Questions tagged [psycholinguistics]

Questions that are about the neurobiological and psychological factors that affect the acquisition, comprehension and utilisation of the language in human beings.

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Multiple-characters vocabulary acquisition by L1 Japanese/Chinese

I am looking for any evidence/reference on how L1 Japanese or L1 Chinese people acquire their multiple hanzi/kanji vocabulary. Take as simple as 折り畳み/折叠 (to fold). Words like 食べる/吃 and 飲む/喝 are not ...
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Teeth and dental clicks

I would like to know how a person without teeth, produces, dental clicks (in a language where dental clicks are a characteristic). Does such person use a different language in adult life, or what? ...
2 votes
3 answers
144 views

Does grammar condition our conclusions and opinions?

I have learned two languages from childhood: English and Malayalam. I find it that most of the time when I think and reflect, my thoughts are mostly expressed in English. Now, the interesting part is, ...
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1 answer
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Even in writing, do bases take longer to construe when they share roots or stems?

Question 1 I ask about merely reading and writing here. Do human readers take longer to distinguish between stems (and bases) that share the same root, even if merely picoseconds? For example, do ...
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-1 votes
1 answer
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Can language reveal how we think? [closed]

I have just started lightly reading about consciousness and, in trying to think about what it is, I couldn't help but notice how simply thinking about the pronoun "I" could shed quite a bit ...
1 vote
1 answer
197 views

Why is feeling and hearing are the same in Italian?

Sentire means hearing, and at the same time feeling, in Italian and it's used passively in both senses. Mi sento male - I feel bad Ho sentito il tuo nome - I heard your name Why among all senses ...
1 vote
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35 views

Name of cognitive bias/effect causing you not to see your own spelling mistakes (because you know what you wrote)

I’m sure there’s a name for this thing where I can’t see my own spelling mistakes because when I’m reading what I’ve written, I know what it’s supposed to say. So, I’m blind to having typed “exmaple” ...
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Are there different "kinds" of meaningless sentences?

There is famous sentences by Chomsky ("Colorless green ideas sleep furiously") to show that syntactically sentences can by devoid of meaning, or at least have a very odd or dubious meaning. ...
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3 votes
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180 views

What psychological effects does the language one speaks have on them? [closed]

Are there any known psychological effects that have been observed on people who speak one language as opposed to another. For example, in Latin languages there are genders, in English there are none; ...
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What are the differences of word stress, lexical stress and metrical stress?

It is said lexical stress is word stress, but I don't understand why they named it differently.
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591 views

What is the difference between neurolinguistics and similar fields of study?

What is the difference between neurolinguistics and cognitive linguistics or psycholinguistics? I am already having trouble understanding the difference between cognitive linguistics and ...
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What is the psychological basis for the argument/adjunct distinction?

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the distinction between arguments and adjuncts. Failing to find a satisfying explanation in formal syntax, I am opening my mind to psycholinguistics. The ...
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1 answer
152 views

How to differentiate between consonants and vowels on praat? [closed]

I am student of MA and i need your help to know about the praat software. i am stuck in my research in last section. If any one hear to know so i thoroughly and rigorously sorry to say and please help ...
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Do older adults perceive words in different ways than young adults?

Do you agree that older adults perceive words differently from young adults, and learn more innuendos and double meanings? I read a science article that stated that adults continue to learn words and ...
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Why are the organization of mental lexicon and lexical access interdependent?

I read in Carroll ("Psychology of Language") that how the mental/internal lexicon is organized and how we access lexical information are interdependent issues. However, he does not really ...
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What are some more examples of doubly centre embedded clauses?

Hey guys I am a uni student doing psycholinguistics and currently studying doubly centre embedded clauses for a study on comprehension. For example a phrase such as: "The man the boy the cat ...
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1 answer
56 views

Term for Regional "Words per Minute"

Is there a term for the variation in how many words per minute is spoken on average by people in various regions of the country/world? A focus group mentioned they wished our Tech Support personnel ...
1 vote
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What are the differences between Frames and Image Schemata?

I know there are several schema based theories in cognitive sciences, including psychology and linguistics. I am also aware that they mostly share a lot in common, as, for instance, Rumelhart (1981) ...
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Phonological parallel of a Lexical Decision Task

Lexical Decision Tasks have been used in psycholinguistics for long. It basically asks the participant if the word shown is meaningful (e.g. GIRL) or not (e.g. GISL) (ref: link). But does a test like ...
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Why is research on grammatical gender important?

I was wondering why is research on grammatical gender important? Why is exploring this area of linguistics of any interest to linguists? What can it tell us about language (especially with regards to ...
1 vote
0 answers
40 views

What is the phenomenon that each word variation is regarded equally, not a variation of the root?

This is a thing that I remember that I read in a cognitive psychology book, but I can't find it out. For example, the word cats has two morphemes: cat + s. So we usually regard cats as a morphological ...
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2 votes
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85 views

What is shallow semantic processing?

What exactly is "shallow semantic processing", and how is it related to syntactic analysis? Is it correct to say that syntactic processing of a text is the preliminary step for shallow semantic ...
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Does the lexical path get slower with more entries

The lexical path of the dual-route hypothesis of reading states that people recognize whole words from memory. Does this theory assume the search time becomes greater with more words in the lexicon?? ...
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1 answer
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Why is there pressure to change seemingly neutral words that some consider 'offensive' to their more 'neutral' synonyms?

Clearly, there is now pressure to stop using words such as whitelist/blacklist (which are now considered racist) and instead replace them with allowlist/denylist; master/slave terminology in tech is ...
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Term for conversational actions meant to influence emotional state

Is there a term for the set of conversational actions/tools that instead of exchanging direct information, seek to instead affect a certain emotional state? Examples of such actions would include ...
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4 votes
1 answer
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Linguistic overview/critique of the Tomatis method

Some advertisements for language training material (like this and this) have a dubious claim that each language has its own frequency range of sounds, or a "pass band", so that listening to ...
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6 votes
3 answers
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A distance on words

I am not an expert in linguistics at all; more of a physicist instead. So I don't know if there are any defined distances on words D(W1, W2) that really represents how the human memory works; for ...
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5 votes
1 answer
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Do humans differ from other animals by being able to push and pop memory?

The Chomsky hierarchy of types 0,1,2,3 grammars correspond, as he showed, to the abstract automata classified in accordance with their use of memory. The type 2 grammars, the context free phrase ...
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2 answers
248 views

How did Proto-Indo-Europeans view the world? [closed]

I was watching a video about Proto-Indo-European culture by Xidnaf at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErXa5PyHj4I. It said that Proto-Indo-Europeans probably had most or all of these philosophical ...
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1 answer
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Are there any studies on complete or partial language loss due to brain injuries?

Several years ago, I read about certain cases of complete or partial language loss in patients (mostly soldiers) who had previously suffered certain brain damage. The research included several cases, ...
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1 vote
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Could certain languages encourage different models of sentence processing?

I'm gonna be frank: I'm a high school student who has limited experience with linguistics. I've never studied it, I've just read a textbook and a handful of seminal studies. Recently, though, I was ...
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80 views

Carrying a mistake in a sentence until contradiction

I am new to the field of linguistics so please forgive any ignorance or naivety, but there is something I have been thinking about recently and cannot find anything about it online. I suppose there ...
2 votes
2 answers
4k views

What do the terms "External" and "Internal" language refer to?

I would like to know about External and Internal language. Suppose I was talking about a person who was not either good or great. I was praising him in my speech as he was my superior though I felt ...
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Sociolinguistics/Psycholinguistics: Does imitation play any role in child language acquisition?

Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics: Does imitation play any role in child language acquisition?
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5 answers
611 views

Word meaning as function of the composition of its phonemes

tl;dr Linguists like to claim that the mapping from sounds to word meanings is mostly arbitrary. Can you point out research that supports this claim? Specificllay I am looking for hard evidience in ...
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160 views

Accidentally speak Japanese on reflex

There is one time I woke up late and accidentally speak in Japanese "yabai" which means "oh no" or "this is bad", when I came around after finishing getting ready I then realized I've just spoken in ...
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Where can I find a set of Spanish-English comparable texts? ***(Not translations)***

This is my very first post, I hope I'm making myself clear. What I'm asking for is a set of texts that are equivalent in both languages in terms of difficulty, word frequency and register (i.e. two ...
5 votes
2 answers
133 views

What factors determine the numeral coming to numbers such as -1, 0, 0.5, 100% in a language which has and only has contrast in singular and plural?

I have searched by corpus and found variant results for the same number above. People also hesitate with these numbers and make different sortation. Is there any research about any psycolinguistical ...
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0 votes
1 answer
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What's the difference between 'concept' and 'meaning'?

Like in the title, are concepts expressed only by some parts of the speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs ? In sentence: The cat ate food - all words are concepts or only the noun ? All those ...
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2 answers
545 views

How can we use the same word in multiple different ways and distinguish the senses so easily?

Say for example some plant names. We have an orange which we easily know is a fruit, but is also a color. We have green which is a color, and greens which is plants, or money, or I could imagine it ...
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1 answer
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Can we use the reverse of mental priming to get out of the 'Mary's Room' problem? [closed]

So there is this semantics/psycholinguistics concept called mental-priming, which says for a concept called 'red' nearby concepts like apple, color, danger etc. 'light up' . Can we teach Mary, what ...
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13 votes
1 answer
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Selective fluency - is it a thing?

I speak 4 languages, and I have the least exposure to my native language, since I have never lived in the region where it's spoken. My only exposure to it is speaking to my parents, and some TV. I ...
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3 votes
3 answers
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Precise timing measurement in Praat / .wav files

When analyzing .wav files in Praat, total time duration and target speech segments are represented down to 6 decimals. For example: 154.900000 seconds (borrowed from a Google image screenshot). ...
10 votes
1 answer
237 views

Why is [la] widely used as a substitution for singing? Is it a worldwide phenomenon?

When people sing without knowing or using the text, they often sing as lalalala...
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1 vote
0 answers
118 views

How is a meaningful sentence or paragraph constructed?

I don't have a formal background of linguistics, but I'd like to know how a sentence or paragraph becomes meaningful to a reader, and how one can construct that. I think it falls to the areas of ...
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2 votes
1 answer
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Linguistic theory of "signs"

First of all thank you all for taking the time to read me. I have been entrusted in the language course of the career I am studying to read the theory of the sign of Ferdinand de Saussure. My ...
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Research on development of language of modality in children 8-12?

Let me quickly introduce myself to provide a context for my questions. My PhD research focuses on ways that we can teach primary school children (9-12) ways of handling complex, contradictory and ...
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Is there any "standard" definition of "linguistic input"?

Recently, I've started wondering how to characterize "linguistic input" and realized that the notion is very rarely unpacked. It seems as if everyone takes it to be obvious, and immediately goes to ...
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1 vote
1 answer
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Evidence proving lingustic perception of speech in brain?

Is there any evidence that speech is perceived linguistically, meaning is there evidence that shows that speech in the brain is perceived as phonemes, morphemes, and so on? I was thinking whether ...
1 vote
0 answers
124 views

What only native speakers and native writers (?) know

Even after many years, even after getting proficient in a foreign language, non-native speakers won't lose their foreign accent. Is there an equivalent to this for non-native writers? Will be ...
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