PSYCHOLINGUISTICS PAPER

Language Comphrehension and Production

This paper complied to fulfill group task Psycholinguistics Course

In the Department of English Teacher Education Smt V Class B

Arranged by 13th Group:

Layla Zalsabila 1908103146

Lola Rizky Amalia 1908103206

Tantri Yuneri 1908103076

Supporting Lecturer:
Dr. Hj. Huriyah Saleh, M.Pd

FAKULTAS ILMU TARBIYAH DAN KEGURUAN (FITK)

INSTITUT AGAMA ISLAM NEGERI (IAIN)
SYEKH NURJATI CIREBON
TAHUN 2021/2022
 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The field of psychology has long had a mutual interest in language, but
psycholinguistics as a field of study did not emerge until the 1960s. It was motivated by
Chomsky's work in linguistics, and by his claim that the special properties of language
require special mechanisms to deal with them (Chomsky, 1959). The special feature of the
language that Chomsky focuses on is its productivity. Possessed with grammar, or syntax,
humans can generate and understand new sentences that carry new messages. The
relationship between psychology and linguistics is very close in the area of syntax, with
psycholinguistics examining the psychological reality of various proposed linguistic rules.

As the field of psycholinguistics developed, it became clear that the theory of

understanding and sentence production could not be based on linguistic theory in a simple
way; Psycholinguistic theory must take into account the properties of the human mind as well
as the structure of language. Psycholinguistics has thus become its own field of inquiry,
informed by but not wholly dependent on linguistics. Early psycholinguists, following
Chomsky, tended to see language as an autonomous system, isolated from other cognitive
systems. In this modular view (see J.A. Fodor, 1983), the early stages of understanding words
and sentences are not affected by higher levels of knowledge. Information about context and
about real-world boundaries comes into play only after the first steps of linguistic processing
have occurred, giving such models a serial quality.

Another tension in psycholinguistics today concerns the proper role of linguistics in

the field. The work of syntactic processing, especially in the early days of psycholinguistics,
was greatly influenced by the development of linguistics. The relationship between linguistics
and psycholinguistics is less close in other fields, but they do exist. For example, work on
phonological processing has been influenced by prosodic linguistic explanation (melody,
rhythm, and stress patterns of spoken language) and the internal structure of syllables, and
some work on word recognition and language production has been influenced by linguistics.
Morphological analysis (study of morphemes and their combinations). In this paper we are
from the last group are going to explained about some topics, there are; words meaning,
memory, recognation, words and morpheme as unit, categories of object, word meaning
decomposed, semantic markers, connotative meaning, words meaning in context and
ambiguous words.
 CHAPTER II
DISCUSSION
A. Words Meaning, Memory and Recognation
a) Words Meaning

Talk about words meaning, in linguistics a word of a spoken language can be defined
as the smallest sequence of phonemes that can be uttered in isolation with objective or
practical meaning. In Semantics, a word is a string of characters that can have different
meanings, maenwhile commonly people defined a word as a letter or group of letters that
has meaning when spoken or written. Some words refer to concrete things, that is things
that can be perceived through sensory input. But, there is also other words which refer to
abstract things such as racism, love, philosophy, etc. Words can not be defined in a
explanation because words are not static but dynamic, it means that their meanings can
change, divide, merge, and disappear. Words are controlled by all competent speakers of
the language, and as a very fluent medium of communication and interaction.

b) Words Memory

As we know that human beings are born with a complex, interrelated system for
categorizing and storing every event experienced throughout life. There are consists of
audio, visual, sensory, and emotional information is integrated, yielding images that are
linked to the lexical items as events. These are stored in memory. Not all information is
equally easy to recall, since different types of events are stored in different parts of
memory, based on significance. The most current and widely accepted model of memory
consists of three general stages: sensory (events that are experienced in real time), short
term (which holds a limited amount of information for a limited time period), and long
term (which stores events and is composed of layers of levels, based on the nature of the
input. As an event is experienced, neurons are fired, encoded, and stored in the area of the
brain responsible for the corresponding type of information. During a memory search
(lexical retrieval), encoded neurons are activated in order to reconstruct the past event.
Lexical retrieval and discourse comprehension are highly dependent upon both short-term
and long-term memory.

c) Words Recognition
 Word recognition refers to a component process of language. Word recognition
transforms written and spoken forms of words into linguistics representations.
Historically, word recognition also referred to lexical decision performance. In lexical
decision, participants judge whether individually presented letter-strings actually spell
words (with respect to a target language). Here, words recognition in the fields of
pscholinguistics is known as spoken word recognition.

- Spoken Word Recognition, is the study of how lexical representations are

accessed from phonological patterns in the speech signal. Spoken word
recognition covers the entire range of processes involved in recognizing spoken-
words both in and out of context. It brings together a number of essays dealing
with important theoritical questions raised by the study of spoken word
recognition among them, how do we understand fluent speech as efficiently and
effortlessly as we do? What are the mental processes and representations involved
when we recognize spoken words? How do these differ from those involved in
reading written words? What information is stored in our mental lexicon and how
is it structured? What do linguistic and computational theories tell us about these
psychological processes and representations? The multidisciplinary presentation
of work by phoneticians, linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists reflects
the growing interest in spoken word recognition from a number of different
perspectives. It is a natural consequence of the mediating role that lexical
representations and processes play in language understanding, linking sound with
meaning.

B. Words and Morpheme as Unit

As we’ve already known that a word is a free form that has a meaning. But you’ve
probably already noticed that there are other forms that have meaning and some of them
seem to be smaller than whole words. A morpheme is the smallest form that has meaning.
Some morphemes are free: they can appear in isolation. (This means that some words are
also morphemes.) But some morphemes can only ever appear when they’re attached to
something else; these are called bound morphemes.

For example this simple sentence,

Penny cooked some carrots.

It’s quite straightforward to say that this sentence has four words in it. We can make the
observations we just discussed above to check for isolation, moveability, and
inseparability to provide evidence that each of Penny, cooked, some, and carrots is a
word. But there are more than four units of meaning in the sentence.

Penny cook-ed some carrot-s.

The word cooked is made up of the word cook plus another small form that tells us that
the cooking happened in the past. And the word carrots is made up of carrot plus a bit
that tells us that there’s more than one carrot.

That little bit that’s spelled –ed (and pronounced a few different ways depending on
the environment) has a consistent meaning in English: past tense. We can easily think of
several other examples where that form has that meaning, like walked, baked, cleaned,
kicked, kissed. This –ed unit appears consistently in this form and consistently has this
meaning, but it never appears in isolation: it’s always attached at the end of a word. It’s a
bound morpheme. For example, if someone tells you, “I need you to walk the dog,” it’s
not grammatical to answer “-ed” to indicate that you already walked the dog.

Likewise, the bit that’s spelled –s or –es (and pronounced a few different ways) has a
consistent meaning in many different words, like carrots, bananas, books, skates, cars,
dishes, and many others. Like –ed, it is not free: it can’t appear in isolation. It’s a bound
morpheme too.

If a word is made up of just one morpheme, like banana, swim, hungry, then we say that
it’s morphologically simple, or monomorphemic.

But many words have more than one morpheme in them: they’re morphologically
complex or polymorphemic. In English, polymorphemic words are usually made up of a
root plus one or more affixes. The root morpheme is the single morpheme that determines
the core meaning of the word. In most cases in English, the root is a morpheme that could
be free. The affixes are bound morphemes. English has affixes that attach to the end of a
root; these are called suffixes, like in books, teaching, happier, hopeful, singer. And
English also has affixes that attach to the beginning of a word, called prefixes, like in
unzip, reheat, disagree, impossible. Some languages have bound morphemes that go into
the middle of a word; these are called infixes.

C. Categories of Object
 Harely (2005) states that the main object of research in the psycholinguistics field is
the study of the cognitive process that underlies the comphrehension and production of
language and the cultural environment interacts with these two. In addition,
psycholinguistics areas are divided into spoken word recognition, sentence
comphrehension, sentence production, message construction, memory limitations, and
cross-linguistic comparisona.

D. Word Meaning Decomposed and How Dictionaries Define Words

It means we will talk about semantics. Carlin (1997) Semantics is the study of the
meaning of words, phrases and sentences. In semantic analysis, there is always an attempt
to focus on what the words conventionally mean, rather than on what an individual
speaker (like George Carlin) might want them to mean on a particular occasion. The
purpose of semantics is to propose exact meanings of words and phrases, and remove
confusion, which might lead the readers to believe a word has many possible meanings. It
makes a relationship between a word and the sentence through their meanings.

Semantic decomposition is the task of understanding the meaning of an individual

word by decomposing it into various aspects (factors, constituents, components) that are
latent in the meaning of the word. The result of a semantic decomposition is a
representation of meaning. This representation can be used for tasks, such as those related
to artificial intelligence or machine learning. Semantic decomposition is common in
natural language processing applications.

The basic idea of a semantic decomposition is taken from the learning skills of adult
humans, where words are explained using other words. It is based on Meaning-text
theory. Meaning-text theory is used as a theoretical linguistic framework to describe the
meaning of concepts with other concepts.

A connectionist knowledge representation is created as a semantic network consisting

of concepts and their relations to serve as the basis for the representation of meaning. This
graph is built out of different knowledge sources like WordNet, Wiktionary, and
BabelNET. Future work uses the created representation of meaning to build heuristics and
evaluate them through capability matching and agent planning, chatbots or other
applications of natural language understanding.

How dictionaries define words

 Before we tell about how dictionaries define words, We should know how
dictionaries get their words. Word gets into a dictionary when it is used by many people
who all agree that it means the same thing. First, you drop the word into your
conversation and writing, then others pick it up; the more its use spreads, the more likely
it will be noticed by dictionary editors, or lexicographers.

Accordind to Merriam-Webster editors, to decide which words to include in the

dictionary and to determine what they mean, they are Tracking Word Usage :

1. Study the language as it’s used. They carefully monitor which words people use most
often and how they use them.

2. Each day most Merriam-Webster editors devote an hour or two to reading a cross
section of published material, including books, newspapers, magazines, and electronic
publications; in our office this activity is called “reading and marking.” The editors scour
the texts in search of new words, new usages of existing words, variant spellings, and
inflected forms–in short, anything that might help in deciding if a word belongs in the
dictionary, understanding what it means, and determining typical usage. Any word of
interest is marked, along with surrounding context that offers insight into its form and
use.

E. Semantic Markers
Essential Meaning of semantics as Linguistics is “The meanings of words and phrases
in a particular context” The whole controversy is a matter of semantics. [=the controversy
was caused by people understanding the same words in different ways]

Semantic markers are Words and phrases that help signal the progression of ideas in a
text. Semantic markers can perform various functions, such as showing the chronology of
events (firstly, then, eventually, in the end), a cause and effect relationship (since,
because, so, consequently), summing up (in short, to sum up), rephrasing (in other words)
and so on. These expressions help a reader to navigate easily through a text.

The Function of semantic makers :

1. In Context. The context of a word can be either physical or linguistic. The physical
context refers to the real-world situation in which the word is used, as in “horrible
weather” (i.e., bad weather — when it’s raining heavily). The linguistic context refers to
the words or sentences surrounding the word that help to make its meaning clear,
 Example : “I don’t know what’s happening to me... I seem to be making mistakes all the
time! It’s horrible! I think I need to take a break” (horrible here referring to some
unhappy circumstances).

2. In Narative. A written text that may be a fictional or factual account of an event

described in chronological order. A narrative usually has a clear beginning, middle and
end, and includes descriptions, dialogues and comments.

Example : As in Novels, short stories, travelogues and biographies are some examples of
narratives.

3. In Collocational restrictions. When two words cannot be used together to make a

meaningful unit, we say that they have collocational restrictions.

For example : the collocation married spinster is unacceptable, as are the phrases smiling
computer or manicured hair. These combinations ignore collocational restrictions on
grammar and meaning. A spinster is an unmarried woman, a computer is inanimate and
hence cannot smile, and unlike nails or gardens, hair cannot be manicured. Collocation
therefore refers to the appropriate use of a combination of words

F. Connotative Meaning and Word Meaning in Context

Language is one of the important part in human’s life. Language is the system of sound and
word used by human for interaction each other. Actually, it is called communication.
Communication is basically a social process. Laswell (1948) Connotative has implicit
meaning. meaning. what people think about two words and find whether it is possible or
impossible for the word to have two different meanings from its denotative meaning.

Connotation can implied meaning of a word that make the word have more than one
meaning. It appears based on people’s thought. The words that used connotative meaning
also related to feeling, either positive nor negative feeling.

Connotative meaning is a term commonly used in linguistics; it is also used to beautifully a

sentence expression in a word. The connotative meaning is influenced by the values and
norms held by society. This results in differences in the social function of words with almost
the same meaning, because they are related to the value of taste.

Connotative meaning is the communicative value an expression has by virtue of what it refers
to, over and above its purely conceptual content. It will be clear if we are talking about
connotation, we are in fact talking about the “real word experience”. It was also relatively
unstable as it varies according to culture, historical periods and experience of the individual.
Connotative meaning was indeterminate and open ended.

Ambiguous is a word or sentence that has two or more meanings. Ambiguity sometimes
makes a word or sentence have doubts, ambiguity, ambiguity, and so on. Meaning is a
grammatical construction that has more than one usage.

One word has multiple interpretations and have different meanings dependent upon one's
perspective. What one source describes as a 'war', may be described as an 'invasion' by the
other side. Use of such words tends to be seen as advocating the views of one side over the
other, unless they are clearly attributed to the correct side. Rather than "this is a war", state
that it is viewed as a war, and who views it as such, providing suitable references. For
complete neutrality, the opposing view should also be mentioned and cited, with
due weight given to each side.
G.
 CHAPTER III
CONCLUSION
 The meaning of the word is imprecise or open to more than one interpretation. For
example, in "the Sun is bright", 'bright' is a relative term that does nothing to inform
the reader of how bright the Sun actually is, nor how bright it is compared to other
celestial bodies. Editors should always avoid using terms such as these, except in
quotations.

 Some words have multiple interpretations and have different meanings dependent
upon one's perspective. What one source describes as a 'war', may be described as an
'invasion' by the other side. Use of such words tends to be seen as advocating the
views of one side over the other, unless they are clearly attributed to the correct side.
Rather than "this is a war", state that it is viewed as a war, and who views it as such,
providing suitable references. For complete neutrally , the opposing view should also
be mentioned and cited, with due weight  given to each side.

 Words with multiple definitions tend to cause the greatest problems, because the
individual definitions may not be ambiguous. The ambiguity arises because the reader
may not be certain as to which definition is intended by the editor. In such cases,
always provide sufficient context or explanation to make it clear to any reader which
definition is intended.
 search for ambiguous words or phrases. A term or phrase is ambiguous when the
meaning is so uncertain in the context of the argument that we need further clarification
before we judge.
Ambiguity is the existence of multiple possible meanings for a word or phrase. When
determining which terms or phrases are ambiguous use the stated issue as a clue for
possible key terms. To locate key terms, we must review the issue for possible key
terms, look for crucial words or phrases within the reasons and conclusion, keep an eye
out for abstract words or phrases and use reverse role-playing to determine how
someone might define certain words and phrases differently.

References
Altmann T. M. Gerry (2001), Psycholinguistics in review British Journal of Psychology 129-
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Harley, T. (2005): The Psychology of Language. From Data to Theory, New York,
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Analysis of Difficulties in Understanding Ambiguous Meaning in Recount Text (Muhammad Ali : 1,
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