Psycholinguistic what is, importance and how it applies

Psycholinguistic research was born with Plato, interested in the world of language and, without embarking.

In fact, the coinage of the psycholinguistic term is attributed to the American Jacob Robert Kantor in the mid -30s of the last century. In this psychology-online article we will better deepen this subject to understand the Psycholinguistic: What is it, what is its importance and how it applies, by exposing different examples.

1. What is psycholinguistics
2. Object of study of psycholinguistics
3. Importance of psycholinguistics
4. How psycholinguistics applies
5. Examples of psycholinguistics

What is psycholinguistics

In the fifties of the twentieth century, the term psycholinguistic began to indicate the research on linguistic behavior carried out on the basis of the concepts and analysis of linguists.

If linguistics are commonly understood as the study of language, psycholinguistics or language psychology, it can be defined as the Study of psychological and neurobiological factors that underlie the acquisition, understanding and use of language in humans.

Specifically, psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field of study that takes advantage of the contribution of various disciplines such as neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, linguistics and cognitive sciences in general.

Object of study of psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics mainly deals with the computational processes applied by the brain to Understand and produce language. The three primary processes covered by psycholinguistics are:

1. Language understanding.
2. Language production.
3. Acquisition of language.

Although it shares some notions and some levels of analysis of linguistics, it is distinguished from the latter as Try to define Theories about the functional architecture of the processes involved in the use of language, investigating how language is represented and processed at the cognitive level and trying to locate it anatomically. This objective is achieved by investigating the different levels that constitute the ability to use language:

• Phonology.
• Morphology.
• Syntax.
• Semantics.
• Pragmatics.

In addition to the study of anatomo-functional architecture of language processes in healthy subjects, psycholinguistics also study damaged linguistic processes In subjects with evolutionary pathologies, such as dyslexia, or who have developed language pathologies after diverse injuries such as stroke, tumor diseases, cranial trauma or neurodegenerative diseases, such as dementias.

Importance of psycholinguistics

The results obtained in the study of the pathology of language and apasiology are useful for Define better cognitive rehabilitation techniques of aphasias, evolutionary pathologies or neurodegenerative diseases that affect language.

Data and theories elaborated on the brain computing of language can be applied in the following ways:

• For didactic purposes: The understanding of the anatomical organization of language in humans plays a relevant role in education.
  
• Improve teaching techniques of the first language or second language in school programs.
• Better understand the functioning of the brain and the mind: Scientific research on the anatomofunctional organization of language in the brain of human beings may have the purpose of reaching a better understanding of the functioning of the brain and the mind.
• Study the relationships between the mind and the brain: thus creating a research field capable of unifying biological sciences with behavioral sciences.

How psycholinguistics applies

Psycholinguistic Apply the scientific method and use different methodologies to collect experimental data. Next, we show you what methods are used in the field of psycholinguistics:

• Behavior observation: The observation of linguistic errors committed by speakers.
• Behavioral measures: The measurement of reaction times in linguistic tasks, the lexical decision or decide whether a word presented by the researcher belongs or not to the tongue of the subject of the essay.
• Psycho-neurophysiological measures: such as electrophysiological methods or neuroimaging techniques (ocular movements, electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance, positron emission tomography). Through these techniques, the physiological reactions that take place in the brain during the execution of tasks of a linguistic nature are measured.

Examples of psycholinguistics

The Linguist and Social Critical Noam Chomsky was a pioneer in psycholinguistics, stating that all normal human beings have a Innate linguistic ability and that all human languages ​​have a common underlying structure known as universal grammar.

This directly challenges behavior learning theories who claim that language is not innate, but learned step by step through imitation and reinforcement. This forms debate still ongoing today.

The Language acquisition is an important subtitle in psycholinguistics of which the following factors have been studied:

• Study of the acquisition of language in young children who are learning their mother tongue.
• Study of the acquisition of the second language. Investigate issues such as the reason why learning a second language is easier for children than for most adults.
• Study of why non -native can have difficulty distinguishing and pronouncing certain necessary sounds for significant discourse in their second language, when these sounds are not present or differentiated in their mother tongue.

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