’s area, causing difficulty forming sentences and slow, effortful speech.

Sex Differences

• Neural systems show different organization in males and females.
• Males with left-hemisphere damage show more aphasia symptoms due to left hemisphere activation.
• Females with left-hemisphere damage have more intact abilities due to language abilities shared with the right hemisphere and activation of both hemispheres.

Acquiring Language

• There is evidence for a biological foundation in language acquisition.
• The language acquisition device, according to Noam Chomsky, is an innate mechanism containing grammatical rules common to all languages.
• Children master language without formal instruction.
• All languages share a common deep structure.
• 1–3 month old infants can vocalize a range of phonemes.
• 6–12 month old infants discriminate sounds specific to their native language.
• The Language Acquisition Support System (LASS), according to Jerome Bruner, includes social environmental factors facilitating language learning.
• Parents use child-directed speech with high-pitched intonations.
• Parents name objects and ask questions.
• Operant conditioning involves positive reinforcement of appropriate language.
• Nonreinforcement/correction occurs for inappropriate language.
• Evidence against operant conditioning includes that children learn words quickly.
• Evidence against operant conditioning includes that parents do not correct grammar but correct deep structure errors.

Developmental Stages

• Language development involves biology and experience
• All children go through the same stages, including cooing, babbling, single words, and two-word (telegraphic) speech.
• There may be a sensitive period in infancy to puberty when language is most easily learned.
• Language-deprived children found after puberty never acquire normal language development.
• A similar pattern holds for deaf children and sign language acquisition.

Explore the psychological elements of language, focusing on comprehension, production, and acquisition. Language is a shared symbolic system for communication, naturally acquired by humans. Key components include symbols, rules, structure, generativity, and displacement.