Psycholinguistics , also mentioned as psycholinguistics , is a scientific discipline that is dedicated to the analysis of the link between language and the psychological mechanisms underlying it . In this way, it investigates how language acquisition occurs and what cognitive resources participate when linguistic information is processed.
Gustave Guillaume , French linguist who was born in 1883 and died in 1960 , is noted as a pioneer in the development of psycholinguistics. This thinker was in charge of relating the psychological elements with the linguistic ones, baptizing his theory as psychosystem (later known as guillaumism ).
The coining of the term psycholinguistics, meanwhile, is attributed to the American Jacob Robert Kantor in the mid- 1930s . Today, psycholinguistics is understood as the area of knowledge that examines the processes inherent to the use of language in human communication .
It is possible to recognize two major dimensions in the processes of psycholinguistics: encoding and decoding . Coding implies that people can construct appropriate sentences using the rules of grammar and vocabulary. Decoding, meanwhile, allows you to understand the message. Psychological factors intervene in these actions that are essential to understand words and expressions and enable interaction.
It can be stated that psycholinguistics, in short, studies the mental activity involved in linguistic knowledge. The organization of the various concepts, the structuring of meaning and the appeal to memory when using the language are some of the issues that are part of its area of interest.
Another phenomenon that is of great interest to psycholinguistics is learning the mother tongue, something that practically all living beings do without making a specific effort . Let us not forget that it is not necessary to receive academic training to learn to speak, read or write: it is enough to grow up in a family that carries out these activities so that the child acquires them progressively.
There are various points of view and theories around this. For example, the American linguist and philosopher Avram Noam Chomsky proposed the so-called universal grammar in the 1960s, according to which human beings naturally have a kind of biologically programmed device that provides us with the fundamental properties of language.
Chomsky's theory is completed when a human being begins to perceive the language spoken by his or her elders, because it is from that moment on that said device allows him or her to adopt its particular rules and learn them. All of this could not be explained without taking into account another of the most important topics for psycholinguistics: communicative intention , which refers to the desire we have to make ourselves understood from the moment we become aware of our environment.
From our birth, we use different resources to communicate our sensations and needs to our elders. First of all, we use crying, since we do not have enough mobility to do much else. As the months go by, we incorporate certain gestures, babbling, and little by little we outline the so-called protowords , such as being eto instead of "this." The first words also appear, although in versions typical of children: baubau for dog, meow for cat, etc.
We also make use of so-called holophrases , which allow us to summarize ideas that require several words in short sounds; for example: tita can mean "she wants a cookie." Telegraphic language , on the other hand, is also typical of our stage of development , and is characterized by a reduced way of speaking, incorrect from a grammatical point of view and potentially different in each child or family group; For example: no abua could mean "I don't want water" or "the bottle has been emptied", depending on the context.