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Fundamentals of psycholinguistics summary
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This is a summary of chapters 1,2,3,5 and 6 of the book Fundamentals of psycholinguistics by Fernandez, E. M. & Cairns, H. S.
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Fernandez, E. M. & Cairns, H. S. (2011). Fundamentals of PsycholinguisticsChapter 1
The creativity of human language
• Speakers can create and understand novel sentences for an entire lifetime
• We can use language to communicate anything we can think of (unlimited range of topics)
Characteristics of the linguistic system
• Language is a formal system for pairing signals with meanings (encoding/decoding)
• The linguistic system contains a complex and highly organized set of principles and rules (which
are the source for infinite creativity)
o Grammar
o Lexicon
• Tacit (implicit) knowledge = knowledge that is not consciously available to the individual who
prossesses it
Prescriptive grammar = the standardized use of language
Descriptive grammar = the language system that underlies ordinary use
Linguists tend to refer to human language as a single entity, despite the fact that there are many
different versions spoken by the thousands of different language communities around the world. The
fact is that all human languages are cut from the same mold: they are highly similar in their
organization and in the abilities they confer on the people who know them.
Rules that make up a grammar
1. Phonological rules = describe the sound patterns of the language
• Creating individual words
• Rhythm and intonation of speech
2. Morphological rules
3. Syntactic rules
• (beide) Involved in creating the structural organization of words and sentences
• The relationships between words and phrases in sentences
1
, Linguistic competence = when people know a language, they know its grammar and lexicon
Linguistic performance = the use of such knowledge in the actual processing of sentences (production
and comprehension)
• The speaker begins with an idea or a thought she wants to convey to the hearer. In order to do
this, she first must translate her thought into a semantic representation (a representation of
meaning) for a sentence in her language.
• Then she must select the words from her lexicon and use her grammar to construct the syntactic
representation (representation of sentence structure) that will convey the meaning she has
selected.
• The words must then be represented as sounds, that is, as a phonological representation, since
they are eventually going to be pronounced.
• Finally, the phonological representation is sent to the motor areas of the speaker’s brain and
instructions are sent to the articulatory organs that are used to produce speech.
• First, he must reconstruct the phonological representation in order to recover the speaker’s
words and their meanings.
• Then, using the grammatical and lexical knowledge that he shares with the speaker, he must
reconstruct the words’ structural organization.
• He then has sufficient information to recover the basic meaning for the speaker’s sentence that
will ultimately lead to her idea or thought.
Encoding = an idea is translated into a physical object > a speech signal
Decoding = a physical signal is recovered to the idea
In every modality people make the distinction between the actual stimulus (the physical signal) that
impinges on our eyes or ears and the percept that the brain constructs when we interpret that
stimulus. A stimulus is never consciously available to us; what we are aware of is the mental percept
that the stimulus gives rise to.
2
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