Questions

1 What problems arise in an attempt to define the notion of 'a lan­guage?

2 Distinguish between dialect and accent

3 Give an example of a change in social situation which is reflected in a changed linguistic situation.

4 Which socio-economic class is likely to show the greatest phono­logical variation within its speech, and why?

5 What is language planning, and how might it be carried out effectively?

6 What is a pidgin, and how may it be distinguished from a creole?

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11

Language and mind

Psycholinguistics is often defined as the study of language and the mind. It explores what goes on in the human mind as an individual acquires, comprehends, produces and stores language. Such a study covers an enormous range of topics, and no two psycholinguists agree on exactly the ground which it covers. One reason for this disagree­ment is that psycholinguistics overlaps with a somewhat wider study, sometimes called the psychology of communication, which looks at language alongside other human methods of communication, such as the use of gesture and facial expressions.

This chapter outlines some of the work going on in three 'core' psycholinguistic topics:

How humans acquire language. How humans comprehend speech. How humans produce speech.

It also discusses how the study of language and mind overlaps with that of language and the brain.

Psycholinguistic evidence

The mind cannot be directly observed, so psycholinguists have to devise ways of finding out how it works. They get their evidence from two main sources: observation of spontaneous utterances, on the one hand, and psycholinguistic experiments, on the other. Spontaneous utterances which deviate from the norm in some way

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are the most informative. We can learn considerably more from a child's mistake such as foots instead of ‘feel', or someone who said geranium instead of ‘hydrangea', than we can from a perfect Mow of speech.

However, ordinary speech is somewhat messy, in that there are dozens of different factors which have to be taken into account when utterances are analysed. Psycholinguists therefore devise experi­ments in which the number of variable factors can be controlled, and the results can be accurately measured. They might, for example, set subjects a 'lexical decision task', in which they time how long it takes a person to recognize a word as being a word, or reject a nonsense sequence such as vleesidence as a non-word.

But this type of methodology presents a problem, sometimes called the 'experimental paradox’. The more carefully an experiment is devised so as to limit variables, the more subjects are put into an unnatural situation, in which they are likely to behave oddly. On the other hand, the more one allows a situation to be like 'real life', the less one is able to sort out the various interacting factors. ,

Ideally, major topics should be tackled both by observing sponta­neous speech and by devising experiments. And when the results coincide, this is a sign that progress is being made.