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Introduction: Psycholinguistics and the Nature of Language

Language Is at the Core of Who We Are

Language is an amazing gift. It is a gift that is at the centre of who we are as a species. Try to imagine what we, as human beings, would be like if we did not have language. Very likely, we would not be human beings.

In many ways, language ability is related to a story I once heard about two lobsters and a dolphin. The story goes something like this:

Two lobsters are walking along the ocean floor off the coast of Maine. A dolphin swims toward them. At first, they are concerned, but then, they see that the dolphin is smiling and friendly. And indeed, he is! So, they each raise a claw and wave hello. The dolphin waves a flipper back and says, "Good morning! The water is cold today, isn't it." The lobsters wave again and the dolphin swims past. Seconds later, one lobster turns to the other and says, "He seemed nice. But, what's water?"

Language is for us humans what water is for those lobsters. We live in a world in which language is everywhere. So, it is hard to notice and easy to take for granted. But when we do think about it, it seems clear that language shapes who we are as individuals and what we are as societies.

Almost all of our present and past culture is built upon the human capacity for language. As a species, we can transmit learned knowledge from one generation to the next because children typically acquire the language of their parents with ease. We have expanded this ability greatly by developing the technology of writing so that knowledge can be transferred without requiring that the person producing language and the person understanding it be in the same physical location at that same time.

Through language, we humans classify and attempt to understand the world around us. We communicate, attempt to influence each other, and, in the best cases, build cultures. The power of language to enable knowledge transfer across individuals and generations has helped us to develop technologies that advance our well-being and to build increasingly complex social and political structures.

Yet, it is important to note that language is also tied to more emotional aspects of our lives. Jokes make us laugh and warm stories make us smile. Threats create fears and taunts create tears. All of these can be seen as both emotional events and language events. They are at the centre of human relations, and they underline the way in which the threads of languages become the fabric of societies.

As the considerations in this section suggest, a thorough understanding of human language requires that we examine the mental representations that underlie language ability and that we must examine/investigate how language ability becomes the language use that can shape thoughts, feelings, and actions. These are certainly great challenges. They are the challenges that the field of psycholinguistics seeks to meet.

What Is Psycholinguistics?

Psycholinguistics can be defined as the study of the human ability to do language. I believe that the key part of this definition is the sequence "ability to do." The use of the word "do" underlines the fact that, from a psycholinguistic perspective, language is an activity. Psycholinguists seek to understand what happens in the minds of humans when they engage in language activities and how that can shed light on the nature of mental processes and representations.

Quite possibly, the psycholinguistic study of language activity represents the scientific and scholarly endeavour that offers the very best window to how the human mind works. The reason for this is that, as I have noted above, language is the core component of the thought processes that we consider to be uniquely human.

We already know a great deal about language ability - many times more than we did just a few decades ago. Yet, great mysteries and uncharted domains remain. And, this is what makes psycholinguistics both fascinating and important because, as we increase our understanding of language, we also increase our understanding of what it means to have a human mind.

Let me now turn back to the word "ability" in the definition of psycholinguistics mentioned earlier. A reasonable question to ask would be: Why do we not simply define psycholinguistics in terms of the actual language activities of comprehension and production rather than the ability to perform these activities? The answer to this question is that the term "ability" brings together the notions of capacity and activity. Both of these notions are critical to understanding in psycholinguistics. Of course, psycholinguistics as a discipline is very much concerned with what people actually do when they listen, speak, read, and write. But we are also concerned with the underlying mental knowledge and cognitive organization and processes that make such behaviour possible.

Mostly, humans are completely unaware of such cognitive processes. Most of us rarely think about how we move our mouths to pronounce syllables and words. We rarely reflect on the cognitive operations involved in how we select the words that we use in a sentence. Of course, there are people who do devote conscious effort to such things: Poets must choose just the right sounds, words, and phrases of their language, and learners of a foreign language typically bring conscious effort to matters of accent, vocabulary, and grammar. But even in such cases of conscious effort, the person involved will not be able to use conscious introspection to observe or gain knowledge of the actual cognitive and brain operations that are involved in producing and understanding language. And it is for this reason that psycholinguistics requires specialized research techniques.

The Scope of Skills in Psycholinguistics: Speaking, Writing, Listening, and Reading

As we have already seen, language is very much at the centre of who we are as a species. So, it is not an easy matter to set boundaries on the field of psycholinguistics. Nevertheless, like other academic disciplines, psycholinguistics can be said to have a scope - a domain that it has a special responsibility to understand. Perhaps the best way to define that scope might be in terms of what it means to do language when we say that psycholinguistics can be defined as the study of the human ability to do language. It seems to me that to do language means to comprehend and use it in a manner that makes an individual a part of one or more communities. So, we can say that the scope of psycholinguistics includes the representations and processes involved in language production and comprehension.

For most of human history, all language production and comprehension involved speech and listening only. Since the advent of written language about 5,500 years ago, at least some members of our species have also been able to use the visual modality for language comprehension and production. Although these were once the skills of the very few, it now seems that any account of language ability that does not include reading and writing would offer an inadequate representation of how humans do language. This perspective is shown in Table 1.1, in which the inclusion of the visual modality creates a matrix of four key language activities. These four key activities comprise the core domains of psycholinguistics. They are the activities that psycholinguistics seeks to understand. If we are successful in achieving this understanding, there is every reason to expect that the benefits and consequences will be far-reaching.

Table 1.1 The four core language activities.

Language function Production Comprehension Language modality Auditory Speaking Listening Visual Writing Reading

As our discussion continues, we will examine the roles that all four language activities play in how words are represented and processed in the mind in some detail. At present, in order to frame that future in-depth discussion, it might be worthwhile to consider the key properties of each activity and how those properties can inform our overall approach to the understanding of language.

Speaking

The activity of speaking is foundational. It is what we notice most in the development of a child's language ability. Indeed, even casual observation of young children suggests that speaking has a biological dimension. The babbling that typically begins to appear among children at about 4-6 months of age seems to be a kind of speech precursor in the way that crawling is a precursor of walking. This suggests a type of natural unfolding. This feeling of the naturalness of speech seems to be characteristic of the process as a whole.

As an overt behaviour, speaking involves both conscious and unconscious language planning. People make conscious choices about when they will speak and when they choose to remain silent. Persons with multilingual ability make choices about which of their languages they will use at any particular time. In addition, both multilinguals and monolinguals make many other speech production choices, involving, for example, which words to use and which words not to use, how loudly to speak, and how quickly to speak. Yet, it is important to point out that many aspects of...