Mid Semester

PSYCHOLINGUISTIC

ANITA BASRAH

8186112005

English applied linguistic study program

postgraduated of state university of medan

Indonesia

1. What is Psycholinguistic? What are the main domains of Psycolinguistic?

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological
and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand
language.
The Domain of Psycholinguistic Inquiry
Linguistics is the discipline that describes the structure of language,
including its grammar, sound system, and vocabulary. The field of
psycholinguistics, or the psychology of language, is concerned with discovering
the psychological processes by which humans acquire and use language.
Conventionally, psycholinguistics addresses three major concerns (Clark &
Clark, 1977; Tanenhaus, 1989):
1. Comprehension: How people understand spoken and written language. This is a
broad area of investigation that involves scrutiny of the comprehension
process at many levels, including investigation of how speech signals are
interpreted by listeners (speech perception), how the meanings of words are
determined (lexical access), how the grammatical structure of sentences is
analyzed to obtain larger units of meaning (sentence processing), and how
longer conversations or texts are appropriately formulated and evaluated
(discourse). Concerns specificall y relevant to how written language is
processed are also part of this domain.
2. Speech production: How people produce language. The chapters that
follow suggest that it is somewhat easier to study comprehension than
production; we can use controlled language stimuli and then analyze patterns
of accuracy and error, response time, and other behaviors to arrive at an
estimate of how listeners process language. However, it is more difficult to
gain insight into how concepts are put into linguistic form; the process is
largely hidden from observation, and speakers’ verbal expressions, even in
response to rather controlled eliciting stimuli, vary considerably. We learn most
about the probable nature of the speech pro duction process from speakers’
mistakes (speech errors or false starts) and from’ breaks in the ongoing rhythm
of connected speech (hesitation and pausal phenom ena, or speech
disfluencies).
3. Acquisition: How people learn language. The major focus in this domain has
been on how children acquire a first language (developmental
psycholinguistics)

3.In relationto language function, which are the most important parts of the
brain?
The medulla is easily the most important part of the brain. We would not be
able to live without the medulla because of the crucial task it performs
including regulating blood pressure and breathing. As part of the brain stem, it
also helps transfer neural messages from the brain to the spinal cord.

4. Aphasia is a language disorder due to a damage in certain part of the brain.

What are the main five , types of aphasia?
1. Expressive aphasia (non-fluent): With expressive aphasia, the person knows
what he or she wants to say, yet has difficulty communicating it to others. It
doesn't matter whether the person is trying to say or write what he or she is
trying to communicate.
2. Receptive aphasia (fluent): With receptive aphasia, the person can hear a voice
or read the print, but may not understand the meaning of the message.
Oftentimes, someone with receptive aphasia takes language literally. Their own
speech may be disturbed because they do not understand their own language.
3. Anomic aphasia. With anomic aphasia, the person has word-finding difficulties.
This is called anomia. Because of the difficulties, the person struggles to find the
right words for speaking and writing.
 4. Global aphasia. This is the most severe type of aphasia. It is often seen right
after someone has a stroke. With global aphasia, the person has difficulty
speaking and understanding words. In addition, the person is unable to read or
write.
5. Primary progressive aphasia. Primary progressive aphasia is a rare disorder
where people slowly lose their ability to talk, read, write, and comprehend what
they hear in conversation over a period of time. With a stroke, aphasia may
improve with proper therapy. There is no treatment to reverse primary
progressive aphasia. People with primary progressive aphasia are able to
communicate in ways other than speech. For instance, they might use gestures.
And many benefit from a combination of speech therapy and medications.

6. What is speech perception? There are five models of Speech Perception. What are
they? Explain each briefly!

Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard,
interpreted and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to
The fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive
psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks
to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds and use this
information to understand spoken language. Speech perception research has
applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, in
improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners, and
in foreign-language teaching.

five models of Speech Perception:

1. TRACE Model
TRACE model for speech perception was one of the first models developed
for perceiving speech, and is one of the better known models. TRACE Model
is a framework in which the primary function is to take all of the various
sources of information found in speech and integrate them to identify single
words. The TRACE model, founded by McClelland and Elman (1986) is based
on the principles of interactive activation[1]. All components of speech
(features, phonemes, and words) have their own role in creating intelligible
speech, and using TRACE to unite them leads to a complete stream of speech,
instead of individual component
2. Motor Theory Model
 This model was developed in 1967 by Liberman and colleagues. The basic
principle of this model lies with the production of speech sounds in the
speaker's vocal tract. The Motor Theory proposes that a listener specifically
perceives a speaker's phonetic gestures while they are speaking. A phonetic
gesture, for this model, is a representation of the speaker's vocal tract
constriction while producing a speech sound[2]. Each phonetic gesture is
produced uniquely in the vocal tract. The different places of producing
gestures permit the speaker to produce salient phonemes for listeners to
perceive
3. Cohort Model
the Cohort-Model is a representation for lexical retrieval. An individual's
lexicon is his or her mental dictionary or vocabulary of all the words he or she
is familiar with. According to a study, the average individual has a lexicon of
about 45,000 to 60,000 words[5]. The premise of the Cohort Model is that a
listener maps novel auditory information onto words that already exist in his
or her lexicon to interpret the new word. Each part of an auditory utterance
can be broken down into segments. The listener pays attention to the
individual segments and maps these onto pre-existing words in their lexicon.
As more and more segments of the utterance are perceived by the listener, he
or she can omit words from their lexicon that do not follow the same pattern
4. Neurocomputational Model
This model differs from previously discussed models on the basis of its role in
speech perception. The authors developed their model to demonstrate that
speech perception not only involves the perception of spoken language, it
also heavily relies on the production of language too. This model greatly
reflects the findings of Liberman and associates in their work on the Motor
Theory of speech production. Both of these models demonstrate that speech
perception is a product of both production of speech and recieving of speech.
With the work conducted by Huang and associates, it can be shown that very
similar areas in the brain are activated for production along with perception
of language[12]. This neurocomputational model is one of the few that
adequately map the pathways of both speech functions in the brain
5. Dual Stream Model
The Dual Stream Model, proposed by Hickok and Poeppel (2007)
demonstrates the presence of two functionally distinct neural networks that
process speech and language information. One of the neural networks deals
primarily with the sensory and phonological information pertaining to
conceptual and semantics. The other network operates with sensory and
phonological information pertaining to motor and articulatory systems. In
this sense, the Dual Stream Model encompasses the key aspects of speech,
production and perception. Despite previous assumptions about the
lateralization of the human brain, the Dual Stream Model reverses the
conceptions

7.Sentence processing is very significant in language comprehension

a. What is sentence processing ?
Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a
language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a
text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have
focused on reading of single utterances (sentences) without context. Extensive
research has shown, however, that language comprehension is affected also
by context preceding a given utterance, as well as many other factors.

b. there are two dominant models of sentence processing. What are they?
1. Garden path model
The garden path model (Frazier 1987) is a serial modular parsing model. It
proposes that a single parse is constructed by a syntactic module. Contextual
and semantic factors influence processing at a later stage and can induce re-
analysis of the syntactic parse. Re-analysis is costly and leads to an observable
slowdown in reading. When the parser encounters an ambiguity, it is guided
by two principles: late closure and minimal attachment. The model has been
supported with research on the early left anterior negativity, an event-related
potential often elicited as a response to phrase structure violations.
Late closure causes new words or phrases to be attached to the current
clause. For example, "John said he would leave yesterday" would be parsed
as John said (he would leave yesterday), and not as John said (he would leave)
yesterday (i.e., he spoke yesterday).
 Minimal attachment is a strategy of parsimony: The parser builds the
simplest syntactic structure possible (that is, the one with the fewest phrasal
nodes).

2. Constraint-based model
Constraint-based theories of language comprehension emphasize how people
make use of the vast amount of probabilistic information available in the
linguistic signal. Through statistical learning, the frequencies and distribution of
events in linguistic environments can be picked upon, which inform language
comprehension. As such, language users are said to arrive at a particular
interpretation over another during the comprehension of an ambiguous sentence
by rapidly integrating these probabilistic constraints