Page 195 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Unit 14: Branches in Linguistics: Psycho-Linguistics

Notes

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.

The theoretical questions have focussed on the issue of how we can account for me phenomenon of
language, development in children at all. Normal children have mastered most of the structures of
their language by the age of five or six. The generative approach argued against the earlier behaviourist
assumptions that it was possible to explain language development largely in terms of imitation and
selectives reinforcement. It asserted that it was impossible to explain the rapidity or the complexity of
language used by the people around them.
Psycholinguists therefore argue that imitation is not enough; it is not merely by mechanical repetition
that children acquire language. They also acquire it by natural exposure. Both nature and nurture
influence the acquisition of language in children. Children learn first not items but systems. Every
normal child comes to develop this abstract knowledge of his mother tongue, even of a foreign
language, to some extent for himself; and the generative approach argues that such a process is only
explicable if one postulates that certain features of this competence are present in the brain of the
child right from the beginning. ‘In other words, what is being claimed is that the child’s brain contains
certain innate characteristics which ‘pre-structure’ it in the direction of language learning. To enable
these innate features to develop into adult competence, the child must be exposed to human language,
i.e. it must be stimulated in proper to respond. But the basis on which it develops its linguistic abilities
is not describable in behaviourist terms.’ (David Crystal, Linguistics).
The boundary between psycholinguistics and linguistics is becoming increasingly blurred as the
result of recent developments in linguistics which aim at giving psychological reality to the description
of language. The bonds between psychology and linguistics become more and more strong by the
extent to which language is influenced by and itself influences such things as memory, motivation,
attention, recall and perception.
Similarly psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics are coming closer because of the realization that merely
grammatical competence is not enough; we have to aim at communicative competence too. Whereas
psycholinguistics is language and the mind, sociolinguistics is language and community. In other
words, psycholinguistics can be said to deal with language and the individual, and sociolinguistics
with language and society.

Chomsky regards linguistics as a subfield of psychology, more specially the cognitive
psychology. His view of linguistics, as outlined for instance, in his book Language
and Mind, is that the most important contribution linguistics can make, is to the
study of the human mind.

14.2 Language Acquisition

By the study of language acquisition is meant the process whereby children achieve a fluent control of
their native language. Few people in the 1950s asked about the processes by which language was
acquired. It was assumed that children imitated the adults around them, and that their speech gradually
became more accurate as they grow up. There seemed to be some mystery attached to this apparently
straight-forward process. Psycholinguists have therefore attempted general theories of language
acquisition and language use. Some have argued that learning is entirely the product of experience and

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 189