Chapter 6 Language Processing in Mind6.1 What is Psycholinguistics6.1.1 The Definition of Psycholinguistics6.1.2 Branches in Psycholinguistics6.1.3 Related Terms6.2 The Relationship between Language and Thought6.2.1 Early views on language and thought6.2.2 The Relation between Language and Thought6.3 Language Comprehension6.3.1 The Comprehension of Words6.3.2 The Comprehension of Sentences6.3.3 The Comprehension of Texts6.4 Language Production6.4.1 Speech Production6.4.2 Written Language Production6.1 What is Psycholinguistics6.1.1 The Definition of PsycholinguisticsPsycholinguistics is the study of language in relation to the mindPsycholinguistics is viewed as the intersection of psychology and linguistics, which studies the ways we acquire, produce and comprehend languages.6.1.2 Branches in PsycholinguisticsThere are mainly two branches in psycholinguistics: cognitive psycholinguistics which studies the continuity of language with the workings of the mind in general and seeking to ground a theory of psycholinguistics in account of cognition and experimental psycholinguistics which is the investigation through experiment of the psychological mechanism for the production and understanding of speech.6.1.3 Related TermsPsychology of language deals with general topic concerning the relationship between language and thought.Psychology of communication is the study of both verbal and non-verbal communications from the psychological point of view.6.2 The Relationship between Language and Thought6.2.1 Early views on language and thought1. Plato suggested that thought was the soul’s discourse with itself. In other words, thought and language were identical. This is the monistic.Aristotle argued that mankind could not have the same language and that language was put signs of psychological experiences. Too much evidence existed to contradict the monistic view.(1)“I don’t know how to express my ideas with words.”(2)Animals’ lack of language does not p revent them from thinking.(3)The deaf-mute is able to think but could not speak the language of his own community.(4)There are other channels for communicating our thoughts besides language like musicand sculpture.2. Whorfian-Sapir HypothesisThe hypothesis was proposed by the American anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and later his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. It has two major thoughts: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity, which may be summarized as follows:1) One’s thinking is complete ly determined by his native language because one cannot but perceive the world in terms of the categories and distinctions encoded in the language.2) The categories and distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to that system and incommensurable with those of other system.6.2.2 The Relation between Language and ThoughtLanguage and may be viewed as two independent circle overlapping in some parts, where language and thought are consistent with each other and one never occurs without the other.Although language and thought may blend together and “verbal thought” and “inner speech”, there are occasions when one can think without language just as one may speak without thinking.Language does not so much determine the way we think as it influences the way we perceive the world and recall things and affect the case with which we perform mental tasks.6.3 Language Comprehension6.3.1 The Comprehension of WordsWord recognition may be explained by the following theoriesCohort theory (p.196)Frequency effect (p.197)Recency effects (p.197)Context (p.197)6.3.2 The Comprehension of SentencesPsycholinguists first began to examine the comprehension of sentences by basing their research on the model of sentence grammar originally proposed by Chomsky on the 1950s.Chomsky’s model claimed that all sentences were “generated” from a phrase structure skeleton which was then fleshed out in everyday utterances by a series of transformational rules.Psycholinguists based their early experiments on sentence pairs like the following:1)The dog is chasing the cat. (deep structure)2)Isn’t the cat being chased by the dog? (negative, passive, interrogative)Psycholinguists who first experimented with this call it the Derivational Theory of Complexity (DTC) because difficulty in comprehension was derived from the number of transformations that were added on to the original phrase structure of the kernel sentence.For example, subjects were given a random assortment of sentences like the following and were then asked to recall both the sentence they had just heard and a string of words spoken immediately after the sentence.1)The dog is chasing the car. (bus/green/etc.)2)The dog isn’t chasing the cat. (car/blue/etc.)3)Is the cat being chased by the dog? (bike/pink/peach/etc.)4)Isn’t the cat being chased by the dog? (train/yellow/stool/etc.)The general tendency for all listeners and readers to make increasingly confident predictions about the meaning of a sentence as it progresses is well-tested in psycholinguistics and is called garden path.Since Jay always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him.Since Jay always jogs a mile this seems like a short distance to him.6.3.3 The Comprehension of TextsPsycholinguistic research into the comprehension of texts has demonstrated:Our syntactic memory may be vague, but it is not haphazard: we tend to remember sentences in a form that is actually simpler than the structure which we originally read or heard.The presence and absence of background information can dramatically felt the way we remember a piece of discourse.6.4 Language Production6.4.1 Speech ProductionSlips of the tongue provide the data that delight the psycholinguists in that they allow us to peek in on the production progress because we know what the speaker intended to say, but the unintentional mistake freezes the production process momentarily.An anticipation error occurs when a word is spoken earlier in the sentence than it should be.e.g. a leading list ( reading list)An exchange error occurs when two items within a sentence are swapped. e.g. hissed all my mystery lectures (missed all my history lectures)6.4.2 Written Language ProductionHayes and Flower (1986) proposed the theories of the writing process which consists of three inter-related processes.The planning process,which involves producing ideas and arranging them into a writing plan appropriate to the writer’s goals.The sentence generation process, which translates the writing plan into actual sentences that can be written down.The revision process,which involves an evaluation of what has been written so far; his evaluation can encompass individual words at one extreme or the overall structure of the writing at the other extreme.。