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 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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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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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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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 ...
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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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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 become a native speaker of another language for someone that already has a mother tongue?
Are there any studies/researches on fields like neurolinguistics(or any other fields) to allow people (can be via drugs, psycho training..whatever) to become a native speaker of another language? Is ...
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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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To what extent do children adapt to a language which is not their mother-tongue?
In following when talking about 'native speaker' I refer to what is considered as 'mother tongue' rather than reaching a level of fluency.
For the purpose of this question think of an average person ...
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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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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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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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How does alcohol affect the ability to speak a second language?
From my own experience, drinking alcohol has both positive and negative effects to the ability of speaking a second language. On the one hand, it facilitates the process, mainly because one gets more ...
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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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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). ...
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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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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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Two tasks in one experiment design (self-paced-reading & grammaticality judgment)
For experiment design experts, I want to know if it's possible to design an experiment on PsychoPy or Open Sesame in which the subject does a self paced reading (with measuring the reading times for ...
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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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How can I embed language proficiency assessment within an unrelated experiment design?
I'm in the process of designing a self-paced-reading & a grammaticality-judgment-task experiment, which should be performed by second language learners. It is crucial to the study is how the ...
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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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Why is it "easier" to understand a foreign language when reading than to speak it?
I know that the two mentioned abilities are different. I always find it quite straightforward to understand a foreign language when reading. provided I have a good knowledge of its grammar and a large ...
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Methods for meaning extraction
Let someone wants to know what some word (concrete as "chair" or abstract as "happiness") mean. What methods, experimental techniques are there for extracting word's meaning? I found next ways:
Study ...
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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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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 ...
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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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Can a child learn a second language only by hearing it over the telephone?
Hi! This question is really important to me personally and I would love to hear from children-learning-experts as well as anybody who made a relevant experience in this area. Some background first: My ...
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dealing with those responses before target offset in a priming experiment
We conducted a priming lexical decision experiment, and the response time was calculated from the target onset. However when we cleaned the data, we found that some responses were given before the ...
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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 language, if any, do deaf people think in?
If a person is partially deaf, I think they would be able to acquire the language, and actually I've seen partially deaf people speak in addition to the use of a sign language. I suppose this means ...
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How would a trained linguist describe this hypothesis of Symbolic Leverage
Context
Two economics students are attempting to describe a concept of language, but do not know of any formally-recognized terms or research that explain this concept.
They believe there is an ...
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Are there any good individualistic measures of linguistic conservatism?
I am currently examining how differing levels of genderisation across languages (French, Finnish, and Norwegian) affects self-perception and the social perception of others through the utilisation of ...
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Does capitalizing nouns improve readability?
In German, one capitalizes the nouns in a sentence. In the video Life in Germany - Ep. 42: English vs. German, an American claims that capitalizing the nouns makes it easier to understand a sentence.
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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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Does the phrase "thinking in a language" have empirical meaning?
In discussions of language learning, multilingualism, and related topics, I hear references to "thinking in a language." Two questions on this stack exchange list have referenced this, namely "What ...
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Experiment of creating an artificial language by cycles of memorizing errors
Once I saw an experiment on a documentary which a simple artificial language (just a set of ten words or something like that) was artificially created by a recurring process of memorizing errors of ...
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Is there a term for a mental prototype changing?
Years ago, if I heard the word bird I thought about a sparrow since I live in western Pennsylvania and there are sparrows everywhere. But now, if I hear the word bird I picture a blue, two-dimensional ...
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How and when do French children learn to select between masculine and feminine forms of words when referring to themselves?
I am interested in what knowledge we have regarding the process by which a young child acquiring French as a first language learns to choose correctly between the masculine and feminine forms of ...
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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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Saying words aloud to confirm/disprove accuracy of written language
I had a really interesting thought the other day:
Is oral language dominant/superior in some way to written language?
I bring this up because every time I need to correct or edit my written words (I ...
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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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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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To which extent are people’s perceptions of their own pronunciation influenced by the language’s orthography?
In my experience, literate native speakers of a language tend to assume that the language’s orthography is significantly more phonetic than it actually is or, with other words, tend to think that ...
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Is 'It' anaphoric or cataphoric, and what is its antecedent/postcedent?
Question 1a: What does 'It' refer to in the following sentence:
It was clearly in the mood to place acknowledgements at the bottom of questions.
The context for the above sentence is provided in ...
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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%; ...
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Does understanding free word order require a distinct cognitive process?
Abbreviate 'a language with free word order' to FWOL (eg: 1, 2, 3, 4). I exemplify with Latin.
When trying to read a FWOL, I must firstly consciously determine the lexical categories of each word, ...
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Do animals have foreign languages?
Humans living in different parts of the world develop different languages; humans living in the same area speak the same language in order to be able to communicate with each other.
We know that other ...
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Psycholinguistics: any interesting studies in personality switching withing language?
I'm workiong on a school project and I want to see if there are any studies made to the following matter.
We all know what a code siwtch is , I wonder if there's something similar in personality, ...
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Does word TA comes from historically, or a psychically to many languages on earth?
Does word TA comes from historically, or a psychically to many languages on earth?
Ta, sumerian -root
Ta, english -thank
Ta, mongolian -grateful and respectful calling of "you"
etc
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What's the 'official' term for when a word is at the tip of your tongue?
If I remember correctly from the half year I studied linguistics, there is a sort of official name for the situation or state your brain (or your speech center) is in when a word is at the tip of your ...
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