PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

1. Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language or Psycholinguists study how word meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning are computed and represented in the mind. Psycholinguistics is a branch of study which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. it is concerned with the relationship between the human mind and the language as it examines the processes that occur in brain while producing and perceiving both written and spoken discourse. They study how complex words and sentences are composed in speech and how they are broken down into their constituents in the acts of listening and reading. In short, psycholinguists seek to understand how language is done. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms in which languages are processed and represented in the brain. Psycholinguistics has roots in education and philosophy, and covers the "cognitive processes" that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc.

The term psycholinguistics was coined in 1936 by Jacob Robert Kantor in his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar and started being used among his team at Indiana University, but its use finally became frequent thanks to the 1946 article "Language and psycholinguistics: a review," by his student Nicholas Henry Pronko. It was used for the first time to talk about an interdisciplinary science "that could be coherent"^[3] as well as in the title of Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems, a 1954 book by Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok. Psycholinguistics is the study of language with reference to human psychology. It has a very broad scope but is frequently used with specific reference to processes of language acquisition, especially of one's first language. In the more general psycholinguistics covers the following areas.

Neurolinguistics (the study of language and the brain). This has a physical dimension to it and is the domain of neurologists concerned with impairments of language due to brain lesions, tumors, injuries or strokes. It also has an observational domain which is the concern of linguists. Here certain phenomena like slips of the tongue, various performance errors (due to nervousness, tiredness for instance) are examined for the insights which they might offer about the structure of the language faculty in the human brain.

Language areas in the brain

Ø  Broca's area A part of the brain — approximately above the left temple — called after its discoverer the French doctor Paul Broca and which is responsible for speech production. Broca's area which is usually associated with the production of language, or language outputs. Paul Broca, a French surgeon, reported in the 1860s that damage to this specific part of the brain was related to extreme difficulty in producing speech. It was noted that damage to the corresponding area on the right hemisphere had no such effect. This finding was first used to argue that language ability must be located in the left hemisphere and since then has been treated as an indication that Broca’s area is crucially involved in the production of speech.

Ø  Wernicke's area A part of the brain which is taken to be responsible for the comprehension of language. It is located just above the left ear. Named after Karl Wernicke, the German scientist who discovered the area in the second half of the 19th century. Wernicke's area, which is associated with the processing of words that we hear being spoken, or language inputs.