Summary Introducing Psycholinguistics

Chapter 1 (Introduction)
1.1 Introduction
 Mental lexicon = dictionary in our heads

1.2 What is psycholinguistics?
 Psycholinguistics can be defined as the study of the mental representations and processes
involved in language use, including the production, comprehension and storage of spoken
and written language.
 Comprehension is a bottom-up flow, processing based on information flow from lower level
of processing to higher level in this case from the input to an interpretation
 There is evidence for top-down information flow too, processing guided by information flow
from higher levels to lower levels in this case when a listener starts to gain an understanding
of the sentence they are hearing this can influence the efficiency with which they recognize
subsequent words in the sentence
 Interactive processing = information flowing in both directions

1.3 Who does psycholinguistics?
 Contribute to knowledge of the workings of the mind
 Neuropsychologists be interested in locating the language faculties within the physical
structures
 Inform theories of language structure, it can provide the performance data to support
theories of competence, it can provide psychological validity for linguistics construct

1.4 How do psycholinguists do psycholinguistics?
 Observation and introspection of daily behavior
 Experiment
 High-tech observation, measuring brain activity

,Chapter 2 (Planning utterances)
2.1 Introduction
 Some sentences are complete, some stop and start again as the speaker changes his mind or
repairs something that he realizes he has got wrong or revises something that is incomplete,
others appear to be full of repetition and there are errors.
 The speaker appears to provide a spoken form of punctuation by placing pauses at various
points in a passage.
 Hesitation = failing to produce well-formed sentences
o Filled pauses = hesitation noises
o Drawing out of a sound
o Filler phrases / verbal fillers = ‘empty’ use i.e. like you know

2.2 A sketch of the production process
CONCEPTUALISATION Discourse model, situational and general knowledge, etc
Generating a message



Pre-verbal message


FORMULATION
(GRAMMATICAL and PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING) Grammar and lexicon
Producing structured language




Phonetic plan (internal speech)


Speech motor commands, etc
ARTICULATION
Producing speech sounds


External speech

 Conceptualisation = notion or abstract idea of what we want to say
 Formulation = put elements of language together that will express a idea, drawing on our
knowledge of our language, including vocabulary
 Articulation = speak this utterance

2.3 Conceptualisation and planning
 Not involve forms of language, but is all done ‘in the head’ in abstract terms
 Pre-verbal message = result of the process of conceptualization
 Mentalese = language of thought
 Articulatory pause = very brief silence

,  Function of pauses
o Planning
o Breaking utterances into constituent part, at places where a written text might have
punctuation = delimitative pauses
o Regulate their breathing = physiological pauses
o Gain time to search for a word
 Read speech an unprepared speech difference in planning
o With a prepared text we need to plan when to pause in order to mark the structure
of the text. We also need to organize how we are going to articulate the speech
sounds that correspond to the word
o In spontaneous speech, we need to decide what we want to say and what sentences
and words we want to use

2.4 Cycles of planning
 Macroplanning = deciding how to achieve an intended communicative goals using relevant
speech act (= the performance of some action through saying something)
 Linearisation = choosing the order in which information should be expressed
 Instrumentality = speaker select information that helps them to achieve their communicative
goals
 Microplanning = determining the perspective and information structure that is most
appropriate for a given speech act and deciding what should be highlighted as new or topical
information
 Two levels of planning
o A speaker has made initial decision about the sequence of speech acts required to
achieve some communicative goals
o Individual acts can be planned in more detail, even before the overall plan has been
finalized


GRAMMATICAL ENCODING
Functional processing
(lexical selection, function assignment)
The Mental Lexicon
Positional processing
(constituent assembly’s: sentence frame, inflections) lemmas
lexemes




PHONOLOGICAL ENCODING




2.5 Formulation
 Grammatical encoding = where the speaker uses their knowledge of grammar to create
sentence structures that will convey a message