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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Are there any fundamental differences in personal pronoun acquisition across languages?
I am interest in reversal errors in personal pronoun acquisition. My knowledge comes mostly from studies done with English-speaking children, and I was wondering if there is any languages where this ...
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Are similar languages easier for children to acquire than dissimilar ones?
When a child is first learning a language in a bilingual environment, is it easier or harder to properly acquire the two distinct languages if they are more similar? For example, is it easier for a ...
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Evidence for age cutoff in foreign accent acquistion
Steven Pinker in "The Language Instinct" claims that there is strong psychological evidence for the existence of a sharp age cutoff for the ability to acquire a flawless foreign accent (I may dig up ...
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What are some examples of recent studies investigating strong linguistic determinism?
One of the most controversial ideas put forth in linguistics is the idea of linguistic determinism. Also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it states that people who speak different languages would ...
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Why do languages not share a root for "butterfly"?
In the article The Elusive Butterfly. Iconicity in Language (2001), William O. Beeman draws attention to the fact that most languages do not share a root for their word for butterfly. In other words, ...
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Language acquisition without interactive contact with fluent speakers
Children raised in a multilingual environment learn all the languages that they are exposed to with no effort. Does the same thing happen if a child has only indirect contact with a language? For ...
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Can one's native medium of language be written, rather than spoken or signed?
(This is probably a poorly-formed question, but I'm really just trying to find out if there's any research in this area.)
Most children pick up a spoken or signed language at an early age, and this ...
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Are there languages with no first person?
Fiction is rife with characters who always speak in third person. Often, such characters are portrayed as having a native language or culture that lacks the concept of a first person, and hence they ...
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Is it possible to change your mother-tongue by thinking in another language?
Once I heard from someone that your mother tongue is the language you talk in your thoughts. I've asked many people to verify the correctness of this proposition and to me, inductively this seems to ...
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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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Do bilinguals and multilingual native speakers make language mistakes?
Suppose a person speaks several languages, occasionally making mistakes in grammar(s), using untypical patterns, clichés and/or calques.
Can such a level of language competence be defined as ...
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How do we perceive and read words and sentences? Does the order of the inner letters play no significant role?
Try to read this texts, start with the most difficult one, if you cant read, skip to the next easier one:
all letters mixed
I onlucd't ieebvel ttah I udloc talyulac rsddetanun hwat I swa
radgeni....
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Does learning ancestral languages enrich a daughter language?
[Grammarphobia.com:] The study, published in 1973, offered this breakdown of sources [of English vocabulary]:
Latin: 28.34%; French: 28.3%;
Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%; ...
user5306
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What does "psychological reality of sound" mean ?
I am taking an introduction course about linguistics.
When my teacher was trying to explain the difference between phonetics and phonology she said something like:
"PHONETICS is study of physical ...
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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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