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Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.
Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and neuropsychology. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling.
An image schema is a recurring structure within our cognitive processes which establishes patterns of understanding and reasoning. As an understudy to embodied cognition, image schemas are formed from our bodily interactions, from linguistic experience, and from historical context. The term is introduced in Mark Johnson's book The Body in the Mind; in case study 2 of George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: and further explained by Todd Oakley in The Oxford handbook of cognitive linguistics; by Rudolf Arnheim in Visual Thinking; by the collection From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics edited by Beate Hampe and Joseph E. Grady.
Eve Eliot Sweetser is a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Berkeley in 1984, and has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since that time. She has served as Director of Berkeley's undergraduate Cognitive Science Program and is currently Director of the Celtic Studies Program.
The N400 is a component of time-locked EEG signals known as event-related potentials (ERP). It is a negative-going deflection that peaks around 400 milliseconds post-stimulus onset, although it can extend from 250-500 ms, and is typically maximal over centro-parietal electrode sites. The N400 is part of the normal brain response to words and other meaningful stimuli, including visual and auditory words, sign language signs, pictures, faces, environmental sounds, and smells.
Sentence processing takes place whenever a reader or listener processes a language utterance, either in isolation or in the context of a conversation or a text. Many studies of the human language comprehension process have focused on reading of single utterances (sentences) without context. Extensive research has shown that language comprehension is affected by context preceding a given utterance as well as many other factors.
The P600 is an event-related potential (ERP) component, or peak in electrical brain activity measured by electroencephalography (EEG). It is a language-relevant ERP component and is thought to be elicited by hearing or reading grammatical errors and other syntactic anomalies. Therefore, it is a common topic of study in neurolinguistic experiments investigating sentence processing in the human brain.
The early left anterior negativity is an event-related potential in electroencephalography (EEG), or component of brain activity that occurs in response to a certain kind of stimulus. It is characterized by a negative-going wave that peaks around 200 milliseconds or less after the onset of a stimulus, and most often occurs in response to linguistic stimuli that violate word-category or phrase structure rules. As such, it is frequently a topic of study in neurolinguistics experiments, specifically in areas such as sentence processing. While it is frequently used in language research, there is no evidence yet that it is necessarily a language-specific phenomenon.
Priming is the idea that exposure to one stimulus may influence a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. The priming effect is the positive or negative effect of a rapidly presented stimulus on the processing of a second stimulus that appears shortly after. Generally speaking, the generation of priming effect depends on the existence of some positive or negative relationship between priming and target stimuli. For example, the word nurse might be recognized more quickly following the word doctor than following the word bread. Priming can be perceptual, associative, repetitive, positive, negative, affective, semantic, or conceptual. Priming effects involve word recognition, semantic processing, attention, unconscious processing, and many other issues, and are related to differences in various writing systems. Onset of priming effects can be almost instantaneous.
Music semantics refers to the ability of music to convey semantic meaning. Semantics are a key feature of language, and whether music shares some of the same ability to prime and convey meaning has been the subject of recent study.
The N200, or N2, is an event-related potential (ERP) component. An ERP can be monitored using a non-invasive electroencephalography (EEG) cap that is fitted over the scalp on human subjects. An EEG cap allows researchers and clinicians to monitor the minute electrical activity that reaches the surface of the scalp from post-synaptic potentials in neurons, which fluctuate in relation to cognitive processing. EEG provides millisecond-level temporal resolution and is therefore known as one of the most direct measures of covert mental operations in the brain. The N200 in particular is a negative-going wave that peaks 200-350ms post-stimulus and is found primarily over anterior scalp sites. Past research focused on the N200 as a mismatch detector, but it has also been found to reflect executive cognitive control functions, and has recently been used in the study of language.
Embodied cognition is the concept suggesting that many features of cognition are shaped by the state and capacities of the organism. The cognitive features include a wide spectrum of cognitive functions, such as perception biases, memory recall, comprehension and high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.
Linguistic prediction is a phenomenon in psycholinguistics occurring whenever information about a word or other linguistic unit is activated before that unit is actually encountered. Evidence from eyetracking, event-related potentials, and other experimental methods indicates that in addition to integrating each subsequent word into the context formed by previously encountered words, language users may, under certain conditions, try to predict upcoming words. In particular, prediction seems to occur regularly when the context of a sentence greatly limits the possible words that have not yet been revealed. For instance, a person listening to a sentence like, "In the summer it is hot, and in the winter it is..." would be highly likely to predict the sentence completion "cold" in advance of actually hearing it. A form of prediction is also thought to occur in some types of lexical priming, a phenomenon whereby a word becomes easier to process if it is preceded by a related word. Linguistic prediction is an active area of research in psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience.
A Jabberwocky sentence is a type of sentence of interest in neurolinguistics. Jabberwocky sentences take their name from the language of Lewis Carroll's well-known poem "Jabberwocky". In the poem, Carroll uses correct English grammar and syntax, but many of the words are made up and merely suggest meaning. A Jabberwocky sentence is therefore a sentence which uses correct grammar and syntax but contains nonsense words, rendering it semantically meaningless.
Embodied cognition occurs when an organism's sensorimotor capacities, body and environment play an important role in thinking. The way in which a person's body and their surroundings interacts also allows for specific brain functions to develop and in the future to be able to act. This means that not only does the mind influence the body's movements, but the body also influences the abilities of the mind, also termed the bi-directional hypothesis. There are three generalizations that are assumed to be true relating to embodied cognition. A person's motor system is activated when (1) they observe manipulable objects, (2) process action verbs, and (3) observe another individual's movements.
Cognitive humor processing refers to the neural circuitry and pathways that are involved in detecting incongruities of various situations presented in a humorous manner. Over the past decade, many studies have emerged utilizing fMRI studies to describe the neural correlates associated with how a human processes something that is considered "funny". Conceptually, humor is subdivided into two elements: cognitive and affective. The cognitive element, known as humor detection, refers to understanding the joke. Usually, this is characterized by the perceiver attempting to comprehend the disparities between the punch line and prior experience. The affective element, otherwise known as humor appreciation, is involved with enjoying the joke and producing visceral, emotional responses depending on the hilarity of the joke. This ability to comprehend and appreciate humor is a vital aspect of social functioning and is a significant part of the human condition that is relevant from a very early age. Humor comprehension develops in parallel with growing cognitive and language skills during childhood, while its content is mostly influenced by social and cultural factors. A further approach is described which refers to humor as an attitude related to strains. Humorous responses when confronted with troubles are discussed as a skill often associated with high social competence. The concept of humor has also been shown to have therapeutic effects, improving physiological systems such as the immune and central nervous system. It also has been shown to help cope with stress and pain. In sum, humor proves to be a personal resource throughout the life span, and helps support the coping of everyday tasks.
Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. is a former psychology professor and researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research interests are in the fields of experimental psycholinguistics and cognitive science. His work concerns a range of theoretical issues, ranging from questions about the role of embodied experience in thought and language, to looking at people's use and understanding of figurative language. Raymond Gibbs's research is especially focused on bodily experience and linguistic meaning. Much of his research is motivated by theories of meaning in philosophy, linguistics, and comparative literature.
The bi-directional hypothesis of language and action proposes that the sensorimotor and language comprehension areas of the brain exert reciprocal influence over one another. This hypothesis argues that areas of the brain involved in movement and sensation, as well as movement itself, influence cognitive processes such as language comprehension. In addition, the reverse effect is argued, where it is proposed that language comprehension influences movement and sensation. Proponents of the bi-directional hypothesis of language and action conduct and interpret linguistic, cognitive, and movement studies within the framework of embodied cognition and embodied language processing. Embodied language developed from embodied cognition, and proposes that sensorimotor systems are not only involved in the comprehension of language, but that they are necessary for understanding the semantic meaning of words.
Cyma Kathryn Van Petten is an American cognitive neuroscientist known for electrophysiological studies of language, memory, and cognition. She is Professor of Psychology at the State University of New York at Binghamton where she directs the Event-Related Potential Lab. Van Petten was recipient of the Early Career Award from the Society for Psychophysiological Research in 1994.
Kara D. Federmeier is a professor in the Department of Psychology, Department of Kinesiology, and the Program in Neuroscience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is known for her work using human electrophysiology to understand the neural basis of cognition, with a focus on language and memory in both younger and older adults.
References
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- ↑ "Innovative Research Grants (IRG) Award Recipients". Kavli Institute for Brain & Mind. Retrieved 2022-10-27.
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- ↑ Regel, Stefanie; Coulson, Seana; Gunter, Thomas C. (2010). "The communicative style of a speaker can affect language comprehension? ERP evidence from the comprehension of irony". Brain Research. 1311: 121–135. doi:10.1016/j.brainres.2009.10.077. PMID 19900421. S2CID 23384659.
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- ↑ Michaelov, James A.; Coulson, Seana; Bergen, Benjamin K. (2022). "So Cloze yet so Far: N400 Amplitude is Better Predicted by Distributional Information than Human Predictability Judgements". IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems. 15 (3): 1033–1042. arXiv: 2109.01226 . doi:10.1109/TCDS.2022.3176783. ISSN 2379-8920. S2CID 237416918.
- ↑ Coulson, Seana; Wu, Ying Choon (2005-03-01). "Right Hemisphere Activation of Joke-related Information: An Event-related Brain Potential Study". Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 17 (3): 494–506. doi:10.1162/0898929053279568. ISSN 0898-929X. PMID 15814008. S2CID 1147591.
- ↑ Coulson, Seana; Van Petten, Cyma (2002-09-01). "Conceptual integration and metaphor: An event-related potential study". Memory & Cognition. 30 (6): 958–968. doi: 10.3758/BF03195780 . ISSN 1532-5946. PMID 12450098. S2CID 3132148.
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