Psycholinguistics

Paper Summary:

The paper provides a definition of psycholinguistics and describes the first steps taken in its development and the significant discoveries made in subsequent stages until today. The paper explains that psycholinguistics examines the psychology of language and concerns the study of the psychological processes involved in language acquisition. The paper concludes that it is reasonable to assert that the existing body of knowledge concerning psycholinguistics will continue to grow in the future.

Outline:
Introduction
Review and Discussion
Conclusion

From the Paper:

"Although different sources credit different researchers with its development, all signs point to Noam Chomsky as one of the early proponents of psycholinguistics as it is applied today. In his book, The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory, Harley (2001), reports that the history of psycholinguistics is a relatively recent one. "Although it is often traced to a conference held in . . . 1951, the approach was certainly used before then. . . . If we place the infancy of modern psycholinguistics sometime around the American linguist Noam Chomsky's (1959) review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior, its adolescence would correspond to the period in the early and mid-1960s when psycholinguists tried to relate language processing to transformational grammar" (12)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Aitchison, Jean. The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. London: Routledge, 1998.
• Carpenter, Patricia A., Marcel Adam Just and Akira Miyake. (1995). "Language Comprehension: Sentence and Discourse Processing." Annual Review of Psychology 46, 91.
• Danks, Joseph H. and Sam Glucksberg. Experimental Psycholinguistics: An Introduction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1975.
• Grenfell, M. and V. Harris. Modern Languages and Learning Strategies: In Theory and Practice. London: Routledge, 1999.
• Harley, Trevor A. The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press, 2001.

More papers on Psycholinguistics:

• Essay # 16461 : "Psycholinguistics"
• Research Paper # 57039 : "Psycholinguistics: The Acquisition of Language"
• Research Paper # 128554 : "Understanding the Origins of Language"

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