Tacit bonds between the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. Psycholinguistics

So far, numerous scholars have worked on the very issue of the bonds of two disciplines. Let’s look first at psychology which sounds older compare to the current counterpart. Psychology deals with how humans which are related to one another (and to themselves, which sounds peculiar but is true) in everyday life. So psychology is the foundation part on which linguistics is built and formed through ages. It provides hints, implies, rules-of-thumb, and principles linguists use to understand how languages are formed, transformed, and deployed. While, Linguistics is a branch of Psychology and mainly studies how human beings understand, produce and process and perceive language. As a branch of psychology linguistics studies communication, including language and non-verbal communication that aims to understand how we communicate with each other when necessary. Language is the ability to produce and comprehend both spoken and written words. Here written words refer to sign languages, for example, Brail alphabet. Tacit understanding of the authentic connections between the very disciplines is highly important to the masters of either spheres. That is basically due to the fact that understanding how language works means reaching across many branches of psychology everything ranging from basic neurological functioning to high-level cognitive processing.

Psycholinguistics is an individual discipline that investigates and describes the psychological procedures that make it possible for humans to master and apply language in different social settings. Psycholinguists conduct research and experiments on speech development of a human being from scratch and language development and how individuals of all ages comprehend and produce language. Therefore, from the above, we can infer that the common tool that three above mentioned disciplines share is language. Language enables us to express our wishes, likes, dislikes, and ideas, pains, anger, happiness, disapproving, in a nutshell, every feeling we feel. It is language’s symbolic function. This language achieves by encoding and externalizing our thoughts. We verbalize, let our thought outside with the help of language. Language is an important patient characteristic of three disciplines and language is closely interwoven with the elements of cognition and emotion. Language and culture also affect psychological science.

It is rational to touch upon the relationship between psychology with respect to learning and teaching. The main questions addressed are whether linguistics does a psychologist need to, or vice versa. A brief historical background to the relationship between linguistics and psychology is provided worldwide. The main area of overlap between linguistics and psychology is just as above proven in the domain known as psycholinguistics. The field crept into knowledge in the 1960s as a response to the intellectual excitement generated by the work of Chomsky. Then the question of what linguistics a psychologist needed to know was relatively transparent. As the goal for psychologists of language was to investigate the psychological reality of grammars, notably transformational grammar, then clearly psychology courses needed to provide students with a sufficient basis in syntax to evaluate the evidence. This fairly direct mapping between linguistics and psychology has been committed recently.

Over time psychologists became less intrigued by this salient relationship between the concerns of linguistics and psychology. From the later 1970s onward the range of research questions on this very topic widened and depended far less on a direct relationship with linguistics. This made it more difficult to define the linguistics that a psychologist needed to know.

The leading US psychologist Kintsch (1984) suggested a new approach to explain the relationship between psychology and linguistics. He asserted that psychologists need to draw on linguistics. For Kintsch, interested in how people understand complete texts, there is little of relevance of sentence syntax but much to be learned from text linguistics. This pragmatic approach to the relationship between psychology and linguistics has implications for the current curriculum. Although the psycholinguistic research agenda has expanded from the 1970s, there are topics which are extensively studied and which therefore feed into the curriculum. Altmann (1997) describes the relationship between linguistics and psycholinguistics. “If linguistics deals with language itself, psycholinguistics is chiefly about the brain.” An important point is the way that the two disciplines draw on different intellectual traditions. Reber (1987) reminds us the actuality of the methods that disciplines use. Linguistics use rationalist approach where argumentation is the prime method of evaluating the validity of theoretical approaches. For psychology empiricism, hypothesis testing by data collection is the main scientific method. These rather different approaches affect the way psycholinguistics is taught basically. Focuses on aspects of psycholinguistics such as language evolution, language pathologies and language acquisition which would be less central in psychology whose greater emphasis is on cognitive processes.

Psycholinguistic approach views learning as a cognitive individual process happening within the individual and then moves to the social dimension. As an approach, there are some methods which were developed based on psycholinguistics theories such as natural method, total physical response method, and suggestopedia method. Language perception refers to listening and reading, while the language production refers to speaking and writing. Psycholinguistics also helps to explain the errors students do in the language learning. Moreover, psycholinguistics also defines some kinds of brain disorders that affect language learning performance such as agraphia and aphasia which must be treated properly. Psycholinguistics mainly helps teachers to consider the use of appropriate method to teach that four language skill.

As a conclusion, I can reassert that these three disciplines are closely connected with each other making the acquisition of the contents of these fields by psychologists, linguists and psycholinguists. More specifically, Psychologists necessarily need to learn at least enough linguistics to have this systematic vocabulary and conversely linguists need to have a grasp of cognitive processes and their possible neural underpinnings. This applies with the third derived discipline-psycholinguistics as well.