Page 194 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics Digvijay Pandya, Lovely Professional University

Notes
Unit 14: Branches in Linguistics: Psycho-Linguistics

CONTENTS
Objectives
Introduction
14.1 Psycho-Linguistics
14.2 Language Acquisition
14.3 Other Areas of Psycho-Linguistics
14.4 Summary
14.5 Key-Words

14.6 Review Questions
14.7 Further Readings

Objectives

After studying this Unit students will be able to:
• Discuss Psycho-Linguistics.
• Explain Language Acquisition
• Understand Other Areas of Psycho-Linguistics.
Introduction

Psycholinguistics is a recent branch of linguistics developed in the sixties. It is the study of
interrelationship of psychological and linguistic behaviour. It uses linguistic concepts to describe
psychological processes connected with the acquisition and use of language. As a distinct area of
interest, psycholinguistics developed in the early sixties, and in its early form covered acoustic
phonology and language pathology. But now-a-days it has been influenced deeply by the development
of generative theory, and its most important area of investigation has been language acquisition. It
has raised and has partly answered questions such as how do children acquire their mother tongue?
How do they grow up linguistically and learn to handle the registral and stylistic varieties of their
mother tongue effectively? How much of the linguistic system that they ultimately command, are
they born with and how much do they discover on the basis of their exposure to that system?
14.1 Psycho-Linguistics

In its early form, psycholinguistics covered the psychological implications of an extremely broad
area, from acoustic phonetics to language pathology. Now-a-days, certain areas of language and
linguistic theory tend to be concentrated on by the psycholinguist. Much of psycholinguistics has
been influenced by generative theory and the so-called mentalists. The most important area is the
investigation of the acquisition of language by children. In this respect there have been many studies
of both a theoretical and a descriptive kind. The need for descriptive study arises due to the fact that
until recently hardly anything was known about the actual facts of language acquisition in children,
in particular about the order in which grammatical structures were acquired. Even elementary
questions as to when and how the child develops its ability to ask question syntactically, or when it
learns the inflectional system of its language, remained unanswered. However, a great deal of work
has been done recently on the methodological and descriptive problems related to the obtaining and
analysing information of this kind.

188 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY