Psycholinguistics

Question 1

What are psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics about ?

Answer 1

Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics are about how language is processed in the brain.

Question 2

How many parts does processing have and what are they ? Which precedes which ?

Answer 2

Processing has two parts :

Perception (what we receive) and production (what we create).

Perception precedes production.

Question 3

Name a few language disorders.

Answer 3

Dyslexia
Broca’s aphasia
Specific language impairment (SLI)

Question 4

Linear v. parallel processing of utterances

Answer 4

There are good reasons to think that language is not processed linearly but rather as we go along and at all stages of linguistics at once.

Question 5

What are linguistic illusions ?

Answer 5

Linguistic illusions are sentences that fool us not because they are ungrammatical, but for reasons of how we process language.

These include :

Garden-path sentences that require reanalysis (The horse raced past the barn fell).

Recursion of rare forms such as center embedding (The rat the cat the dog chased loved hid)

Question 6

Slips of the tongue

Answer 6

It is normal to make language errors in our native languages. These are of several types :

Malapropisms 
Spoonerisms 
Eggcorns 
Freudian slips 
Mondegreen

Question 7

Practice exercises

1. Which kind of aphasia is demonstrated by the following speech ?
   a. ‘’ Walk, uh, dog. You take bone uh walk. ‘’
   b. ‘’ You know as well as me that smoodle binkered and that I want to get above and below and take concern of him before. ‘’

Answer 7

Soon.