Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Senior 6 · Psychology (Languages)
Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Lesson 1 of 4
25 min
In 1980 Marta Kutas and Steven Hillyard at the University of California, San Diego, recorded the electrical activity of volunteers’ brains through sensors on the scalp while they read sentences one word at a time. Most sentences ended normally: “He spread the warm bread with butter.” Some ended with a word that made no sense: “He spread the warm bread with socks.”
About 400 milliseconds after the senseless word appeared, the brain produced a clear negative wave that the sensible endings did not. A word printed in unusually large letters, which is surprising in form but not in meaning, produced a different wave. The researchers had found a physical sign that the brain checks the meaning of each word against what it expects, within less than half a second. The wave, called the N400, has since been found in thousands of studies, in many languages, including sign languages.
Figure 1. A schematic version of the N400 effect (not real data). Researchers often plot negative voltage upwards; here it is drawn downwards to match an ordinary graph.
Definition
Psycholinguistics: the study of the mental processes and brain mechanisms by which people acquire, understand, produce and store language.
Phoneme: the smallest unit of sound that can change a word’s meaning. English /p/ and /b/ are phonemes because pat and bat differ in meaning.
Morpheme: the smallest unit of meaning. Unhelpful has three: un-, help, -ful.
Syntax: the rules for combining words into sentences. Semantics: the meaning of words and sentences. Pragmatics: how context and the speaker’s intention shape meaning.
Mental lexicon: the store of words a person knows, with their sounds, meanings and grammar.
| Level | Unit | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Phonology | Phonemes | French tu (“you”) and tout (“all”) differ in one vowel phoneme, a contrast English speakers find hard to hear. |
| Morphology | Morphemes | Kinyarwanda umuntu (person) and abantu (people) share the stem -ntu; the prefixes umu- and aba- mark singular and plural in this noun class. |
| Syntax | Phrases and sentences | “The dog chased the cat” and “The cat chased the dog” have the same words but different meanings because of word order. |
| Semantics | Word and sentence meaning | “She went to the bank” is ambiguous: a river bank or a money bank. |
| Pragmatics | Meaning in context | “Can you pass the salt?” is a request, not a question about ability. |
| Subfield | Central question |
|---|---|
| Developmental psycholinguistics | How do children acquire their first language? |
| Language comprehension | How do we recognise words and understand sentences in real time? |
| Language production | How do we turn an idea into speech, writing or signs? |
| Neurolinguistics | Which brain networks support language, and what happens when they are damaged? |
| Bilingualism and second language acquisition | How are several languages learned and kept apart? |
| Clinical psycholinguistics | What causes and helps aphasia, dyslexia, stuttering and language delay? |
| Computational psycholinguistics | Can computer models that learn language explain how people do it? |
| Method | How it works | Example finding |
|---|---|---|
| Lexical decision task | Press a key as fast as possible: is the string a real word (table) or not (blick)? | Common words are recognised faster than rare ones. |
| Priming | A first word changes how quickly a second is processed. | People recognise nurse faster after doctor than after bread (Meyer and Schvaneveldt, 1971). |
| Eye tracking | A camera records where and how long the eyes rest while reading. | Readers look longer at, and go back to, words that are hard to fit into the sentence. |
| Event-related potentials (ERPs) | Scalp sensors record the brain’s electrical response to each word, millisecond by millisecond. | The N400 to unexpected meanings. |
| Brain imaging (fMRI) | Measures blood flow to show which areas are more active during a task. | Left-hemisphere networks are active in most people during language tasks. |
| Speech-error analysis | Collecting slips of the tongue. | Swaps such as “a blushing crow” for “a crushing blow” show sounds are planned before speaking (Fromkin, 1971). |
| Observation and recordings | Recording children’s speech at home over months or years. | Large shared databases such as CHILDES let researchers compare children across languages. |
CrashCourse: “Psycholinguistics: Crash Course Linguistics #11”. Watch for how the presenter uses speech errors and experiments to show what happens in the mind when we speak and listen.
Important
Evaluate the methods. Laboratory tasks such as lexical decision and priming are precise and replicable, but reading single words on a screen is far from real conversation. ERPs show when processing happens with great precision but not exactly where; fMRI shows where but is slow. Observation of children is natural but time-consuming and hard to generalise. Most psycholinguistic research has studied English and a few European languages; languages such as Kinyarwanda, with rich prefixes and tones, are under-studied, so some “universal” claims rest on a narrow base.
Warning
Don’t confuse phonemes with letters. A phoneme is a sound unit, not a written letter: ship has four letters but three phonemes, and the letter c stands for different phonemes in cat and city.
Tip
Memory hook for the levels: “People Make Sentences Sound Polite”: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Semantics, Pragmatics, from the smallest unit to meaning in context.
Practice
Sources and credits
Written by Ganzaa: the text, the tables, Figure 1 (schematic) and the exercises.
