MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

688 Psycholinguistics
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Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is the study of people’s actions and mental
processes as they use language. At its core are speaking
and listening, which have been studied in domains as different
as LANGUAGE ACQUISITION and language disorders. Yet
the primary domain of psycholinguistics is everyday language
use.
Speaking and listening have several levels. At the bottom
are the perceptible sounds and gestures of language: how
speakers produce them, and how listeners hear, see, and
identify them (see PHONETICS, PHONOLOGY, SIGN LAN-
GUAGES). One level up are the words, gestural signals, and
syntactic arrangement of what is uttered: how speakers formulate
utterances, and how listeners identify them (see
SENTENCE PROCESSING). At the next level up are communicative
acts: what speakers do with their utterances, and how
listeners understand what they mean (see PRAGMATICS). At
the highest level is DISCOURSE, the joint activities people
engage in as they use language. At each level, speakers and
listeners have to coordinate their actions.
Speakers plan what they say more than one word at a
time. In conversation and spontaneous narratives, they tend
to plan in intonation units, generally a single major clause
or phrase delivered under a unifying intonation contour
(Chafe 1980). Intonation units take time to plan, so they
often begin with pauses and disfluencies (uh or um, elongated
words, repeated words). For example, one speaker
recounting a film said: “[1.0 sec pause] A--nd u--m [2.6 sec
pause] you see him taking . . . picking the pears off the
leaves.”
Planning such units generally proceeds from the top level
of language down—from intention to ARTICULATION (Levelt
1989). Speakers decide on a message, then choose constructions
for expressing it, and finally program the phonetic
segments for articulating it. They do this in overlapping
stages.
Formulation starts at a functional level. Consider a
woman planning “Take the steaks out of the freezer.” First
she chooses the subject, verb, direct object, and source she
wants to express, roughly “the addressee is to get meat from
a freezer.” Then she chooses an appropriate syntactic frame,
an imperative construction with a verb, object, and source
location. She then finds the noun and verbs she needs, take,
steak, and freeze. Finally, she fills in the necessary syntactic
elements—the article the, the preposition out of, and the suffixes
-s and -er. Formulation then proceeds to a positional
level. She creates a phonetic plan for what she has formulated
so far. She uses the plan to program her articulatory
organs (tongue, lips, glottis) to produce the actual sounds,
“Take the steaks out of the freezer.” Processing at these levels
overlaps as she plans later phrases while articulating earlier
ones.
Much of the evidence for these stages comes from slips
of the tongue collected over the past century (Fromkin
1973; Garrett 1980). Suppose that the speaker of the last
example had, by mistake, transposed steak and freeze as she
introduced them. She would then have added -s to freeze
and -er to steak and produced “Take the freezes out of the
steaker.” Other slips occur at the positional level, as when
the initial sounds in left hemisphere are switched to form
heft lemisphere.
Listeners are often thought to work from the bottom up.
They are assumed to start with the sounds they hear, infer
the words and syntax of an utterance, and, finally, infer what
the speakers meant. The actual picture is more complicated.
In everyday conversation, listeners have a good idea of what
speakers are trying to do, and working top down, they use
this information to help them identify and understand what
they hear (Tanenhaus and Trueswell 1995).
Spoken utterances are identified from left to right by an
incremental process of elimination (Marslen-Wilson 1987).
As listeners take in the sounds of “elephant,” for example,
they narrow down the words it might be. They start with an
initial cohort of all words beginning with “e” (roughly 1000
words), narrow that to the cohort of all words beginning with
“el” (roughly 100 words), and so on. By the sound “f” the
cohort contains only one word, allowing them to identify the
word as “elephant.” This way listeners often identify a word
before it is complete. Evidence also suggests that listeners
access all of the meanings of the words in these cohorts
(Swinney 1979). For example, the moment they identify
“bugs” in “He found several bugs in the corner of his room”
they activate the two meanings “insects” and “hidden microphones.”
Remarkably, they activate the same two meanings
in “He found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the