Sociolinguistics and

Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics
Various branches on the basis of the inner
world of mans mind and of the outer world of
society and social relationships have
developed recently in modern linguistics, such
as psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics.

We shall study these branches in detail.
Definitions
Linguistics:
It is the branch of science that studies the origin,
structure, and use of language.
Sociolinguistics:
- The study of relationships between language and social
behavior is called sociolinguistics.
Psycholinguistics:
The psychological study of language is called
psycholinguistics. As the name implies
psycholinguistics is principally an integration of the
fields of psychology and linguistics.

Introduction to Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics
It is the study of language in relation to society.
Language is always meant for society. The social
interaction and communication of ideas or messages
can be possible only through language.
The history and the function of language have
been the subject of studies since the prehistoric
period, but sociolinguistics has been introduced
only recently perhaps in the late sixties.
Considerable growth has taken place since then.











Sociolinguistics
It does not mean that the study of language in
relation to society is the invention of 1960s but on
the contrary there is a long tradition of dialects
and in the general study of the relations between
word meaning and culture.
since the 1960s both these began to be considered
as the subjects within sociolinguistics.
Sociolinguistics throws light on both the nature of
language and the nature of society.
The purpose of language is to represent the nature
and the culture of the society.



Sociolinguistics
Forms of language
We use different forms of language for
different purposes. We express languages
through either speech or graphic medium.
The speech can be a bit different from the
graphic expression.
The grammatical rules and the selection of
appropriate words are required in graphic
expression but in speech some relaxation may
be allowed.
Sociolinguistics
In graphic expression there are number of
formal and informal forms to meet the
different methods of social interaction. e.g.
letter, application, report, notice, agenda,
proceedings, statement, newspapers, books ,
etc.
The speech may also have a number of forms
e.g., gossip, talk, lecture in a public place,
lecture in a seminar or in classroom etc.

Insights into sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is the study of the any and all
aspects of society including cultural norms,
expectations and context ,on the way language is
used, and the effects of language use on society.

Sociolinguistics differs from sociology of language
in that the focus of sociolinguistics is the effect of
the society on the language while the latters
focus is languages effect on society.
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics overlaps to a considerable degree
with pragmatics. It is historically closely related to
linguistic anthropology and the distinction
between the two fields has even been questioned
recently.
It also studies how language varieties differ
between groups separated by certain social
variables e.g. ethnicity,religion,status,gender,level
of education,age,etc. and how creation and
adherence to these rules is used to categorize
individuals in socio or socioeconomic classes.

Sociolinguistics
As the usage of language varies from place to place
(dialect) , language usage varies among social classes,
and it is these socialects that sociolinguistic studies.
The social aspects of language were in the modern
sense first studied by Indian and Japanese linguistics in
the 1930s , and also by Gauchat in Switzerland in the
early 1900s ,but none received much attention in the
west until much later.
The study of the social motivation of language change,
on the other hand has its foundation in the wave
model of the late 19
th
century.
Sociolinguistics
The first attested use of the term
sociolinguistics was by Thomas Callan Hodson
in the title of a 1939 paper.
Sociolinguistics in the west first appeared in
the 1960s and was pioneered by linguists such
as William Labov in the US and Basil Bernstein
in the UK.

Factors Influencing Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is a quickly developing branch of
linguistics which investigates the individual and social
variation of language.
Just as regional variation of language can give a lot of
information about the place the speaker is from, social
variation tells about the role fulfilled by a given speaker
within one community, or country.
Sociolinguistics is practical scientific discipline
researching the language that is actually used either by
native speakers or foreigners, in order to formulate
theories about language change.


Sociolinguistics
There are numerous factors influencing the way
people speak which are investigated by
sociolinguistics.
Social class: the position of the speaker in the
society, measured by the level of education ,
parental background, profession and their effect
on syntax and lexis used by the speaker.
Social context: the register of the language used
depending on changing situations, formal
language in formal meetings and informal during
meetings with friends for example.


Sociolinguistics
Geographical origins: slight differences in
pronunciation between speakers that point at the
geographical region which the speaker comes
from.
Ethnicity: differences between the use of a given
language by its native speakers and other ethnic
groups.
Nationality: clearly visible in the case of the
English language British English differs from
American English, or Canadian English.


Sociolinguistics
Gender: differences in patterns of language
use between men and women, such as
quantity of speech, intonation patterns.
Age: the influence of age of the speaker on
the use of vocabulary and grammar
complexity.
Sociolinguistics
An important factor influencing the way of
formulating sentences is according to
sociolinguists the social class of the speakers.
There has been a division of social classes
proposed in order to make the description
accurate.
Two main groups of language users, mainly those
performing non-manual work and those with
more years of education are the middle class.
Those who perform some kind of manual work
are working class.
Sociolinguistics
Additional terms lower and upper are
frequently used in order to subdivide the
social classes.
Therefore, differences between upper middle
class can be compared with lower working
class.

Sociolinguistics
It is notable that people are acutely aware of the
differences in speech patterns that mark their
social class and are often able to adjust their style
to the interlocutor.
It is especially true for the members of the
middle class who seem eager to use forms
associated with upper class, however , in such
efforts the forms of characteristic of upper class
are often overused by the middle class members.


Sociolinguistics
The above mentioned process of adopting
own speech to reduce social distance is called
convergence.
When people want to emphasize the social
distance they make use of this process called
divergence purposefully using idiosyncratic
forms.

Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics investigates the way in which
language changes depending on the region of
country it is used in.
To describe a variety of language that differs in
grammar , lexis and pronunciation from others a
term dialect is used.
Each member of community has a unique way of
speaking due to the life experience , education ,
age, and aspiration. An individual personal
variation of language use is called an idiolect.

Sociolinguistics
There are numerous factors influencing idiolect
some of which have been discussed just now, yet
two more need to be elucidated, namely Jargon
and Slang.
Jargon is specific technical vocabulary associated
with the particular field of interest, or topic. For
example words such as convergence , dialect and
social class are sociolinguistic jargon.
Slang is a type of language used most frequently
by people from outside of high status groups
characterized by the use of unusual words and
phrases instead of conventional forms.
Sociolinguistics
Sociolinguistics is a branch of linguistics which
studies the relation between language and
society.
Language changes its form and structure on the
basis of social conditions, for example, social
class, gender, religion and culture groups.
A particular social group may speak a different
variety of a language from the rest of the
community. Such a group of speakers comes
under the head speech community.
Sociolinguistics
The variation in language, as such, may occur due to
differences in class or status.
The speakers belonging to the educated and higher
class may have a different way of speaking of the same
language in comparison with that of those belonging to
the uneducated and lower class.
A language also varies among the speakers belonging
to different geographical regions with respect to their
pronunciations. For example, the English spoken in
London varies from that which is spoken in the other
regions of the same country.
Sociolinguistics
For example, Received Pronunciation (RP) is a variety
of spoken English used in the south-west of England
and is particularly associated with the universities of
Oxford and Cambridge, and the BBC.
It is an educated and formal kind of English. Where
as the English spoken in the north of England, for
example, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, in Scotland and
Wales differ in their form and pronunciation.
Similarly, varieties of English spoken in different
countries, for example, American, Indian and
Australian English, also have variations.
Sociolinguistics studies these variations and changes
in a language.











Introduction to
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological
processes involved in the language.
Psycholinguists study understanding, producing and
remembering language and hence are concerned with
listening, reading , speaking, writing and memory of
language.
They are also interested in how we acquire language and
the way in which it interacts with other psychological
systems.
Many people think that psycholinguistics has a rather
dated field emphasizing the role of linguistics too much.
Although the area might once have been about the
psychology of linguistic theory, it is now much more. Still
there is currently no better term so it will have to do.



Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of
psychological and neurobiological factors that enable
humans to acquire ,use ,comprehend and produce
language.
Modern research makes use of biology , neuro science ,
cognitive science, linguistics, and information theory to
study how the brain processes language.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make
it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful
sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structure, as
well as the processes that make it possible to understand
utterances, words, texts, etc.
Developmental psycholinguistics studies children ability to
learn language.
Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistic is a branch of study which
combines the disciplines of psychology and
linguistics. It is concerned with the relationship
between the human mind and the language
examines the processes that occur in the brain
while producing and perceiving both written and
spoken discourse.
It is interested in the ways of storing lexical items
and syntactic rules in the mind, as well as the
processes of memory involved in perception and
interpretation of texts.
Psycholinguistics

The processes of speaking and listening are analyzed, along
with the language acquisition and language disorders.
Psycholinguistics as a separate branch of study emerged in
the late 1950s and 1960s as a result of Chomsky revolution.
The ideas presented by Chomsky became so important that
they quickly gained a lot of publicity and had a big impact
on a large number of contemporary views of language.
Consequently also psycholinguistics started investigating
such matters as the processing of deep and surface
structure of sentences.
Psycholinguistics
In the early years of development of
psycholinguistics special experiments were
designed in order to examine if the focus of
processing is the deep syntactic structure.
On the basis of transformation of sentences it
was initially discovered that the ease of
processing was connected with syntactic
complexity. However, later on it became clear
that not only syntactic complexity adds to the
difficulty of processing, but also semantic factors
have a strong influence on it.
Psycholinguistics
Principles of sentence
Certain principles of sentence processing that were
formulated at that time are still valid.
One of them, namely the principle of minimal
attachment means that when processing a sentence
which could have multiple meanings people most
frequently tend to choose the simplest meaning, or the
meaning that in syntactic analysis would present the
simplest parse tree with fewest nodes.
Thus, a sentence Mary watched the man with the
binoculars by most language users would be
interpreted that it was Mary, and not the man, who
was using binoculars.
Psycholinguistics
One other principle worth noting is the
principle of late closure which states that
there is a tendency to join a new information
to the current phrase, or clause.
which explains why in a sentence such as john
said he will leave this morning the phrase this
morning would be understood as relating to
the verb leave and not to the word said.
Psycholinguistics
Processing of texts
Other psycholinguistic investigations into how
processing of texts occurs led to conclusion that
complex sentences with multiple clauses are
interpreted faster and with less mental effort when the
clauses are not reduced.
When it comes to speech the experiments show that
the interpretation of sentences can vary depending on
the placing of pauses, or disfluencies.
Additionally, it has been proven that visual contact
between speakers also has a strong influence on the
ease, or difficulty of processing text.

Psycholinguistics
During experiments subjects were listening to some
sentences and those who saw the speaker could
understand what the speech was about better, while
those who did not see him often had difficulties with it.
The recent tendencies in psycholinguistics show
increasing interest in discourse processing, and in
particular in the way readers create a mental
representation of the narrative word.
The focus of interest is on the role of readers
schemata (plan or scheme) and the problem of
inferences (conclusion or deduction) about the read
subject matter.
Psycholinguistics
It has been proved that certain inferences are
made in the very process of reading, while
others are made later in order to resolve some
problems or inconsistencies.
The issue of background knowledge and
automaticity of drawing inferences are still
being investigated.
Psycholinguistics
The ideas of psycholinguistic interest flourished
primarily in Europe in the early 1960s and then in
America in 1987.
The first overview of psycholinguistics appeared
in Annual Review of Psychology by Rubenstein
and Abron in 1960.
In 1964, George A. Miller, through his writings
and experiments, bridged the gap between
linguistic theory and psychological
experimentation.
In 1964, it was completely accepted by M. Neill.
Psycholinguistics
In the early stage, psycholinguistics covered an
extremely broad area, from acoustic phonetics to
language pathology.
But gradually, it converged to a certain area of
language and linguistic theory.
Now, psycholinguistics is confined to the inter-
relationship of psychological and linguistic
behaviour.
It studies how the mind processes and produces
language

Psycholinguistics
It uses linguistic concepts to describe the
mental processes connected with the
acquisition and use of languages.
Psycholinguistics deals with the various
aspects of meaning.
It has been deeply influenced by the
development of generative theory, and its
most important area of investigation has been
language acquisition.
Psycholinguistics
The relation between psychology and language
cannot be ignored. Linguistic science is directly
connected with the mind and psychological
behaviour.
The linguistic expression of a man depends, many
times on the mental states such as love, anger,
hatred, surprise, distress all have a deep impact
on the language.
Sometimes, the language, especially speech,
loses its control, which means the mental state is
expressed through it.

Psycholinguistics
Particularly, semantics is totally dependant on
psychology.
Psychology also assists in forming the syntax of a
language.
On some occasions, to know the reason for
phonological changes, we have to take the help of
psychology.
The origin and growth of a language is also the direct or
indirect areas of psychology.
It also studies child psychology of mentally retarded
people. The psychological treatment of the mentally
diseased also depends on the specific type of speech.
Psycholinguistics
Language is a mental phenomenon. Whatever we
think is expressed in language behaviour.
Psycholinguistics studies these mental processes,
such as thought and concept formation.
The concept of psycholinguistics was developed
in the early sixties.
In the beginning it had covered a very broad area,
from acoustic phonetics to language pathology.
But now it has been confined to those areas of
language and linguistic theory that tend to be
concentrated on by the psycholinguist.
Psycholinguistics
It has been mostly influenced by the
generative theory and the so-called
mentalists.
We can see the example of psycholinguistics in
the infants, such as how they acquire
language from their mother through the
method of imitation and how by imitating,
learning and asking questions they grow.

Psycholinguistics
It also studies the influence of psychological
factors, such as intelligence, motivation and
anxiety on the kind of language that is
understood and produced.
Various language activities of a man are
included in it.
If a speaker makes any error in his language, it
may be due to the psychological reasons that
influence its comprehension or production.
Psycholinguistics
Our perception of sounds and graphic symbols
(in writing) is influenced by the state of our
mind.
The learning of a language, the way the
speaker uses it, the way of answering
questions and of teaching it are included in
the area of psycholinguistics.