Psycholinguistics: Language Production and Perception

What is Psycholinguistics?

Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological aspects of language, the relationships between psychology and language, our neural capacity, and speech perception and production.

It is the study of language from the point of view of psychology, trying to understand how language is produced and understood.

Branches of Psycholinguistics

• General psycholinguistics: Theories of language functioning in adult language users.
• Developmental psycholinguistics: Mainly focuses on language acquisition by children.
• Applied psycholinguistics: Covers reading, writing, and bilingualism.

Related Disciplines

Psycholinguistics has several "siblings": neurolinguistics, biolinguistics (the origin and biological foundations of language), and sociolinguistics (the social foundations of language behavior).

Methods in Psycholinguistics

• Priming (torowanie, poprzedzanie): Evoking some lexical items by means of others.
• Error analysis
• Discourse analysis: A domain of linguistics and sociolinguistics.
• Experiment
• Quasi-experiments: Some variables cannot be manipulated. For example, if you are testing the number of accidents depending on road signs, you cannot remove the signs.
• Correlational study: For example, checking the correlation between time spent by parents reading to children and their performance at school.
• The survey: Includes self-reports where people describe how they think and feel.
• Naturalistic observation: Observation in a natural setting where the observer stays out of the way.
• Participant observation: The observer joins the group. For example, a policeman joining a group of criminals or a psychologist joining a religious sect.
• The case study: For example, studies by Sigmund Freud, who described individuals.
• Physiological assessment: Measuring blood pressure and other physical markers.

Survey Validity and Measurement Criteria

A survey's validity depends heavily on the wording of the questions and the characteristics of the person conducting the questioning.

Criteria for Adequacy of Measurement

• Validity: Whether it really measures what it is intended to measure.
• Reliability: The results must not fluctuate wildly from one measurement to another.

Study Designs

• Longitudinal: Examining the same group of people over a number of years.
• Cross-sectional: The population is divided into subgroups based on specific criteria.