Psycho Linguistics

PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: A Cross-Language Perspective

By: Elizabeth Bates Presented By; Hendri

Abstract Cross-linguistic studies are essential to the identification of universal processes in language development, language use, and language breakdown. Comparative studies in all three areas are reviewed, demonstrating powerful differences across languages in the order in which specific structures are acquired by children,

the sparing and impairment of those structures in aphasic patients, and the structures that normal adults rely upon most heavily in real-time word and sentence processing. It is proposed that these differences reflect a cost-benefit trade-off among universal mechanisms for learning and processing (perception, attention, motor planning, memory) that are critical for language, but are not unique to language.

CONTENTS INTRODUCTION CROSS-LANGUAGE

CONTRASTS AND THEIR RELEVANCE FOR PROCESSING CROSS-LINGUISTIC VARIATIONS IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT “SPEECH PERCEPTION” CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION The purpose of psycholinguistic research is to uncover universal processes that govern the development, use, and breakdown of language. However, to the extent that research in a given subfield of psycholinguistics is dominated by English, we cannot distinguish between universal mechanisms and English-specific facts.

Below we present a brief, selective review of cross- linguistic research on language development in children, and language processing in normal adults, in an order that reflects the impact that cross-language variations have had on theoretical frameworks within each field.

CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDIES OF MONOLINGUALS COME IN TWO VARIETIES :  One

approach treats language as a between-subjects variable  The second approach treats languages as experiments of nature

TREATS LANGUAGE AS A BETWEENSUBJECTS VARIABLE : Applying the same experimental design in two or more languages to determine how theoretically relevant linguistic differences affect performance. Examples from child language include crosslinguistic comparisons of tense and aspect in narratives (Berman & Slobin 1994), the use of “path verbs” (e.g. “ascended”) versus “manner verbs” (e.g. “wiggled”) to describe an action-packed cartoon (Slobin 1996)

The second approach treats languages as experiments of nature Exploiting particular properties of a single target language to ask questions that could not be answered in (for example) English

CROSS-LANGUAGE CONTRASTS AND THEIR RELEVANCE FOR PROCESSING We assume that psycholinguistic universals do exist. Languages such as English, Italian, and Chinese drawon the same mental/neural machinery. They do not “live”in different parts of the brain, and children do not differ in the mechanisms requiredto learn each one.

However, languages can differ (sometimes quite dramatically) in the way this mental/neural substrate is taxed or configured, making differential use of the same basic mechanisms for perceptual processing, encoding and retrieval, working memory, and planning.

languages can vary qualitatively, in the presence/absence of specific linguistic features (e.g. Chinese has lexical tone, Russian has nominal case markers, English has neither).

languages can vary quantitatively, in the challenge posed by equivalent structures (lexical, phonological, grammatical) for learning and/or real-time use. For example, passives are rare in English but extremely common in Sesotho, and relative clause constructions are more common in Italian than in English. To the extent that frequency and recency facilitate structural access, these differences should result in earlier acquisition and/or a processing advantage.

CROSS-LINGUISTIC VARIATIONS IN LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT Human newborns are “citizens of the world” (Kuhl 1985), able to discriminate virtually all of the sound contrasts (phonetics) that are used systematically by the world’s languages (for a detailed review, see Aslin et al 1998).

Nevertheless, preferential-listening studies have shown that newborn infants have already acquired a weak preference for the sounds of their native language in utero (Jusczyk et al 1993, Mehler et al 1988)

By 3 months of age, infants show selective preference for their own names, with discrimination of many detailed and language-specific phonotactic features following soon thereafter (Jusczyk 1997),

Including a clear preference for the prototypic vowels of their native language by 6 months (Kuhl et al 1992)

For rapid learning of speech-specific structure was initially cited as evidence for the existence of a domain-specific “speech acquisition device” (Mehler et al 1988)

The acquisition of speech contrasts in the first year of life may be a language-specific manifestation of domain-general learning mechanisms (Kuhl 1985)

CONCLUSION The dominance of English in twentiethcentury psycholinguistics was a historical accident, more socio-political than scientific. However, it has had particularly unfortunate consequences for those fields that try to study the universal psychological and neural underpinnings of language.

Psycholinguistics has finally broken away from the hegemony of English, and the field is better for it. There is, however, an immense amount of work that needs to be done to verify whether Englishbased findings can be generalized and to explore the opportunities afforded by the dramatic structural

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