Literature Degree Program in China - Psycholinguistics

1. Introduction

Psycholinguistics is a discipline that studies the psychological process of language activity. It involves human individuals on how to master and use the language system, how to in actual intercourse, the language system to play a role, and in order to grasp and use this system should be with what knowledge and ability. From the point of view of information processing, the research on the coding and decoding process of individual speech communication is the psychological linguistics. Because of its characteristics, it has a close relationship with many subjects, such as psychology and linguistics, as well as information theory, anthropology, etc. On the method, it mainly uses the method of experimental psychology.

2. Research Directions

There are two main research directions in the field of psycholinguistics, the research direction of the behavior doctrine and the research direction of cognitive psychology.

3. Research Problems

Psycholinguistics research problems include speech perception and understanding, the production of speech, language acquisition, neurophysiological mechanisms of speech, speech defects, speech and thinking and verbal and emotional, personality relations and so on. The solution of these problems will play a great role in the study of learning theory, thinking theory, and the theory of psychological development of children. It has applied value to the research of engineering psychology, language teaching, speech defect diagnosis and treatment, and the language identification of electronic computer.

4. Research Methods

1). Natural observation

2). Test methods

3). Statistical methods

5. Research Scope

Psycholinguistics is a branch of psychology that studies how human beings acquire, understand and produce language. It studies the characteristics of human language activities from the angle of psychological process and psychological mechanism. The study of psychological linguistics is interdisciplinary. First, it explores the mental process and mechanism of human verbal activity with the structure and function of language as the clue, and the structure and function of language is the research object of linguistics. Secondly, in the psychological process and mechanism of the speech event study, is bound to relate to the human brain structure and special function, sometimes with the help of the analysis of the medical records of by brain damage and developmental disorder in. Finally, the human speech activity is in the social environment and development, the complex social factors directly determine the language system changes, and the language activities have an important impact. Therefore, research on the psychological mechanism of human speech activity depends not only on the psychological theories and methods, and absorption and adopting the theory and method of linguistics, sociology, physiology, clinical medicine, computer science, mathematics and many other fields.

6. Language Understanding

Language understanding is a heat topic of psycholinguistics. The study includes: speech perception; vocabulary extraction; sentence processing; text comprehension. In short, it is the study of how people understand language.

7. Application and Contribution

Psycholinguistics have been applied in communication technology (research information transmission, perception and understanding), medicine (study of aphasia and neurosis cause and therapy) and artificial intelligence research (discussed how to simulate the language function of the brain). But its most important use or in teaching (including preschool education, foreign language teaching, deaf language teaching, etc.), its purpose is according to the different circumstances, to work out a set of effective teaching theories and methods.