Undergraduate Pozihun D.O.

National Technical University of Ukraine

"Kyiv Polytechnic Institute", Ukraine

Comprehension and production of a language in the domain of psycholinguistics

The variety of language functions in society and the nature of its close connection with the thinking and mental activity of a person makes an interaction between linguistics and its social and psychological sciences quite flexible. Particularly it concerns relations between linguistics and psychology that in the XIX century lead to the implementation of psychological techniques and ideas into linguistics. That was the emergence of psychological trend in linguistics that caused creation of a new frontier science in linguistics, called psycholinguistics, in the fifties of the XX century.

For many years language was handled as just a system, outside the processes of its acquisition and use. Nowadays it has become quite common to study language in action, taking into account the human factor.

Psycholinguistics is the discipline of psychology that explores the mental mechanisms of language processing that includes such major aspects as reading, writing, listening and speaking. The subject point of Psychology is the nature and function of the human soul. The term itself is originated from the two Greek words “psyche” which means “soul” and “logos” which denotes “science”. There are three aspects in the human soul, studied by Psychology. They are “mind”, “will” and “emotions”. The subject matter of Psycholinguistics is quite narrower, without regarding the human soul as it is. It studies the connections between language system and mind and how the mind acquires, stores and handles a language. Psycholinguistic approach comprises animal communication, language evolution and bilingualism.

Psychologists have long been interested in language, but psycholinguistics as a field of study, as it was mentioned above, did not emerge until the 1960s. It was motivated by Chomsky’s work in a field of linguistics. He claimed that the special properties of language require specific mechanisms to handle it. Its productivity was the special characteristic of language on which Chomsky focused. Possessed with a grammar, or syntax, people can produce and comprehend novel sentences that carry novel messages. It is mainly done in a way that is absolutely sensitive to the structure of the language. For instance, we interpret The umpire helped the child to third base and The umpire helped the child on third base as transferring distinct messages, despite the fact that the sentences vary in just one small word. It’s obvious that He showed her baby the pictures and He showed her the baby pictures describe quite different events, although the difference in word order is extremely small.

There are generally two schools of thought about how children can acquire and learn language, and there are still a lot of discussions about which one of the theories is the correct one. The first theory declares that each language must be learned by children. The second one declares that humans cannot learn the abstract system of language, yet they possess an inborn faculty of a language, or an access to which is called universal grammar. The idea that language should be learned was particularly popular before 1960. It is also well represented by Jean Piaget’s mentalistic theories along with the empiricist Rudolf Carnap’s ones. Similarly, the school of psychology well-known as behaviorism puts forward a suggestion that language is a behavior formed by conditioned response, thus it is learned.

One of the questions in the area of language comprehension concerns the issue of how people perceive sentences while reading (also known as sentence processing). Experimental researches have originated a number of theories about the structure and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. These theories are typically analyzed pursuant to the fact what types of information included in the sentence the reader may utilize to establish meaning, and at what period in reading that information becomes available to the reader. Notions such as "modular" and "interactive" processing were theoretically divided in this field.

A modular point of view of sentence processing supposes that the stages required for a sentence reading function separately in independent modules. These modulates have restricted interaction with one another. For instance, one dominant theory of sentence processing, the garden-path theory, declares that syntactic analysis always goes first. Pursuant to this theory while reading a sentence, the reader creates the most possible simple structure in order to minimize endeavors and cognitive load. That was done without any contribution from both semantic analysis and context-dependent information.

Contrary to a modular viewpoint, an interactive theory of sentence processing, that includes a constraint-based lexical approach states that all available information included within a sentence can be processed at any time. Pursuant to an interactive theory, the semantics of a sentence (such as plausibility) may come in handy later on in order to help specify the sentence structure.

There are data to support both modular and interactive points of view; yet which one is the right one is still up for debate.

Despite the fact that some researchers have explained how comprehension and production can interact in certain tasks, the two areas of investigation have not always had a close connection. One of the reasons for such separation is that, originally, various methods have been used to learn comprehension and production. Those researches who studied language comprehension have often measured how long it takes people to fulfill tasks such as word naming, lexical decision, or reading for understanding. And those researches who studied language production have focused on product rather than on process, for instance, as in analyses of speech errors.

All things considered, many influential people such as Chomsky and Wundt contributed to the history of psycholinguistics. Many significant theories were put forward, and much progress was made concerning the comprehension people have about language and how they perceive it. The various schools of thought suggested their frameworks for how linguists shaped their thoughts and views. While the thinkers always had their own ideas in minds, there were always inspirational debates, and as a result of these debates, people developed their knowledge of the subject. In the future, there will definitely be more breakthroughs that no one has even thought about yet.