KEY CONCEPTS

Before starting with the topic of Psycholinguistics and more specifically “Psycholinguistics in Bilingualism and L2 Learning”, some relevant concepts and ideas will be explained to get a better understanding of the topic.

- Language: in very simple words, it is a system of signs (e.g. speech sounds, hand gestures, letters) used to communicate messages. Of all kinds of language, the most developed, used and studied is human spoken language, since it has allowed people to communicate efficiently. There has been several attempts to determine the defining properties of human language, however, only six of these features will be considered in this short definition and they are: displacement, arbitrariness, productivity, cultural transmission, discreteness and duality.

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- Psychology: is an academic and applied discipline involving the phenomenological and scientific study of mental processes and behaviour. Psychologists study such concepts as perception, cognition, emotion, personality, behaviour, interpersonal relationships, and the individual and collective unconscious.

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- Linguistics: in five words, linguistics is the scientific study of language. It endeavours to answer the questions: What is language? and How is it represented in the mind? Linguists focus on describing and explaining language and are not concerned with the prescriptive rules of the language; besides it very common to think linguists are required to know many languages, but they are concerned with the language process.

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- Critical Period: the general belief is that during childhood there is a period (the critical one) when the human brain is most ready to “receive” and learn a particular language, since it is thought the lateralization process begins in early childhood and coincides with the period during which language acquisition takes place. If a child does not acquire language during this period, he or she will have great difficulty learning language later on.

If you want to watch an interesting report on the Genie’s case, click on the video below

If you want to watch the second part of this report, click on the following link: GENIE2

If you want to watch the third part of this report, click on the following link: GENIE3

If you want to watch the fourth part of this report, click on the following link: GENIE4

If you want to watch the fifth part of this report, click on the following link: GENIE5

If you want to watch the sixth part of this report, click on the following link: GENIE6

- Language and Thought: it has been an important topic of discussion among linguists, philosophers, psychologists and people in general. The questions, Is it possible to think without language? and Does our language dictate the ways in which we are able to think?, have exercised many people, but a simple answer has not been found. However, there are some ideas to be considered:

a. Kinds of Thinking: many kinds of behaviour have been referred to as “thinking”, but they are not related to language. For example, our emotional response to some object or event, we may use language to explain our reaction to other, but the emotion itself is beyond words. The thinking which involves language is of a different kind and it is called rational, directed, logical or propositional thinking.

b. Independence or Identity?: we agree there are different kinds of thinking, but how close is this relationship between language and thought? Several hypothesis have been made in order to answer the previous question and they are organised in the following diagram:

c. Saphir-Whorf Hypothesis: it combines two principles which are called “Linguistic Determinism” (it states that language determine the way we think) and “Linguistic Relativity” (it states that the distinctions encoded in one language are not found in any other language). This hypothesis is considered to be very plausible, but in its strongest form it is unlike to have any adherents now, since successful translations can be made and the conceptual uniqueness of a language can be explained using other language; in short, although differences among languages are great, it can not be said that mutual comprehension is impossible, considering that one language may take many words to say what another language says in a single word, but in the end the circumlocution can make the point. However, a weaker version of this hypothesis is generally accepted:

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