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The Universality of Human Language: Psycholiinguistics

1) All human languages share common properties of having a grammar and lexicon to generate sentences, suggesting language is a biological trait. 2) Children acquire the grammar and vocabulary of the languages they are exposed to without being explicitly taught. 3) Psycholinguistics studies both linguistic competence, referring to a person's internal knowledge of language, and performance, referring to how that knowledge is used in production and comprehension of sentences.

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Ricky Wijaya
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76 views

The Universality of Human Language: Psycholiinguistics

1) All human languages share common properties of having a grammar and lexicon to generate sentences, suggesting language is a biological trait. 2) Children acquire the grammar and vocabulary of the languages they are exposed to without being explicitly taught. 3) Psycholinguistics studies both linguistic competence, referring to a person's internal knowledge of language, and performance, referring to how that knowledge is used in production and comprehension of sentences.

Uploaded by

Ricky Wijaya
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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THE UNIVERSALITY OF

HUMAN LANGUAGE
psycholiinguistics
• All human languages have a grammar and a lexicon, which together
allow the creation of an infinite set of sentences to convey any possible
thought.
• The fact that all humans have languages of similar organization and
function strongly suggests that language is part of the human biological
endowment, as the communication systems of animals are specific to
their species.
• The universality of human language has profound consequences for the
way psycholinguists analyze the human use of language.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE
ACQUISITION OF LANGUAGE

• An important area of psycholinguistics is language acquisition.


• Just as every human culture has at least one language, children in every
culture acquire the grammar and lexicon of the language or languages in
their environment and develop the ability to employ that linguistic
knowledge in the production and comprehension of speech.
• Children do this without effort and without being taught.
HOW LANGUAGE PAIRS SOUND
AND MEANING
• Morphological rules and syntactic rules are involved in creating the structural organization
of words and sentences, that is, the relationships between words and phrases in sentences.
• It is a fundamental concept in psycholinguistics that the meaning of a sentence is a function
of the meaning of individual words and how those words are organized structurally.
• People are consciously aware of many elements of language – like consonants or vowels,
syllables, and words – but they tend not to be aware of sentence structure.
THE MAN SAW THE BOY WITH THE
BINOCULARS.
LINGUISTIC COMPETENCE AND
LINGUISTIC PERFORMANCE
• A grammar and a lexicon are those components of language that allow sounds and meanings
to be paired.
• When people know a language, they know its grammar and its lexicon.
• This knowledge is called linguistic competence.
• Linguistic competence is a technical term, different from the usual meaning of the word
competence.
• Being competent at something usually means that a person has adequate abilities to perform
an action with skill, but that is not what is meant by linguistic competence.
• Linguistic competence has no evaluative connotation; it simply refers to the knowledge of
language that is in a person’s brain (or mind), knowledge that provides a system for pairing
sound and meaning.
CONTINUED
• Linguistic performance, in contrast, is the use of such knowledge in the
actual processing of sentences, by which we mean their production and
comprehension.
• Typically, linguists are concerned with describing linguistic competence
and psycholinguists are concerned with describing linguistic
performance.
• Beyond basic sentence processing, psycholinguists are also concerned
with the actual use of language.
STEPS INVOLVED IN ENCODING BY THE
SPEAKER (LEFT TO RIGHT) AND DECODING BY
THE HEARER (RIGHT TO LEFT).
THE SPEECH SIGNAL AND
LINGUISTIC PERCEPTION
EXPLANATION
• Waveform for the sentence Linda loves the melody, illustrating
graphically the continuous nature of the speech signal.
• The superimposed vertical lines mark the approximate locations for
word boundaries.
• The word boundaries are not particularly salient, and neither are the
boundaries between the consonants and vowels that make up the
words.

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