waking hours; point out objects and their owners, comment
on people doing things and seeing thing, and ask about who,
what, and where; in 95% of them, the words are properly
ordered.)
3. Stage of three-word utterances
(Three-word utterance look like samples drawn from longer
potential sentences expressing a complete and more
complicated idea.)
4. Fluent grammatical conversation stage
(In this stage children’s language blooms into fluent
grammatical conversation rapidly, sentence length increase
steadily. Many children speak in complex sentences before
they turn two.)
Ÿ Language Acquisition Theories
1. Reinforcement theory (Bloomfield and Skinner)
(See in “behaviorism” of Bloomfield in the American
Structuralism; “stimulus-response reinforcement”)
2. Innateness theory (Chomsky)
(See in Chomsky’s LAD and Innateness Hypothesis)
3. Cognitive theory (Piaget)
(Cognitive theory, represented by Piaget, take the view that
children acquire the language through assimilation and
adaptation and learn from the environment through
interaction with the environment.)
= Language Comprehension
Humans can understand sentences that carry novel messages in a way that exquisitely sensitive to the structure of the language. We store a great deal of information about the properties of words in our mental lexicon, and when we encounter a new word, we use morphological rules to decompose it and then after several exposures we may store and access it as a unit or word. While the connection of similarity between the known items and the novel ones and the frequency of exposure play important roles in processing and comprehending language, (Connectionism).
Ÿ Mental lexicon
From a psycholinguistic point of view, we store a great deal of information about the properties of words in our mental lexicon, and retrieve this information when we understand language. That is, we use morphological rules to decompose a complex word the first few times we encounter it and after several exposures we will store and access it as a unit or word. It means that frequency of exposure determines our ability to recall stored instances.
Ÿ Connectionism
Connectionism in psycholinguistics claims that readers use the same system of links between spelling units and sound units to generate the pronunciations of written words and to access the pronunciation of familiar words or words that are exceptions to these patterns. In this view, similarity and frequency both play important roles in processing and comprehending language, with the novel items being processed based on their similarity to the known ones.
Ÿ Word recognition
Word lays in the central position in language comprehension because of its extremely important role in transmitting the meaning. Word recognition can be viewed in terms of recognition of spoken words and printed ones.
Listeners attempt to map the acoustic signal onto a representation in the mental lexicon almost as the signal starts to arrive.
According to cohort model proposed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh in 1990, the first few phonemes of a spoken word activate a set or cohort of word candidates that are consistent with the input. These candidates compete with one another for activation. As more acoustic input analyzed, candidates that are no longer consistent with the input drop out of the set. This process continues until only one word candidate matches the input; the best fitting word may be chosen if no single candidate is a clear winner.
The interactive model holds that higher processing levels have a direct, “top-down” influence on lower levels. Lexical knowledge can affect the perception of phonemes. In certain cases, listener’s knowledge of words can lead to the inhibition of certain phonemes; in other cases, listeners continue to “hear” phonemes that have been removed from the speech signal and replaced by noise.
The race model suggests that there are two routes that race each other —a pre-lexical route, which computes计算;估计 phonological information from the acoustic signal, and a lexical route, in which the phonological information associated with a word becomes available when the word itself is accessed. When word-level information appears to affect a lower-level process, it is assumed that the lexical route won the race.
And listener’s knowledge of language and its patterns also facilitates perception in some ways.
Print serves as a map of linguistic structure, readers use the clues to morphological structure that are embedded in orthography in reading the printed words. Two different processes are available for converting orthographic representations to phonological representations. A lexical route is used to look up the phonological forms of known words in the mental lexicon. A non-lexical route accounts for the productivity of reading: it generates pronunciations for novel letter strings as well as for regular words on the basis of smaller units.
Ÿ Comprehension of sentence
Serial Model proposes that the sentence comprehension system continually and sequentially follows the constraints of a language’s grammar with remarkable speed. Serial models describe how the processor quickly constructs one or more representations of a sentence based on a restricted range of information that is guaranteed to be relevant to its interpretation, primarily grammatical information.
Parallel model emphasizes that the comprehension system is sensitive to a vast range of information, including grammatical, lexical, and contextual, as well as knowledge of the speaker/writer and of the world in general. It is generally acknowledged that listeners and readers integrate grammatical and situational knowledge in understanding a sentence.
Structural factors:
Lexical factors:
Ÿ Comprehension of text
Sentences come in texts and discourses, and the entire text or discourse is relevant to the messages conveyed. Readers abstract the main threads of a discourse and infer missing connections, constrained by limitations of short-term memory and guided by how arguments overlap across propositions and by linguistic cues signaled by the text.
In resonance model, information in long-term memory is automatically activated by the presence of material that apparently bears a rough semantic relation to it.
= Language Production
Psycholinguistics are also interested in the way in which a speaker formulates some intention, or expresses some idea in speech, in a conversational setting or otherwise.
Ÿ Access to words
Words are planned in several processing steps. The first processing step, called conceptualization, is decided what notion to express. The next step is to select a word that corresponds to the chosen concept. A unit is selected as soon as its activation level exceeds the summed activation of all competitors. The following processing step, morpho-phonological encoding, begins with the retrieval of the morphemes corresponding to the selected word.
Ÿ Generation of sentence
In generating sentence, the first step is again conceptual preparation—deciding what to say. To make a complicated theoretical argument or to describe a series of events, the speaker needs a global plan. When speaker plan sentences, they retrieve words. However, because sentences are not simply sets of words but have syntactic structure, speakers must apply syntactic knowledge to generate sentences.
Ÿ Written language production
The steps in the production of written language are similar to those in the production of spoken language. A major difference is that, once a syntactic lexicon unit and its morphological representation have been accessed, it is the orthographic rather the phonological form that must be retrieved and produced.
« Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive linguistics is a newly established approach to the study of language that emerged in the 1970s as a reaction against the dominant generative paradigm, which pursues an autonomous view of language. Cognitive linguistics is based on human experiences of the world and the way they perceive and conceptualize the world.
= Construal and Construal Operations
Construal is the ability to conceive and portray the same situation in alternate ways through specificity特异性, different mental scanning, directionality方向性, vantage优势point, figure-ground图形-背景segregation隔离etc.
Construal Operations are conceptualizing processes used in language process by human beings. That is, construal operations are the underlying psychological processes and resources employed in the interpretation of linguistic expressions.
Ÿ Attention/ Salience [ˈseiliəns] 突显
The operations grouped under Salience have to do with our direction of attention towards something that is salient to us. We direct the attention towards the relevant concepts. Attention/Salience relates to language, among others, because we use certain linguistic expressions to provoke certain patterns of activation.
Ÿ Judgment/ Comparison
The construal operations of Judgment/Comparison have to do with judging something by comparing it to something else. This is a very fundamental cognitive capacity and the cognitive operations of judgment are also very fundamental to the human experience.
The figure-ground alignment seems to apply to space with the ground as the prepositional object and the preposition expressing the spatial relational configuration. It also applies to our perception of moving objects, since the moving object is typically the most prominent one. Langacker uses the term Trajector for a moving figure and Landmark for the ground of a moving figure.
Ÿ Perspective/ Situatedness
