Essays on Psycholinguistics

The process of becoming fluent in writing and speaking a second language is a complex process that relies on a number of influences; individual personality characteristics such as maturity, past experiences, exposure to the new language, learning environment, motivation, and natural inclinations to adapting to new skills are some factors that promote or hinder progress. Research involving experimentation, investigation, and empirical studies has been conducted to describe individual factors that influence the quality and speed of children’s learning a second language and will be examined. Some children are born into multilingual families with different cultural backgrounds and it ...

Introduction

It has been established in a separate review of related literatures that bilingualism can have numerous direct and indirect advantages and disadvantages. Although bilingualism does not only affect a state’s educational system, this paper would focus on its effects on an established educational system. Some of the pertinent findings about bilingualism and its effects on the educational system include buy may not limited to the ones that suggest that: There is a set of social factors that may be used to determine the likelihood that individuals within an educational system would adopt bilingualism. These factors are social input, ...

Pearson, B. "Social Factors in Childhood Bilingualism in the United States." Applied Psycholinguistics (2007): 399-410. Print. This particular source answers the research question on why (i.e. what is the purpose) people consider to become bilingual. Establishing the fact that roughly a quarter of all children in most developed countries are now bilingual, the authors suggested that there are five social factors that influence an individual, or in this case a child to become bilingual and they are: social input, language status, family language use, access to literacy, and community support and schooling. Collectively, these factors determine whether an ...

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Institutions INTRODUCTION Psycholinguistics is a branch of applied linguistics which is concerned with the study of how word meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning are computed and represented in the mind (Field, 2003).Psycholinguists study the manner in which complex words and sentences are produced in speech and how they are broken down into their constituent parts in the processes such as listening and reading .Basically, psycholinguistics is concerned with the understanding of how language is ‘done’. Linguistic communication inherently involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. The problem ...

Critiquing Psycholinguistic and Sociolinguistic Theories

Psycholinguistics and Sociolinguistics Psycholinguistics - Psycholinguistic Theory Psycholinguistic theory falls under the general concept of Constructivism; it is regarded as the study of relationship between psychological process and linguistic behavior including the concept of language acquisition (Tracey & Morrow, 2012). The evidence from which the theory was based upon is the assumption that language is a primary process of reading. There are three major components of the theory that are also referred to as cues such as semantic, syntactic and Graphophonic. Syntactic refers to the pattern that dictates how the word combination constructs the sentences or otherwise the ...

Constructivism and Psycholinguistic Theories

Constructivism and Psycholinguistic Theories

Constructivism can be assumed to have existed during the same period as the development of Behaviorism in the American educational system. It is a learning theory that involves an individual’s active construction of learning. Constructivism encompasses an integration of learning by combining the existing and new knowledge. However, according to theoretical perspectives, constructivism only occurs when the learner actively participates in the process. Furthermore, learning itself can be perceived as the by-product of an on-going natural state-of-mind and it is not something that can be stimulated or reinforced (Tracey & Morrow, 2012). Apart from the general ...

Introduction

Psycholinguistics is a study field that deals with the relationship between psychology and neurobiological characteristics and their contribution towards language development. Psycholinguistics is one of the important fields in human development since it evaluates the factors promoting, sustaining and producing languages in humans. Although the study is mostly relevant in early human development to evaluate acquisition of language, it is still applicable in the analysis of second and progressive languages learnt by humans at any stage of their development. Although psycholinguistics relates to languages alone, it borrows modern concepts from biology, cognitive sciences and information theory to understand human language ...