心理语言学概述

摘要： 语言心理学由心理学和语言构成。需要从多个方面研究这个项目。

Abstract： Psycholinguistics combines psychology and linguistics. And there are many important aspects to study this subject.

关键词： 语言学；心理语言学；语言习得

Key words： linguistics；psycholiguistics；language acquisition

中图分类号：B84 文献标识码：A文章编号：1006-4311（2010）32-0327-01

Language is a mirror of the mind. It is a product of human intelligence, created anew in each individual by operations that lie far beyond the research of will or consciousness. (Chomsky, Reflections on Language, 1975) Psycholinguistics combines psychology and linguistics. It examines the processes that occur in brain while producing and perceiving both written and spoken language. It is interested in the ways of storing lexical items and syntactic rules in mind. Furthermore, it studies processes of speaking and listening, together with language acquisition. Psycholinguistics can perhaps be glossed as the storage, comprehension and acquisition of language in any medium (spoken or written) (Hu Zhuanglin, Linguistics. A Course Book).

Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study emerged in the late 1950s .Chomsky established the Transformational-Generative Grammar and claimed the innateness hypothesis. In the early years of development of psycholinguistics, special experiments were designed to examine if the focus of processing is the deep syntactic structure. On the basis of transformation of sentences it was initially discovered that the ease of processing was connected with syntactic complexity. However, later on it became clear that not only syntactic complexity adds to the difficulty of processing, but also semantic factors have a strong influence on it. Besides, certain principles of sentence processing were formulated. One is the principle of minimal attachment, which means that when processing a sentence which could have multiple meanings people most frequently tend to choose the simplest meaning, or the meaning that in syntactic analysis would present the simplest parse tree with fewest nodes. Another principle is the principle of late closure which states that there is a tendency to join the new information to the current phrase or clause.

A natural language can be analyzed at a number of different levels, and the study of its subdivisions is based on the components that make up human language, including Phonetics, Phonology, distribution, and sequencing of speech sounds and the shape of syllables, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, and Pragmatics. The three major areas of psycholinguistic research are the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. That is, How do people use their knowledge of language, and how do they understand what they hear or read? How do they produce messages that others can understand in turn? How language is represented in the mind and how language is acquired? (Hu Zhuanglin, Linguistics. A Course Book)

Modern research in psychology makes use of biology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. Usually psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures. The cognitive psychology has a great effect on the development of psycholinguistics. Jean Piaget, as its representative holds that human being don’t have innate language ability, but are born with cognitive ability. It is the interaction between the born cognitive ability and the surrounding environment that arouses the language ability.

Research Proposal

On the basis of the brief description of psycholinguistics above, I’ve got an outline of psycholinguistics. One is the acquisition of a language. S. Gass proposed a model of second language acquisition in 1988. There are five stages in this model: apperceived input, comprehended input, intake, integration and output. This model is quite reasonable and reflects the psychological process in second language acquisition. In the first stage, apperceived input, apperception takes place in such a way that newly observed materials are related to the former experience, or the past experiences or former knowledge relate to the selection of what might be called noticed material. The second stage is comprehended input, which refers to the process that a learner makes use of his prior knowledge, especially the prior linguistic knowledge to analyze the input and comprehend it. Then comes the third stage- intake, which refers to what is actually internalized by a learner. More importantly, it is in this stage- intake where psycholinguistic processing takes place. It is in this stage where generalization is likely to occur. Some of the major processes that take place in the intake component are hypothesis formation, hypothesis testing, hypothesis rejection, hypothesis modification, and hypothesis confirmation. (S. Gass, Larry Selinker, Second Language Acquisition) After intake, it’s the component integration, which leads to the development of second language grammar, and storage. The last stage is output. There are two points to emphasize: First, there is the role of comprehensible output in testing out hypotheses. Second, there is the role output plays in forcing a syntactic rather than a solely semantic analysis of language. (S. Gass, Larry Selinker, Second Language Acquisition)

As I reflect upon the progress of my English learning, I find this model is quite appropriate. Reflection is not enough, and the progress is far more complex. So I plan to do some longitudinal experiment with some middle school students to collect data and analyze the progress and features of their English learning as beginners. I could take records of what they say, collect what they write or design some questionnaires to analyze the process of learning as to a certain structural point at different developmental stages. I have just got the rough idea, and the concrete implementation needs further consideration.

References:

[1]胡壮麟，语言学教程，北京大学出版社，2001.

[2]岑运强，语言学基础，北京师范大学出版社，2005.

[3]刑福义，吴振国，语言学概论，华中师范大学，2002.

[4]S. Gass, Larry Selinker, Second Language Acquisition, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publisher, 2001.