Presentation of psycholinguistics Presenters: Shameem Akhter, Fatima Syed, Iqra Nayab, Shaat Bibi, A.Baseer Shah Topic: Psycholinguistics, Its Origin and Contemporary Issues.

Psycholinguistics: It is an interdisciplinary field studied in psychology, linguistics and cognitive science. Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study to use, acquire, comprehend and produce language. The study of mental aspects of language and speech. It focuses upon the comprehension and production of language.

Cont. It is concerned with the relationship between human mind and language as it examine the process that occur in the brain while receiving both spoken and written discourse. This term was primarily coined by Jacob robert.

Cont. Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the computations and processes that the brain undergoes to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model (1980s) seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input.

Origin Work on psycholinguistics started from Plato. It become famous with linguistics. The important linguists who worked on psycholinguistics and due to which it is known in field of linguistics are paul Broca, willern levelt and charles hockett. Psycholinguistics is closely related to neurolinguistics and works on comprehension and production of language.

The function of mind in language: According to Chomsky; there is LAD in everyone's mind, this device is fixed in the brain to acquire language. Chomsky posited humans posses a special innate ability for language and that complex syntactic feature such as recursion are hardwired in the brain.

Recent work on psycholinguistics: After the invention of modern equipments, many improvements have brought in this field. The researchers can identify where different types of linguistic information are located within the brain. They can even track the processing taking place in the brains of pre-linguistic children. As we can say that in nineteenth century the scientists argued that the language is only related to left hemisphere of brain but according to modern research right hemisphere also plays basic role in the language perceiving and judging.

Work of some researchers: There are the research of well known researchers in the field of psycholinguistics B.F. Skinner, Rudolf carnap and Jean Piaget. the innatist perspective began with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of Skinner's book in 1959. This review helped to start what has been termed "the cognitive revolution" in psychology. Chomsky posited humans possess a special, innate ability for language and that complex syntactic features, such as recursion, are "hard-wired" in the brain.

Cont. Assuming that eye movements are closely linked to the current focus of attention, language processing can be studied by monitoring eye movements while a subject is presented auditorily with linguistic input. Recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Beginning with Rayner (1978) the importance and informativity of eye-movements during reading was established.

Cont. Later, Tanenhaus et al. (1995) used the visual-world paradigm to study the cognitive processes related to spoken language. According to the psychologists a child which is exposed to the multilingual society it has ability in mind to learn the languages easily. And it is the stage for learning a new language.

Cont. Two other major subfields of psycholinguistics investigate first language acquisition, the process by which infants acquire language, and second language acquisition. In addition, it is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languages than it is for infants to learn their first language. Bilingual infants are able to learn both of their native languages easily. Sensitive periods may exist during which language can be learned readily.

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