Amira Al Harbi

 Psycholinguistics is concerned with language and the brain.  To be a perfect psycholinguistist, you would need to have a comprehensive understanding of the way the brain operates, the processes by which we perceive and interpret the world, and the variety of categories that are found in human language.  In addition, you would need to have a laboratory full equipment suitable for both psychological and neurological experimentation.

 Psycholinguistics is a sub-discipline of both psychology and linguistics.  It is likely to encounter some different viewpoints and approaches because the slant within textbooks varies.

 Most psychologists believe that human cognition is modular. This means that it consists of a number of independent processors.  A model of processing consistent with this pattern might have the comprehension of written input mediated by an internal phonological representation of the input, so that all written input had to be turned into "speech" before it could be decoded.

 It should be straightforward to establish relationships through clinical case studies for several reasons: 1) Each process is complex and involves several stages. 2) Damage occurs in different place in different patients. 3) There is to be more than one route to processing any one type of input, and damage may affect only one of them. 4) Two processes might be fundamentally independent but tend to both get damaged in many patients. 5) One can gain an impression about these problems from Eysenck, Keane, Caplan, and Harley.

 There are two level at which a project in psycholinguistics can operate. 1) Investigate the hypothesis that some types of extraneous sound are more distracting to linguistic processing than others by giving a difficult linguistic task to three groups of subjects. 2) Compare memory for objects with memory for words. Give one group of subjects a set of household objects to memorize. Give a second group just a list of the names of the same objects to memorize. Hypothesis: it is easier to remember the names of objects than it is to remember the objects them selves. 3) Assess the transferability of linguistic training to another task by giving one group of subjects training in strategies for memorizing random lists of words.

Motor theory in which the listener recreates the motor movements associated with speaking the words Cohort theory in which we "flag up" all the words we know which have that sound at the beginning, creating a word-initial cohort. Trace theory which derives from an approach to the modeling of psychological processing called connectionism, and entails the dynamic connection of nodes creating the information pathways where they are most useful.. There are three theories to show us how to understand the spoken word.

 There are three theories to help us understand the written word. 1) Autonomous serial search model in which words in the brain are likened to books on a library independently in three different access files: orthographic, phonological, and syntactic-semantic. 2) Logogen model in which each word has a threshold of activation, which, when reached, triggers it to be recognized. 3) Interactive activation model which is based on connectionist principles, this is similar in nature to the Trace model for speech comprehension.

 It is believed that there are differences in the way that we access the meaning of spoken and written words, but that the processes by which we achieve the comprehension of larger units such as phrases, clauses and sentences are common to both mediums.

 We should put into consideration: 1) The relative complexity of sentence types which contains the surface structure and the underlying structure. 2) Lexical and structural ambiguity in much of what we hear. Ambiguity occurs at the syntactic level. 3) Garden-path sentences which are so called because they lead us up the garden path by misleading us about their construction. 4) Inferencing which includes two theories that exist in opposition: The constructionist view and the minimalist.