PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

THE NATURE OF LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE

■ The Universality of Human Language

Languages are similar in their function and organization. Every human language has a grammar. Furthermore, the organization in all human languages both of lexicons and the formal properties of grammatical systems are similar . This is what psycholinguists mean by the statement that language is universal.

■ Phonotactic constraints

Phonotactic constraints are really constraints on the way syllables can be created in a particular language. A syllable is a group of sounds which must contain a nucleus (usually a vowel), and may have an onset (one or more syllable-initial consonants) and a coda (one or more syllablefinal consonants). Together, the nucleus and the coda are the syllable’s rhyme.

THE BIOLOGICAL BASIS OF LANGUAGE

Psycholinguistics is a concerned with how language is represented and processed in the brain. on language as a system controlled by the brain that is different from but closely linked to general cognition.

■ Language Is Species Specific

Language is one of the most important component to communicate and to convey messages between individuals, we can simplify that every species has a communication system. There is no other species that use language communication system to communicate like human. There are many research was made to find if the animals can communicate using language. For example: Lana a chimpanzee that can operate the computer. There are three key with a word that written in there, please, machine give and water. When she wants to drink she knows that she should press water key. Even she can do that things, its does not mean she understand the word. It can be because of she knows when she press that key she will get water as a reward

■ Language Is Universal in Humans.        

All human babies are born with an innate capacity to learn language. It genetically prepared to organized linguistics information. Human’s ability to acquire and use language is as natural as a fish’s ability to swim. Language does not need to be taught. Children are acquiring language naturally.

■ Children Everywhere Acquire Language on a Similar Developmental Schedule

Children acquire language in the same age. It’s the same with baby roll over, sit up, crawl, and walk at similar ages everywhere. When they are acquiring language, they made the same mistake like an un grammatically sentences and the pronunciations. Most researchers agree that the optimal period for first language acquisition is before the early teen years,

■ Language Development Is Triggered by the Environment

On of the factors that affect human’s ability in acquire language is environment. Children will not develop language if language is not accessible in their environment or nobody is there to interact with them. How people acquire language is based on the environment. For example: a baby that was born from Indonesian parents lives in Japan. The environment helps the baby to acquire Japanese language. He hear Japanese language everyday from people around him and it makes him can speak Japanese well. That is the evidence that environment is helpful in acquire language.

■ Anatomical and Physiological Correlates for Language

Gall in eighteen century believed that musical ability, morality, and language ability is in different place in our brain. It’s proved by Broca’s research. Aphasia is a disease that happened in the place that processing language inside our brain.

The Acquisition of Language

 This picture is shows how we process the language. Starting from getting an input and then the signal is going to LAD and it becomes a grammar and lexicon.

Children around the world acquire language in different cultural and social settings, so it should not come as a surprise that many caregivers are not necessary features of the linguistic environment. In cultures where information about the language comes from people other than caretakers information must be conveyed in an interactive setting. But children do not need to be rewarded, or encouraged to imitate the language around them, or corrected when they produce an error, and caregivers do not need to alter the way they speak to guarantee successful language acquisition.

There are some stage of age in acquire language.

■ From before birth to 12 months

Werker’s have found that infants aged 6 to 8 months can differentiate speech sounds that are not phonemic in their language. For instance, Japanese infants can discriminate /r/ versus /l/ as well as English-speaking adults can, although Japanese adults find this distinction very difficult. In the next 6 months the baby start babbling and it consist consonant and vowel sounds.

■ From 12 to 24 months

In this step infants can say their first word. When the children can speak 50 vocabularies, they

start combine the words together to make sentences

Metalinguistic awareness

this skill is important for children because it’s related with an early reading habits from the children. When they read a book that is make them aware about the phonological terms. For example: when they read a “cat” word from the book they know that cat is consist of 3 alphabets.

The ability to detect an ambiguous word is one of the matalinguistic skill. The last is children awareness to ungrammatical sentences.

THE SPEAKER: PRODUCING SPEECH

it start with an idea for a message to the  a process of lexical selection. The capsule-like figures represent lexical items for the words girl, dog, and pet, activated based on the intended meaning for the message. The tree diagram in the center represents the sentence’s syntactic form. The phonetic transcription to the right represents the sentence’s eventual phonological form, sent on to the articulatory system, which produces the corresponding speech signal.

■ Production in bilinguals and second language learners

People who can speak 2 languages have two language-specific grammars. When they speak in one language the grammar and lexical unit of that language will be active and the other languages will not active. When they speak 2 languages, lexical unit and grammars from both languages will active. It is possible for the speakers to speak both languages in the same time. When the speaker switches from one language to another language it’s called code switching.

■ Coarticulation

The most important psycholinguistic aspect of speech production is the phenomenon of coarticulation. Coarticulation means that the articulators are always performing motions for more than one speech sound at a time. it tell use how to pronoun the words well so, there is no different perspective.

THE HEARER: SPEECH PERCEPTION AND LEXICAL ACCESS

 It begins with the hearer when decoding the sentence the girl pets the dog. The speech signal on the far right, perceived by the auditory system, serves to recover the phonological form for the sentence, indicated by the phonetic transcription. The tree diagram on the left represents the sentence’s syntactic form, used to decode the meaning of the sentence. The light bulb indicates that the hearer has successfully recovered the idea the speaker intended to convey.

■ Constructive speech perception and phonological illusions

One of the speech perception systems is constructive. This means that the speech perception system takes information from anywhere. it can find information to construct a linguistic percept of the acoustic signal.

■ Bottom-up and top-down information

When you hear the information clearly it called bottom-up information. For example: your friends said “don’t forget to buy 2 boxes of milks and 4 cheese bread”. You can hear the voice clearly and you know what to buy because you get the information clearly. When you do not get the information clearly it called top-down information. For example: the situations in your house is noisy because your friends play a music hardly and your friends said “don’t forget to buy 2 boxes of milks and 4 cheese bread”. Because of the noisy it makes you do not get the information clearly. Maybe you just hear the word “boxes”, ”milk”, ”or 2 boxes of bread”.

■ Bound morphemes

There are inflectional morphemes, like the –s that attached to nouns to make them plural (book/books) or the –ed that attached to verbs to make them past tense (play/played). There are derivational morphemes, that can change the meaning of a word, and sometimes the grammatical class of the word as well. For instance, the suffix –er can be attached to a verb, changing it into a noun meaning a person who performs the activity of that verb (bike/biker).

THE HEARER: STRUCTURAL PROCESSING

■ Prosody

Prosody is the intonation of a sentence. Intonational boundaries are signaled by :

·         Pitch excursions like:rises or falls,.

·         Fluctuations in duration (a word has a longer duration at the end of an  intonational phrase than when it appears in the middle of an intonational phrase),

·         and pauses.