socio+psycho - copy

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Sociolinguistics andPsycholinguistics


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Definitions

Linguistics:

It is the branch of science that studies the origin,structure, and use of language.

Sociolinguistics:- The study of relationships between language and social

behavior is called sociolinguistics.

Psycholinguistics:

The psychological study of language is calledpsycholinguistics. As the name impliespsycholinguistics is principally an integration of thefields of psychology and linguistics.


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Introduction to Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics

It is the study of language in relation to society.

Language is always meant for society. The social

interaction and communication of ideas or messagescan be possible only through language.

The history and the function of language have

been the subject of studies since the prehistoric

period, but sociolinguistics has been introduced

only recently perhaps in the late sixties.

Considerable growth has taken place since then.


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Sociolinguistics

It does not mean that the study of language inrelation to society is the invention of 1960s but onthe contrary there is a long tradition of dialects

and in the general study of the relations betweenword meaning and culture.

since the 1960s both these began to be consideredas the subjects within sociolinguistics.

Sociolinguistics throws light on both the nature oflanguage and the nature of society.

The purpose of language is to represent the natureand the culture of the society.


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Sociolinguistics

Forms of language

We use different forms of language fordifferent purposes. We express languagesthrough either speech or graphic medium.

The speech can be a bit different from thegraphic expression.

The grammatical rules and the selection of

appropriate words are required in graphicexpression but in speech some relaxation maybe allowed.


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Sociolinguistics

In graphic expression there are number offormal and informal forms to meet thedifferent methods of social interaction. e.g.

letter, application, report, notice, agenda,proceedings, statement, newspapers, books ,etc.

The speech may also have a number of formse.g., gossip, talk, lecture in a public place,lecture in a seminar or in classroom etc.


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Insights into sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is the study of the any and all

aspects of society including cultural norms,

expectations and context ,on the way language is

used, and the effects of language use on society.

Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language

in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect ofthe society on the language while the latters

focus is languageseffect on society.


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Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degreewith pragmatics. It is historically closely related tolinguistic anthropology and the distinctionbetween the two fields has even been questioned

recently. It also studies how language varieties differ

between groups separated by certain socialvariables e.g. ethnicity,religion,status,gender,level

of education,age,etc. and how creation andadherence to these rules is used to categorizeindividuals in socio or socioeconomic classes.


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Sociolinguistics

As the usage of language varies from place to place(dialect) , language usage varies among social classes,and it is these socialects that sociolinguistic studies.

The social aspects of language were in the modernsense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguistics inthe 1930s , and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in theearly 1900s ,but none received much attention in thewest until much later.

The study of the social motivation of language change,on the other hand has its foundation in the wavemodel of the late 19thcentury.


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Sociolinguistics

The first attested use of the term

sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson

in the title of a 1939 paper.

Sociolinguistics in the west first appeared in

the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such

as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein

in the UK.


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Factors Influencing Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is a quickly developing branch oflinguistics which investigates the individual and socialvariation of language.

Just as regional variation of language can give a lot ofinformation about the place the speaker is from, socialvariation tells about the role fulfilled by a given speakerwithin one community, or country.

Sociolinguistics is practical scientific discipline

researching the language that is actually used either bynative speakers or foreigners, in order to formulatetheories about language change.


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Sociolinguistics

There are numerous factors influencing the waypeople speak which are investigated bysociolinguistics.

Social class: the position of the speaker in thesociety, measured by the level of education ,parental background, profession and their effecton syntax and lexis used by the speaker.

Social context: the register of the language used

depending on changing situations, formallanguage in formal meetings and informal duringmeetings with friends for example.


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Sociolinguistics

Geographical origins: slight differences inpronunciation between speakers that point at thegeographical region which the speaker comes

from. Ethnicity: differences between the use of a given

language by its native speakers and other ethnicgroups.

Nationality: clearly visible in the case of theEnglish language British English differs fromAmerican English, or Canadian English.


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Sociolinguistics

Gender: differences in patterns of language

use between men and women, such as

quantity of speech, intonation patterns.

Age: the influence of age of the speaker on

the use of vocabulary and grammar

complexity.


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Sociolinguistics

An important factor influencing the way offormulating sentences is according tosociolinguists the social class of the speakers.

There has been a division of social classesproposed in order to make the descriptionaccurate.

Two main groups of language users, mainly thoseperforming non-manual work and those with

more years of education are the middleclass. Those who perform some kind of manual work

are workingclass.


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Sociolinguistics

Additional terms lower and upper are

frequently used in order to subdivide the

social classes.

Therefore, differences between upper middle

class can be compared with lower working

class.


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Sociolinguistics

It is notable that people are acutely aware of the

differences in speech patterns that mark their

social class and are often able to adjust their style

to the interlocutor.

It is especially true for the members of the

middle class who seem eager to use forms

associated with upper class, however , in suchefforts the forms of characteristic of upper class

are often overused by the middle class members.


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Sociolinguistics

The above mentioned process of adopting

own speech to reduce social distance is called

convergence.

When people want to emphasize the social

distance they make use of this process called

divergence purposefully using idiosyncratic

forms.


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Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics investigates the way in whichlanguage changes depending on the region ofcountry it is used in.

To describe a variety of language that differs ingrammar , lexis and pronunciation from others aterm dialect is used.

Each member of community has a unique way of

speaking due to the life experience , education ,age, and aspiration. An individual personalvariation of language use is called an idiolect.


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Sociolinguistics

There are numerous factors influencing idiolectsome of which have been discussed just now, yettwo more need to be elucidated, namely Jargonand Slang.

Jargon is specific technical vocabulary associatedwith the particular field of interest, or topic. Forexample words such as convergence , dialect andsocial class are sociolinguistic jargon.

Slang is a type of language used most frequentlyby people from outside of high status groupscharacterized by the use of unusual words andphrases instead of conventional forms.


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Sociolinguistics

Sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics whichstudies the relation between language andsociety.

Language changes its form and structure on thebasis of social conditions, for example, socialclass, gender, religion and culture groups.

A particular social group may speak a different

variety of a language from the rest of thecommunity. Such a group of speakers comesunder the head speechcommunity.


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Sociolinguistics

The variation in language, as such, may occur due todifferences in class or status.

The speakers belonging to the educated and higherclass may have a different way of speaking of the samelanguage in comparison with that of those belonging tothe uneducated and lower class.

A language also varies among the speakers belongingto different geographical regions with respect to their

pronunciations. For example, the English spoken inLondon varies from that which is spoken in the otherregions of the same country.


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Sociolinguistics

For example, Received Pronunciation (RP) is a varietyof spoken English used in the south-west of Englandand is particularly associated with the universities ofOxford and Cambridge, and the BBC.

It is an educated and formal kind of English. Whereas the English spoken in the north of England, forexample, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, in Scotland andWales differ in their form and pronunciation.

Similarly, varieties of English spoken in differentcountries, for example, American, Indian andAustralian English, also have variations.

Sociolinguistics studies these variations and changesin a language.


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Introduction to

Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychologicalprocesses involved in the language.

Psycholinguists study understanding, producing andremembering language and hence are concerned with

listening, reading , speaking, writing and memory oflanguage.

They are also interested in how we acquire language andthe way in which it interacts with other psychologicalsystems.

Many people think that psycholinguistics has a ratherdated field emphasizing the role of linguistics too much.Although the area might once have been about thepsychology of linguistic theory, it is now much more. Stillthere is currently no better term so it will have to do.


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Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study ofpsychological and neurobiological factors that enablehumans to acquire ,use ,comprehend and producelanguage.

Modern research makes use of biology , neuro science ,cognitive science, linguistics, and information theory tostudy how the brain processes language.

Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that makeit possible to generate a grammatical and meaningfulsentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structure, aswell as the processes that make it possible to understandutterances, words, texts, etc.

Developmental psycholinguistics studies children ability tolearn language.


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Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistic is a branch of study whichcombines the disciplines of psychology andlinguistics. It is concerned with the relationshipbetween the human mind and the language

examines the processes that occur in the brainwhile producing and perceiving both written andspoken discourse.

It is interested in the ways of storing lexical items

and syntactic rules in the mind, as well as theprocesses of memory involved in perception andinterpretation of texts.


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Psycholinguistics

The processes of speaking and listening are analyzed, along

with the language acquisition and language disorders.

Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study emerged in

the late 1950s and 1960s as a result of Chomsky revolution.

The ideas presented by Chomsky became so important that

they quickly gained a lot of publicity and had a big impact

on a large number of contemporary views of language.

Consequently also psycholinguistics started investigating

such matters as the processing of deep and surface

structure of sentences.


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Psycholinguistics

In the early years of development ofpsycholinguistics special experiments weredesigned in order to examine if the focus ofprocessing is the deep syntactic structure.

On the basis of transformation of sentences itwas initially discovered that the ease ofprocessing was connected with syntacticcomplexity. However, later on it became clear

that not only syntactic complexity adds to thedifficulty of processing, but also semantic factorshave a strong influence on it.


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Psycholinguistics

Principles of sentence

Certain principles of sentence processing that wereformulated at that time are still valid.

One of them, namely the principle of minimalattachment means that when processing a sentence

which could have multiple meanings people mostfrequently tend to choose the simplest meaning, or themeaning that in syntactic analysis would present thesimplest parse tree with fewest nodes.

Thus, a sentence Mary watched the man with the

binoculars by most language users would beinterpreted that it was Mary, and not the man, whowas using binoculars.


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Psycholinguistics

One other principle worth noting is the

principle of late closure which states that

there is a tendency to join a new information

to the current phrase, or clause.

which explains why in a sentence such as john

said he will leave this morning the phrase this

morning would be understood as relating tothe verb leaveand not to the word said.


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Psycholinguistics

Processing of texts

Other psycholinguistic investigations into howprocessing of texts occurs led to conclusion thatcomplex sentences with multiple clauses areinterpreted faster and with less mental effort when the

clauses are not reduced. When it comes to speech the experiments show that

the interpretation of sentences can vary depending onthe placing of pauses, or disfluencies.

Additionally, it has been proven that visual contactbetween speakers also has a strong influence on theease, or difficulty of processing text.


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Psycholinguistics

During experiments subjects were listening to somesentences and those who saw the speaker couldunderstand what the speech was about better, whilethose who did not see him often had difficulties with it.

The recent tendencies in psycholinguistics showincreasing interest in discourse processing, and inparticular in the way readers create a mentalrepresentation of the narrative word.

The focus of interest is on the role of readers

schemata (plan or scheme) and the problem ofinferences (conclusion or deduction) about the readsubject matter.


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Psycholinguistics

It has been proved that certain inferences are

made in the very process of reading, while

others are made later in order to resolve some

problems or inconsistencies.

The issue of background knowledge and

automaticity of drawing inferences are still

being investigated.


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Psycholinguistics

The ideas of psycholinguistic interest flourishedprimarily in Europe in the early 1960s and then inAmerica in 1987.

The first overview of psycholinguistics appeared

in Annual Review of Psychology by Rubensteinand Abron in 1960.

In 1964, George A. Miller, through his writingsand experiments, bridged the gap between

linguistic theory and psychologicalexperimentation.

In 1964, it was completely accepted by M. Neill.


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Psycholinguistics

In the early stage, psycholinguistics covered anextremely broad area, from acoustic phonetics tolanguage pathology.

But gradually, it converged to a certain area oflanguage and linguistic theory.

Now, psycholinguistics is confined to the inter-relationship of psychological and linguistic

behaviour. It studies how the mind processes and produces

language


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Psycholinguistics

It uses linguistic concepts to describe themental processes connected with theacquisition and use of languages.

Psycholinguistics deals with the variousaspects of meaning.

It has been deeply influenced by thedevelopment of generative theory, and itsmost important area of investigation has beenlanguage acquisition.


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Psycholinguistics

The relation between psychology and languagecannot be ignored. Linguistic science is directlyconnected with the mind and psychologicalbehaviour.

The linguistic expression of a man depends, manytimes on the mental states such as love, anger,hatred, surprise, distressall have a deep impacton the language.

Sometimes, the language, especially speech,loses its control, which means the mental state isexpressed through it.


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Psycholinguistics

Particularly, semantics is totally dependant onpsychology.

Psychology also assists in forming the syntax of alanguage.

On some occasions, to know the reason forphonological changes, we have to take the help ofpsychology.

The origin and growth of a language is also the direct orindirect areas of psychology.

It also studies child psychology of mentally retardedpeople. The psychological treatment of the mentallydiseased also depends on the specific type of speech.


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Psycholinguistics

Language is a mental phenomenon. Whatever wethink is expressed in language behaviour.

Psycholinguistics studies these mental processes,such as thought and concept formation.

The concept of psycholinguistics was developedin the early sixties.

In the beginning it had covered a very broad area,from acoustic phonetics to language pathology.But now it has been confined to those areas oflanguage and linguistic theory that tend to beconcentrated on by the psycholinguist.


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Psycholinguistics

It has been mostly influenced by the

generative theory and the so-called

mentalists.

We can see the example of psycholinguistics in

the infants, such as how they acquire

language from their mother through the

method of imitation and how by imitating,learning and asking questions they grow.


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Psycholinguistics

It also studies the influence of psychologicalfactors, such as intelligence, motivation andanxiety on the kind of language that is

understood and produced. Various language activities of a man are

included in it.

If a speaker makes any error in his language, itmay be due to the psychological reasons thatinfluence its comprehension or production.


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Psycholinguistics

Our perception of sounds and graphic symbols

(in writing) is influenced by the state of our

mind.

The learning of a language, the way the

speaker uses it, the way of answering

questions and of teaching it are included in

the area of psycholinguistics.

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