PSYCHOLINGUISTIC MODELS

Psycholinguistics is a science investigating the speech activity of humans, including perception and forming of utterances, via psychological methods. After creating its hypotheses and models, psycholinguistics tests them through psychological experiments. Therefore, psycholinguistics is similar to linguistics in its objects of investigation and similar to psychology in its methods.

Here is an example of a psycholinguistic experiment. The subject, i.e., the person under observation, is given, one by one, a sequence of specially selected words as input stimuli. Then the subject is prompted to give the response to each word as any other word first coming to his or her mind. The pairs “stimulus—response” are recorded: rosa—roja, padre—madre, mano—pie, etc. Based on such experiments, psycholinguists put forward a hypothesis that various psychological types of people demonstrate specific types of associative choices, so that they can give a true identification of the personality under investigation based exclusively on such tests.

In another experiment, the objectives can be nearer to linguistics as such. The series of utterances with some syntactic ambiguities are given to the human subjects. The time required to the person under test for disambiguation is measured, when he or she selects at last one of possible hypotheses. On the grounds of experimental statistics, a hypothesis is advanced how a human can understand such constructions and what is the humans’ way for the disambiguation.

Psycholinguistics tries also to describe the teaching of native and not native language, social influence of a speech on humans, and so forth. In such a way, psycholinguistics aims to explain some purely psychological features of people concerning their speech behavior. Psychological features, in their turn, are closely related to the social behavior of a person. Two kinds of activities, both of very high complexity, are studied in parallel, and each aspect of the science exploits techniques and suggestions from the other.

Therefore, psycholinguistics usually does not have linguistic ideas of its own. It adopts them from various branches of linguistics and then uses them for its own purposes without much critical review and feedback. Purely psychological methods well adapted to the problems of linguistics as such have not yet been proposed, so that these methods give little to generalized (holistic) models of language.