Psycholinguistics

While completing the readings for this reflection paper, I found myself thinking just how important it is to obtain knowledge of one's history. I believe it is essential as it allows one to develop a more profound understanding and appreciation of each other as well as their work. Wilhelm Wundt was a very renowned human being affectionately credited as the founder of psychology as a science. He was quite inspirational, possessed an inquisitive mind, and believed in proving phenomena using experiments

ambiguity multiple meanings are constructed and processed by both hemispheres of the brain (Mason & Just, 2007). This study lends support to the Parallel Processing Hypothesis when processing ambiguity. Structural priming A popular method in psycholinguistics when studying the reading of a sentence is structural priming (van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Jacob, 2006). Structural priming involves showing a sentence that is syntactically similar to a target sentence of choice and is based on the concept

In the 1960s, Noam Chomsky challenged the traditional view on language by claiming that language is biologically rooted, and belongs to our biological endowment. To begin with, the notion of ‘language’ is ambiguous, as it covers many different aspects: historical, social, cultural, etc. However, the Chomskyan bio linguistic approach is not concerned with these aspects. To avoid terminological problems, I will refrain from using ‘language’, and will use instead ‘Faculty of Language’ (henceforth,

Sapir-Worf Hypothesis: Linguistic Determinism and Linguistic Relativity The romantic idealism of the late eighteenth century, as encountered in the views of Johann Herder (1744-1803) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (I 762-1835), placed great value on the diversity of the world’s languages and cultures. The tradition was taken up by the American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), and resulted in a view about the relation between language

Individual Learners’ Uniqueness: A Closer Look at Learners’ Needs The population of adult learners, immigrants, refugees who are studying English as a second language in North America is increasing. In the United States, 46% of all adult learners participating in state-administered adult education programs are enrolled in ESL classes, making approximately 700,000 total number of ESL learners during 2016–2017 (U.S. Department of Education, 2017). This population presents an enormously multilingual

Exposing children to Foreign Languages “A gift parents can give children that money can’t buy” (Judy Willis). This powerful quote insists that teaching a child a foreign language is better than any gift that can be bought. It implies that money cannot buy children the benefits of learning another language. Exposing children to foreign languages will benefit them in the future by improving their overall brain activity and development, making them more culturally aware individuals, and by making

“The Bilingual Advantage” is a very real thing according to scientists who perform research in the field of neurology, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics and language sciences, but by all mean do not feel as if you have been wasting your life away not having learned a second language -- not all is lost. Having heard that with each language one learns, the next becomes easier, I have always thought that learning languages does something incredibly beneficial for the brain. Informed by philosopher

focuse, but they also different in their courses. Linguistics which focuses on language and grammar has many scops of studying. Those are; Pragmatics, which is studying about language in everyday life; Semantics, which is studying about meaning; Psycholinguistics, studying about language and brain and also the language acquisition; Phonetics and Phonology, studying about sound pattern and the sound production; Sociolinguistics, studying about language in the social life; Discourse Analysis; Stylistics;

The next cognitive ability to examine is visual spatial abilities. This field also lacked in published experiments, especially for adults. Visual spatial abilities is included because of curiosity, but also since it is a huge neuropsychological factor of intelligence that neurologists study. In an experiment done by Blom et al with children from the Netherlands, aged six to seven, they unfortunately did not find any differences between bilinguals and the control group monolinguals for verbal and

Theories of Second Language Acquisition The approaches to Second Language Acquisition (SLA for short) have been changing and developing throughout the years. Since the beginning of the study of Second Language Acquisition, the approaches and theories of SLA have ranged from the Behaviourist approach to SLA by an American psychologist Burrhus Frederic Skinner in 1940s-1950s to Universal Grammar approach by an American linguist Noam Chomsky in 1960-1970s to the Information Processing Model introduced