What Does a Psycholinguist Do?

Psycholinguistics is a discipline that studies the psychological processes in language activities. It involves how individual humans grasp and use language systems, how to make language systems work in actual communication, and what knowledge and capabilities they should possess in order to master and use this system. From the perspective of information processing, psycholinguistics is the study of the encoding and decoding processes in individual speech communication. Due to the characteristics of the research object, it is closely related to many disciplines. In addition to psychology and linguistics, it also has information theory and anthropology. In method, it mainly adopts the method of experimental psychology.

Psycholinguistic research methods borrow from psychological

Psycholinguists often use "language acquisition" instead of "language learning" in the past. Think why children can learn in a few years

"Language comprehension" is a topic discussed in psycholinguistics. Its research includes: (1) speech perception; (2) vocabulary extraction; (3) sentence processing; (4) discourse understanding. In short, it is studying how people understand language.

First, "speech perception" involves "research methods of speech perception", "conditions of speech perception", "production of speech signals and acoustic characteristics of speech", "listening of vowels and consonants", and "continuous speech" There are 7 researches in "listening discrimination", "perception of written language" and "speech perception model". The research method of language perception was first recorded and analyzed by the "vocoder" invented by H. Dudley (1939). Later, the principle of making a "sound recorder"

In the United States, BL Wolf believes that language is a "thinker" that determines people's thinking and even their views on the world. Soviet Ö.. Wigotsky (1896-1934) and Switzerland

Is language unique to humans because of their special physiological basis?

Some biologists train

Language acquisition: Psycholinguists often use "language acquisition" instead of "language learning" in the past. They think why children learn their mother tongue within a few years is just based on

Psycholinguistics has been applied in communication technology (researching the transmission, perception and understanding of information), medicine (research

Looking at the research status of psycholinguistics in the United States, Germany, Russia, and middle countries, although German psycholinguistic scholars (such as Johannes Engelkamp), Vygotsky and Leontiev of the former Soviet Union, and Gui Shichun of China, etc. Russian, Chinese) from the perspective of psycholinguistics. However, most of the research is based on the work of American psycholinguists using English as the research object, and the research beyond the American psycholinguistic research framework is not yet obvious. Especially in the in-depth study of the relationship between "mental nature" and "language comprehension", further exploration is needed.

First, take the difference in language behavior between "second language" and "first language" learners as an example. In terms of the understanding of words and sentences between British and Americans, the processes and methods of information processing and language understanding are obviously different from those of English learners in other countries. Just take the understanding of the noun phrase TheAmericanDream as an example. When British and Americans hear this phrase, the "conceptual connection" or "ideological association" that appears in their minds is very different from the "connection" or "association" that occurs in the minds of Chinese English learners. If someone says "this is due to cultural differences", how does "culture" affect people's language understanding? Let us take the phenomenon of "morpheme transposition" or "word transposition" concerned by linguistics and psycholinguistics as an example. In the words of the British and Americans, they have described carpark as parkark, but it is difficult for Chinese to make such "mistakes." what about this? It seems that to explain these phenomena, psycholinguists still have a lot of work to do.

Second, language perception, language generation, and language understanding are all closely related to language acquisition. We know that the mother tongue of the United States and Australia is English. However, "Icometoday" spoken by Australians is often heard as "Icometodie" by Americans; "Southern children" spoken by Beijingers do not understand many Southerners. This is why How about it? This not only involves the study of "phonology" and "dialect", but also provides another space for the development of psycholinguistics. Mr. Zhao Yuanrun is a master of dialects and Wu Tieping is a master of "fuzzy linguistics" and Chinese etymology. However, although psycholinguistics has mentioned "fuzzy logic model" in the study of speech perception, it has not The acquisition and perception of "fuzzy language" is an in-depth exploration. In terms of the development of psycholinguistics, this must be regarded as another "place of use".

Third, human "behavioral language" has similarities and differences. In this regard, we ca nt help asking Why do some Americans who are visiting China for the first time think that the Chinese are preparing to fight when they see that the Chinese are playing Tai Chi in the morning on the street? And "laugh" is also a language, and it is also a form of language that is used by almost all cultures. So how do people learn to use and understand this type of "non-verbal language"? Why is the "nodding" action in most The country means "agree" or "agree", and in some countries it means "disagree" or "disagree"? This undoubtedly provides a way of thinking for future psycholinguistic studies.

Fourth, many research results of psycholinguistics have high "applied" value in guiding language practice, language analysis, and language research. For example, the theory of "activation" proposed by psycholinguistics in the study of "psychological vocabulary" is highly instructive in language teaching, but unfortunately, psycholinguists have no time to consider the value of its theoretical application. Publicize and promote.

In short, to develop psycholinguistics into an independent new discipline that can integrate psychology and linguistics into one, and which is different from psychology and linguistics, we need to deepen the research on human thinking and the mind. It is true that the "object" studied in psycholinguistics is language, but the essence of the study is not only the psychological mechanism concerned by psychology or the surface structure and deep structure of language concerned by linguistics, but the psychological mechanism of language users Operation process and operation law, and all language-related thinking phenomena including philosophy. We believe that based on the research of psychology and linguistics in the past century, and inspired by the research on "heart" in human beings for thousands of years, psycholinguistics will surely develop into a benefit for human development. The theoretical basis, and a new science with high practical significance.