Unification can be achieved by incorporating into a single model the idea that the physical system (identified with phonetics) constrains the underlying abstract system (identified with phonology), making the units of control at the abstract planning level the same as those at the physical level.


The plan of an utterance is formatted as a gestural score, which provides the input to a physically based model of speech production – the task dynamic model of Elliot Saltzman. The gestural score graphs locations within the vocal tract where constriction can occur, indicating the planned or target degree of constriction. A computational model of speech production developed at Haskins Laboratories combines articulatory phonology, task dynamics, and the Haskins articulatory synthesis system developed by Philip Rubin and colleagues.


The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of an entity in terms of mental properties. It is part of a theory of mental content proposed by Dennett, which provides the underpinnings of his later works on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution.


Dennett (1971, p. 87) states that he took the concept of "intentionality" from the work of the German philosopher Franz Brentano. When clarifying the distinction between mental phenomena (viz., mental activity) and physical phenomena, Brentano (p. 97) argued that, in contrast with physical phenomena, the "distinguishing characteristic of all mental phenomena" was "the reference to something as an object" – a characteristic he called "intentional inexistence". Dennett constantly speaks of the "aboutness" of "intentionality"; for example: "the aboutness of the pencil marks composing a shopping list is derived from the intentions of the person whose list it is" (Dennett, 1995, p. 240).


John Searle (1999, pp. 85) stresses that "competence" in predicting/explaining human behaviour involves being able to both recognize others as "intentional" beings, and interpret others' minds as having "intentional states" (e.g., beliefs and desires):


According to Dennett (1987, pp. 48–49), folk psychology provides a systematic, "reason-giving explanation" for a particular action, and an account of the historical origins of that action, based on deeply embedded assumptions about the agent; namely that:


This approach is also consistent with the earlier work of Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, whose joint study revealed that, when subjects were presented with an animated display of 2-dimensional shapes, they were inclined to ascribe intentions to the shapes.


Further, Dennett (1987, p. 52) argues that, based on our fixed personal views of what all humans ought to believe, desire and do, we predict (or explain) the beliefs, desires and actions of others "by calculating in a normative system"; and, driven by the reasonable assumption that all humans are rational beings – who do "have" specific beliefs and desires and do "act" on the basis of those beliefs and desires in order to get what they want – these predictions/explanations are based on four simple rules:


The core idea is that, when understanding, explaining, and/or predicting the behavior of an object, we can choose to view it at varying levels of abstraction. The more concrete the level, the more accurate "in principle" our predictions are; the more abstract, the greater the computational power we gain by zooming out and skipping over the irrelevant details.


Dennett defines three levels of abstraction, attained by adopting one of three entirely different "stances", or intellectual strategies: the physical stance; the design stance; and the intentional stance:


Even when there is no immediate error, a higher-level stance can simply fail to be useful. If we were to try to understand the thermostat at the level of the intentional stance, ascribing to it beliefs about how hot it is and a desire to keep the temperature just right, we would gain no traction over the problem as compared to staying at the design stance, but we would generate theoretical commitments that expose us to absurdities, such as the possibility of the thermostat not being in the mood to work today because the weather is so nice. Whether to take a particular stance, then, is determined by how successful that stance is when applied.


Dennett argues that it is best to understand human behavior at the level of the intentional stance, without making any specific commitments to any deeper reality of the artifacts of folk psychology. In addition to the controversy inherent in this, there is also some dispute about the extent to which Dennett is committing to realism about mental properties. Initially, Dennett's interpretation was seen as leaning more towards instrumentalism, but over the years, as this idea has been used to support more extensive theories of consciousness, it has been taken as being more like Realism. His own words hint at something in the middle, as he suggests that the self is as real as a center of gravity, "an abstract object, a theorist's fiction", but operationally valid.


As a way of thinking about things, Dennett's intentional stance is entirely consistent with everyday commonsense understanding; and, thus, it meets Eleanor Rosch's (1978, p. 28) criterion of the "maximum information with the least cognitive effort". Rosch argues that, implicit within any system of categorization, are the assumptions that:


Also, the intentional stance meets the criteria Dennett specified (1995, pp. 50–51) for algorithms:


The general notion of a three level system was widespread in the late 1970s/early 1980s; for example, when discussing the mental representation of information from a cognitive psychology perspective, Glass and his colleagues (1979, p. 24) distinguished three important aspects of representation:


Other significant cognitive scientists who also advocated a three level system were Allen Newell, Zenon Pylyshyn, and David Marr. The parallels between the four representations (each of which implicitly assumed that computers "and" human minds displayed each of the three distinct levels) are detailed in the following table:


The rationale behind the intentional stance is based on evolutionary theory, particularly the notion that the ability to make quick predictions of a system's behaviour based on what we think it might be thinking was an evolutionary adaptive advantage. The fact that our predictive powers are not perfect is a further result of the advantages sometimes accrued by acting contrary to expectations.


Robbins and Jack point to a 2003 study in which participants viewed animated geometric shapes in different "vignettes," some of which could be interpreted as constituting social interaction, while others suggested mechanical behavior. Viewing social interactions elicited activity in brain regions associated with identifying faces and biological objects (posterior temporal cortex), as well as emotion processing (right amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex). Meanwhile, the mechanical interactions activated regions related to identifying objects like tools that can be manipulated (posterior temporal lobe). The authors suggest "that these findings reveal putative 'core systems' for social and mechanical understanding that are divisible into constituent parts or elements with distinct processing and storage capabilities."


Robbins and Jack argue for an additional stance beyond the three that Dennett outlined. They call it the "phenomenal stance": Attributing consciousness, emotions, and inner experience to a mind. The explanatory gap of the hard problem of consciousness illustrates this tendency of people to see phenomenal experience as different from physical processes. The authors suggest that psychopathy may represent a deficit in the phenomenal but not intentional stance, while people with autism appear to have intact moral sensibilities, just not mind-reading abilities. These examples suggest a double dissociation between the intentional and phenomenal stances.


In a follow-up paper, Robbins and Jack describe four experiments about how the intentional and phenomenal stances relate to feelings of moral concern. The first two experiments showed that talking about lobsters as strongly emotional led to a much greater sentiment that lobsters deserved welfare protections than did talking about lobsters as highly intelligent. The third and fourth studies found that perceiving an agent as vulnerable led to greater attributions of phenomenal experience. Also, people who scored higher on the empathetic-concern subscale of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index had generally higher absolute attributions of mental experience.


Language deprivation experiments have been claimed to have been attempted at least four times through history, isolating infants from the normal use of spoken or signed language in an attempt to discover the fundamental character of human nature or the origin of language.


The American literary scholar Roger Shattuck called this kind of research study "The Forbidden Experiment" because of the exceptional deprivation of ordinary human contact it requires. Although not designed to study language, similar experiments on non-human primates (labelled the "Pit of despair") utilising complete social deprivation resulted in serious psychological disturbances.


Throughout history, several rulers have claimed to have carried out this kind of experiment:


An early record of a study of this kind can be found in Herodotus's "Histories". According to Herodotus (ca. 485 – 425 BE), the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I (664 – 610 BE, i.e. 200 years before Herodotus) carried out such a study, and concluded the Phrygian race must antedate the Egyptians since the child had first spoken something similar to the Phrygian word "bekos", meaning "bread". Recent researchers suggested this was likely a willful interpretation of their babbling.


A long time after Frederick II's alleged experiment, James IV of Scotland was said to have sent two children to be raised by a mute woman isolated on the island of Inchkeith, to determine if language was learned or innate. The children were reported to have spoken good Hebrew, but historians were sceptical of these claims soon after they were made.


Mughal emperor Akbar was later said to have children raised by mute wetnurses. Akbar held that speech arose from hearing; thus children raised without hearing human speech would become mute.


Critical authors have doubted the veracity of the accounts: probably neither Psamtik I nor James IV ever conducted any such studies, and probably neither did Frederick II. Only Akbar's study is most likely authentic, but offers an ambiguous outcome.


Structural priming is a form of positive priming, in that it induces a tendency to repeat or more easily process a current sentence that is similar in structure to a previously presented prime. It is a phenomenon studied in the field of psycholinguistics. J. Kathryn Bock introduced it in 1986. Several paradigms exist to elicit structural priming. Structural priming persists cross-linguistically. One specific form of structural priming is syntactic priming.


Bock introduced a picture description task to investigate this phenomenon. In the study phase, at their own pace, participants read a list of sentences and observe a set of pictures. All these pictures describe events including an agent, patient, and theme. Half of the agents pictured are humans and the other half inanimate objects. This phase of the experiment was performed in an attempt to establish a "recognition memory" cover story. In the test phase, participants are asked to read a sentence expressing one of four conditions:


After reading a sentence, the participant repeats it. Following this repetition, the participant describes the picture.


Consider a trial wherein the participant is reading a dative double-object construction, "George gave the boy the ball". The subject is then significantly more likely to describe the a picture as "X gave Y the Z" instead of "X gave the Z to Y". This persistence in sentential form is structural priming.


At least four theories exist to explain structural priming: syntactic repetition; thematic congruency, derivation of subjects, and error-based learning.


In the Bock study, the sentences presented match their primes in syntactic structure. This is trivially true for any type-type prime. However, other structural priming patterns exist that complicate this explanation.


A structure known as the unaccusative, which is unmarked morphologically in English, is capable of priming passive transitive sentences. The two constructions differ in syntax, but in both cases the subject takes a thematic, or at least non-agentive, thematic role.


Because the two constructions have this property in common, it has been suggested that such a thematic relational mapping is what allows structural priming.


A second possibility for describing the presence of unaccusative-passive priming is their shared characteristic of having a derived subject. For instance, the passive subject is said by some scholars of syntax to be derived via movement, or "smuggling," from the same position where it is generated in the active, to wit, the complement of the transitive verb. Though the derivation of the unaccusative does not seem to be an identical process, it is nevertheless assumed to be derived.


Another explanation is that syntactic priming is a form of implicit learning supported by a prediction error-based learning mechanism.


The bouba/kiki effect is a non-arbitrary mapping between speech sounds and the visual shape of objects. It was first documented by Wolfgang Köhler in 1929 using nonsense words. The effect has been observed in American university students, Tamil speakers in India, young children, and infants, and has also been shown to occur with familiar names. It is absent in individuals who are congenitally blind and reduced in individuals with autism. The effect has recently been investigated using fMRI.


The bouba/kiki effect was first observed by German American psychologist Wolfgang Köhler in 1929. In psychological experiments first conducted on the island of Tenerife (where the primary language is Spanish), Köhler showed forms similar to those shown at the right and asked participants which shape was called "takete" and which was called "baluba" ("maluma" in the 1947 version). Although not explicitly stated, Köhler implies that there was a strong preference to pair the jagged shape with "takete" and the rounded shape with "baluba".


In 2001, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated Köhler's experiment using the words "kiki" and "bouba" and asked American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India "Which of these shapes is bouba and which is kiki?" In both groups, 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki", suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds in a consistent way.


The effect has also been shown to emerge when the words to be paired are existing first names, suggesting that some familiarity with the linguistic stimuli does not eliminate the effect. A study showed that individuals will pair names such as "Molly" with round silhouettes, and names such as "Kate" with sharp silhouettes. Moreover, individuals will associate different personality traits with either group of names ("e.g.", easygoingness with "round names"; determination with "sharp names"). This may hint at a role of abstract concepts in the effect.


Contexts where the effect is smaller or absent.


Other research suggests that this effect does not occur in all communities, and it appears that the effect breaks if the sounds do not make licit words in the language. The bouba/kiki effect seems to be dependent on a long sensitive period, with high visual capacities in childhood being necessary for its typical development. In contrast to typically sighted individuals, congenitally blind individuals have been reported not to show a systematic bouba/kiki effect for touched shapes. Autistic individuals do not show as strong a preference. Individuals without autism agree with the standard result 88% of the time, while individuals with autism agree only 56% of the time.


In 2019, researchers published the first study using fMRI to explore the bouba/kiki effect. They found that prefrontal activation is stronger to mismatching (bouba with spiky shape) than to matching (bouba with round shape) stimuli. Interestingly, they also found that sound–shape matching also influences activations in the auditory and visual cortices, suggesting an effect of matching at an early stage in sensory processing.


The experiment was reproduced in episode 3 of season 4 of the television show "Brain Games" with the names "takete" and "maluma." One participant expressed her association of takete and maluma with their respective shapes by comparing them to the rigid movement of a toy soldier and the swaying of the hula, respectively. A similar experiment included the association of the name "lomba" with a fictitious brand of milk chocolate and "kitiki" with a fictitious brand of dark chocolate.


Language production is the production of spoken or written language. In psycholinguistics, it describes all of the stages between having a concept to express and translating that concept into linguistic form. These stages have been described in two types of processing models: the lexical access models and the serial models. Through these models, psycholinguists can look into how speech is produced in different ways, such as when the speaker is bilingual. Psycholinguists learn more about these models and different kinds of speech by using language production research methods that include collecting speech errors and elicited production tasks.


The basic loop occurring in the creation of language consists of the following stages:


According to the lexical access model (see section below), in terms of lexical access, two different stages of cognition are employed; thus, this concept is known as the two-stage theory of lexical access. The first stage, lexical selection provides information about lexical items required to construct the functional level representation. These items are retrieved according to their specific semantic and syntactic properties, but phonological forms are not yet made available at this stage. The second stage, retrieval of wordforms, provides information required for building the positional level representation.


A serial model of language production divides the process into several stages. For example, there may be one stage for determining pronunciation and a stage for determining lexical content. The serial model does not allow overlap of these stages, so they may only be completed one at a time.


This model states that the sentence is made by a sequence of processes generating differing levels of representations. For instance, the functional level representation is made on the a preverbal representation, which is essentially what the speaker seeks to express. This level is responsible for encoding the meanings of lexical items and the way that grammar forms relationships between them. Next, the positional level representation is built, which functions to encode the phonological forms of words and the order they are found in sentence structures. Lexical access, according to this model, is a process that encompasses two serially ordered and independent stages.


Fluency can be defined in part by prosody, which is shown graphically by a smooth intonation contour, and by a number of other elements: control of speech rate, relative timing of stressed and unstressed syllables, changes in amplitude, changes in fundamental frequency. In other words, fluency can be described as whether someone speaks smoothly and easily. This term is used in speech-language pathology when describing disorders with stuttering or other disfluencies.


Whether or not a speaker is fluent in one or more languages, the process for producing language remains the same. However, bilinguals speaking two languages within a conversation may have access to both languages at the same time. Three of the most commonly discussed models for multilingual language access are the Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus model, the Revised Hierarchical Model, and the Language Mode model:


Speakers fluent in multiple languages may inhibit access to one of their languages, but this suppression can only be done once the speaker is at a certain level of proficiency in that language. A speaker can decide to inhibit a language based on non-linguistic cues in their conversation, such as a speaker of both English and French inhibiting their French when conversing with people who only speak English. When especially proficient multilingual speakers communicate, they can participate in code-switching. Code-switching has been shown to indicate bilingual proficiency in a speaker, though it had previously been seen as a sign of poor language ability.


There are three main types of research into language production: speech error collection, picture-naming, and elicited production. Speech error collection focuses on using the analysis of speech errors made in naturally produced speech. On the other hand, elicited production focuses on elicited speech and is conducted in a lab. Also conducted in a lab, picture-naming focuses on reaction-time data from picture-naming latencies. Although originally disparate, these three methodologies are generally looking at the same underlying processes of speech production.


Speech errors have been found to be common in naturally produced speech. Analysis of speech errors has found that not all are random, but rather systematic and fall into several categories. These speech errors can demonstrate parts of the language processing system, and what happens when that system doesn't work as it should. Language production occurs quickly with speakers saying a little more than 2 words per second; so though errors occur only once out of 1,000 words, they occur relatively often throughout a speaker's day at once every 7 minutes. Some examples of these speech errors that would be collected by psycholinguists are:


Picture-naming tasks ask participants to look at pictures and name them in a certain way. By looking at the time course for the responses in these tasks, psycholinguists can learn more about the planning involved in specific phrases. These types of tasks can be helpful for investigating cross-linguistic language production and planning processes.


Elicited production tasks ask participants to respond to questions or prompts in a particular way. One of the more common types of elicited production tasks is the sentence completion task. These tasks give the participants the beginning of a target sentence, which the participants are then asked to complete. Analyzing these completions can allow psycholinguistics to investigate errors that might be difficult to elicit otherwise.


The psychology of reasoning is the study of how people reason, often broadly defined as the process of drawing conclusions to inform how people solve problems and make decisions. It overlaps with psychology, philosophy, linguistics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, logic, and probability theory.


Psychological experiments on how humans and other animals reason have been carried out for over 100 years. An enduring question is whether or not people have the capacity to be rational. Current research in this area addresses various questions about reasoning, rationality, judgments, intelligence, relationships between emotion and reasoning, and development.


One of the most obvious areas in which people employ reasoning is with sentences in everyday language. Most experimentation on deduction has been carried out on hypothetical thought, in particular, examining how people reason about conditionals, e.g., "If A then B". Participants in experiments make the modus ponens inference, given the indicative conditional "If A then B", and given the premise "A", they conclude "B". However, given the indicative conditional and the minor premise for the modus tollens inference, "not-B", about half of the participants in experiments conclude "not-A" and the remainder concludes that nothing follows.


Other investigations of propositional inference examine how people think about disjunctive alternatives, e.g., "A or else B", and how they reason about negation, e.g., "It is not the case that A and B". Many experiments have been carried out to examine how people make relational inferences, including comparisons, e.g., "A is better than B". Such investigations also concern spatial inferences, e.g. "A is in front of B" and temporal inferences, e.g. "A occurs before B". Other common tasks include categorical syllogisms, used to examine how people reason about quantifiers such as "All" or "Some", e.g., "Some of the A are not B".


There are several alternative theories of the cognitive processes that human reasoning is based on. One view is that people rely on a mental logic consisting of formal (abstract or syntactic) inference rules similar to those developed by logicians in the propositional calculus. Another view is that people rely on domain-specific or content-sensitive rules of inference. A third view is that people rely on mental models, that is, mental representations that correspond to imagined possibilities. A fourth view is that people compute probabilities.


One controversial theoretical issue is the identification of an appropriate competence model, or a standard against which to compare human reasoning. Initially classical logic was chosen as a competence model. Subsequently, some researchers opted for non-monotonic logic and Bayesian probability. Research on mental models and reasoning has led to the suggestion that people are rational in principle but err in practice. Connectionist approaches towards reasoning have also been proposed.


It is an active question in psychology how, why, and when the ability to reason develops in infants. Jean Piaget's theory of cognitive development describes a sequence of stages in the development of reasoning from infancy to adulthood. According to the neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development, changes in reasoning with development come from increasing working memory capacity, increasing speed of processing, and enhanced executive functions and control. Increasing self-awareness is also an important factor.


In their book "The Enigma of Reason", the cognitive scientists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber put forward an "argumentative" theory of reasoning, claiming that humans evolved to reason primarily to justify our beliefs and actions and to convince others in a social environment. Key evidence for their theory includes the errors in reasoning that solitary individuals are prone to when their arguments are not criticized, such as logical fallacies, and how groups become much better at performing cognitive reasoning tasks when they communicate with one another and can evaluate each other's arguments. Sperber and Mercier offer one attempt to resolve the apparent paradox that the confirmation bias is so strong despite the function of reasoning naively appearing to be to come to veridical conclusions about the world.


Inductive reasoning makes broad generalizations from specific cases or observations. In this process of reasoning, general assertions are made based on past specific pieces of evidence. This kind of reasoning allows the conclusion to be false even if the original statement is true. For example, if one observes a college athlete, one makes predictions and assumptions about other college athletes based on that one observation. Scientists use inductive reasoning to create theories and hypotheses.


The syllogism is a form of deductive reasoning in which two statements reach a logical conclusion. With this reasoning, one statement could be “Every A is B” and another could be “This C is A”. Those two statements could then lead to the conclusion that “This C is B”. These types of syllogisms are used to test deductive reasoning to ensure there is a valid hypothesis. A Syllogistic Reasoning Task was created from a study performed by Morsanyi, Kinga, Handley, and Simon that examined the intuitive contributions to reasoning. They used this test to assess why “syllogistic reasoning performance is based on an interplay between a conscious and effortful evaluation of logicality and an intuitive appreciation of the believability of the conclusions”.


Another form of reasoning is called abductive reasoning. This type is based on creating and testing hypotheses using the best information available. Abductive reasoning produces the kind of daily decision-making that works best with the information present, which often is incomplete. This could involve making educated guesses from observed unexplainable phenomena. This type of reasoning can be seen in the world when doctors make decisions about diagnoses from a set of results or when jurors use the relevant evidence to make decisions about a case.


Judgment and reasoning involve thinking through the options, making a judgment or conclusion and finally making a decision. Making judgments involves heuristics, or efficient strategies that usually lead you to the right answers. The most common heuristics used are attribute substitution, the availability heuristic, the representativeness heuristic and the anchoring heuristic – these all aid in quick reasoning and work in most situations. Heuristics allow for errors, a price paid to gain efficiency.


Other errors in judgment, therefore affecting reasoning, include errors in judgment about covariation – a relationship between two variables such that the presence and magnitude of one can predict the presence and magnitude of the other. One cause of covariation is confirmation bias, or the tendency to be more responsive to evidence that confirms your beliefs. But assessing covariation can be pulled off track by neglecting base-rate information – how frequently something occurs in general. However people often ignore base rates and tend to use other information presented.


There are more sophisticated judgment strategies that result in fewer errors. People often reason based on availability but sometimes they look for other, more accurate, information to make judgments. This suggests there are two ways of thinking, known as the Dual-Process Model. The first, System I, is fast, automatic and uses heuristics – more of intuition. The second, System II, is slower, effortful and more likely to be correct – more reasoning.


The inferences people draw are related to factors such as linguistic pragmatics and emotion.


Decision making is often influenced by the emotion of regret and by the presence of risk. When people are presented with options, they tend to select the one that they think they will regret the least. In decisions that involve a large amount of risk, people tend to ask themselves how much dread they would experience were a worst-case scenario to occur, e.g. a nuclear accident, and then use that dread as an indicator of the level of risk.


Antonio Damasio suggests that somatic markers, certain memories that can cause a strong bodily reaction, act as a way to guide decision making as well. For example, when you are remembering a scary movie and once again become tense and your palms might begin to sweat. Damasio argues that when making a decision we rely on our “gut feelings” to assess various options, and this makes us decide to go with a decision that is more positive and stay away from those that are negative. He also argues that the orbitofrontal cortex - located at the base of the frontal lobe, just above the eyes - is crucial in your use of somatic markers, because it is the part in the brain that allows you to interpret emotion.


Another note to make is that when emotion shapes decisions, the influence is usually based on predictions of the future. When people ask themselves how they would react, they are making inferences about the future. Researchers suggest affective forecasting, the ability to predict your own emotions, is poor because people tend to overestimate how much they will regret their errors.


Studying reasoning neuroscientifically involves determining the neural correlates of reasoning, often investigated using event-related potentials and functional magnetic resonance imaging?


Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.


Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener.


Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, due mainly to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain processes language, and less so the known processes of social sciences, human development, communication theories, and infant development, among others.


There are several subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain. For example: neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right; and developmental psycholinguistics, as a branch of psycholinguistics, concerns itself with a child's ability to learn language.


Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that consists of researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, including psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, speech and language pathology, and discourse analysis. Psycholinguists study how people acquire and use language, according to the following main areas:


A researcher interested in language comprehension may study word recognition during reading, to examine the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text. A researcher interested in language production might study how words are prepared to be spoken starting from the conceptual or semantic level (this concerns connotation, and possibly can be examined through the conceptual framework concerned with the semantic differential). Developmental psycholinguists study infants' and children's ability to learn and process language.


Psycholinguistics further divide their studies according to the different components that make up human language.


In seeking to understand the properties of language acquisition, psycholinguistics has roots in debates regarding innate versus acquired behaviors (both in biology and psychology). For some time, the concept of an innate trait was something that was not recognized in studying the psychology of the individual. However, with the redefinition of innateness as time progressed, behaviors considered innate could once again be analyzed as behaviors that interacted with the psychological aspect of an individual. After the diminished popularity of the behaviorist model, ethology reemerged as a leading train of thought within psychology, allowing the subject of language, an innate human behavior, to be examined once more within the scope of psychology.


The theoretical framework for psycholinguistics began to be developed before the end of the 19th century as the "Psychology of Language". The science of psycholinguistics, so called, began in 1936 when Jacob Kantor, a prominent psychologist at the time, used the term "psycholinguistic" as a description within his book "An Objective Psychology of Grammar".


However, the term "psycholinguistics" only came into widespread usage in 1946 when Kantor's student Nicholas Pronko published an article entitled "Psycholinguistics: A Review". Pronko's desire was to unify myriad related theoretical approaches under a single name. Psycholinguistics was used for the first time to talk about an interdisciplinary science "that could be coherent", as well as being the title of "Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems", a 1954 book by Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok.


Though there is still much debate, there are two primary theories on childhood language acquisition:


The field of linguistics and psycholinguistics has since been defined by pro-and-con reactions to Chomsky. The view in favor of Chomsky still holds that the human ability to use language (specifically the ability to use recursion) is qualitatively different from any sort of animal ability. This ability may have resulted from a favorable mutation or from an adaptation of skills that originally evolved for other purposes.


The structures and uses of language are related to the formation of ontological insights. Some see this system as "structured cooperation between language-users" who use conceptual and semantic deference in order to exchange meaning and knowledge, as well as give meaning to language, thereby examining and describing "semantic processes bound by a 'stopping' constraint which are not cases of ordinary deferring." Deferring is normally done for a reason, and a rational person is always disposed to defer if there is good reason.


The theory of the "semantic differential" supposes universal distinctions, such as:


One question in the realm of language comprehension is how people understand sentences as they read (i.e., sentence processing). Experimental research has spawned several theories about the architecture and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. These theories are typically concerned with the types of information, contained in the sentence, that the reader can use to build meaning, and at what point in reading does that information becomes available to the reader. Issues such as "modular" versus "interactive" processing have been theoretical divides in the field.


In contrast to the modular view, an interactive theory of sentence processing, such as a constraint-based lexical approach assumes that all available information contained within a sentence can be processed at any time. Under an interactive view, the semantics of a sentence (such as plausibility) can come into play early on to help determine the structure of a sentence. Hence, in the sentence above, the reader would be able to make use of plausibility information in order to assume that "the evidence" is being examined instead of doing the examining. There are data to support both modular and interactive views; which view is correct is debatable.


When reading, saccades can cause the mind to skip over words because it does not see them as important to the sentence, and the mind completely omits it from the sentence or supplies the wrong word in its stead. This can be seen in "Paris in thethe Spring". This is a common psychological test, where the mind will often skip the second "the", especially when there is a line break in between the two.


Language production refers to how people produce language, either in written or spoken form, in a way that conveys meanings comprehensible to others. One of the most effective ways to explain the way people represent meanings using rule-governed languages is by observing and analyzing instances of speech errors, which include speech disfluencies like false starts, repetition, reformulation and constant pauses in between words or sentences, as well as slips of the tongue, like-blendings, substitutions, exchanges (e.g. Spoonerism), and various pronunciation errors.


These speech errors have significant implications for understanding how language is produced, in that they reflect that:


It is useful to differentiate between three separate phases of language production:


Psycholinguistic research has largely concerned itself with the study of formulation because the conceptualization phase remains largely elusive and mysterious.


Many of the experiments conducted in psycholinguistics, especially early on, are behavioral in nature. In these types of studies, subjects are presented with linguistic stimuli and asked to respond. For example, they may be asked to make a judgment about a word (lexical decision), reproduce the stimulus, or say a visually presented word aloud. Reaction times to respond to the stimuli (usually on the order of milliseconds) and proportion of correct responses are the most often employed measures of performance in behavioral tasks. Such experiments often take advantage of priming effects, whereby a "priming" word or phrase appearing in the experiment can speed up the lexical decision for a related "target" word later.


As an example of how behavioral methods can be used in psycholinguistics research, Fischler (1977) investigated word encoding, using a lexical-decision task. He asked participants to make decisions about whether two strings of letters were English words. Sometimes the strings would be actual English words requiring a "yes" response, and other times they would be non-words requiring a "no" response. A subset of the licit words were related semantically (e.g., cat–dog) while others were unrelated (e.g., bread–stem). Fischler found that related word pairs were responded to faster, compared to unrelated word pairs, which suggests that semantic relatedness can facilitate word encoding.


Recently, eye tracking has been used to study online language processing. Beginning with Rayner (1978), the importance of understanding eye-movements during reading was established. Later, Tanenhaus et al. (1995) used a visual-world paradigm to study the cognitive processes related to spoken language. Assuming that eye movements are closely linked to the current focus of attention, language processing can be studied by monitoring eye movements while a subject is listening to spoken language.


The analysis of systematic errors in speech, as well as the writing and typing of language, can provide evidence of the process that has generated it. Errors of speech, in particular, grant insight into how the mind produces language while a speaker is mid-utterance. Speech errors tend to occur in the lexical, morpheme, and phoneme encoding steps of language production, as seen by the ways errors can manifest themselves.


The types of speech errors, with some examples, include:


Speech errors will usually occur in the stages that involve lexical, morpheme, or phoneme encoding, and usually not in the first step of semantic encoding. This can be attributed to a speaker still conjuring the idea of what to say; and unless he changes his mind, can not be mistaken for what he wanted to say.


Until the recent advent of non-invasive medical techniques, brain surgery was the preferred way for language researchers to discover how language affects the brain. For example, severing the corpus callosum (the bundle of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain) was at one time a treatment for some forms of epilepsy. Researchers could then study the ways in which the comprehension and production of language were affected by such drastic surgery. Where an illness made brain surgery necessary, language researchers had an opportunity to pursue their research.


Newer, non-invasive techniques now include brain imaging by positron emission tomography (PET); functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); event-related potentials (ERPs) in electroencephalography (EEG) and magnetoencephalography (MEG); and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Brain imaging techniques vary in their spatial and temporal resolutions (fMRI has a resolution of a few thousand neurons per pixel, and ERP has millisecond accuracy). Each methodology has advantages and disadvantages for the study of psycholinguistics.


Computational modelling, such as the DRC model of reading and word recognition proposed by Max Coltheart and colleagues, is another methodology, which refers to the practice of setting up cognitive models in the form of executable computer programs. Such programs are useful because they require theorists to be explicit in their hypotheses and because they can be used to generate accurate predictions for theoretical models that are so complex that discursive analysis is unreliable. Other examples of computational modelling are McClelland and Elman's TRACE model of speech perception and Franklin Chang's Dual-Path model of sentence production.


Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the processes that the brain undergoes in order to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input. Using new non-invasive imaging techniques, recent research seeks to shed light on the areas of the brain involved in language processing.


Another unanswered question in psycholinguistics is whether the human ability to use syntax originates from innate mental structures or social interaction, and whether or not some animals can be taught the syntax of human language.


Two other major subfields of psycholinguistics investigate first language acquisition, the process by which infants acquire language, and second language acquisition. It is much more difficult for adults to acquire second languages than it is for infants to learn their first language (infants are able to learn more than one native language easily). Thus, sensitive periods may exist during which language can be learned readily. A great deal of research in psycholinguistics focuses on how this ability develops and diminishes over time. It also seems to be the case that the more languages one knows, the easier it is to learn more.


The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of brain damage. Studies in aphasiology can offer both advances in therapy for individuals suffering from aphasia and further insight into how the brain processes language.


A short list of books that deal with psycholinguistics, written in language accessible to the non-expert, includes:


International Association for the Study of Child Language


The International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL) is an academic society for first language acquisition researchers.


IASCL was founded in 1970 by a group of prominent language acquisition researchers to promote international and interdisciplinary cooperation in the study of child language. Its major activity is the sponsorship of the triennial International Congress for the Study of Child Language, for which it publishes proceedings. It also publishes the "Child Language Bulletin" approximately twice a year.


A mora (plural "morae" or "moras"; often symbolized μ) is a unit in phonology that describes syllable weight, which in some languages determines stress or timing. A mora is a sound which comes after a short pause in a syllable. The term comes from the Latin word for "linger, delay", which was also used to translate the Greek word "chronos" (time) in its metrical sense.


Monomoraic syllables have one mora, bimoraic syllables have two, and trimoraic syllables have three, although this last type is relatively rare.


In general, morae are formed as follows:


In general, monomoraic syllables are called "light syllables", bimoraic syllables are called "heavy syllables", and trimoraic syllables (in languages that have them) are called "superheavy syllables". Some languages, such as Old English and present-day English, can have syllables with up to four morae.


A prosodic stress system in which moraically heavy syllables are assigned stress is said to have the property of quantity sensitivity.


For the purpose of determining accent in Ancient Greek, short vowels have one mora, and long vowels and diphthongs have two morae. Thus long "ē" (eta: ) can be understood as a sequence of two short vowels: "ee".


Ancient Greek pitch accent is placed on only one mora in a word. An acute (, ) represents high pitch on the only mora of a short vowel or the last mora of a long vowel ("é", "eé"). A circumflex () represents high pitch on the first mora of a long vowel ("ée").


In Old English, short diphthongs and monophthongs were monomoraic, long diphthongs and monophthongs were bimoraic, consonants ending in a syllable were each a mora, and geminate consonants added a mora to the preceding syllable. In Modern English, the rules are similar, except that all diphthongs are bimoraic. In English, and probably also in Old English, syllables cannot have more than four morae, with loss of sounds occurring if a syllable would have more than 4 otherwise. From the Old English period through to today, all content words must be at least two morae long.


Gilbertese, an Austronesian language spoken mainly in Kiribati, is a trimoraic language. The typical foot in Gilbertese contains three morae. These trimoraic constituents are units of stress in Gilbertese. These "ternary metrical constituents of the sort found in Gilbertese are quite rare cross-linguistically, and as far as we know, Gilbertese is the only language in the world reported to have a ternary constraint on prosodic word size."


In Hawaiian, both syllables and morae are important. Stress falls on the penultimate mora, though in words long enough to have two stresses, only the final stress is predictable. However, although a diphthong, such as "oi," consists of two morae, stress may fall only on the first, a restriction not found with other vowel sequences such as "io." That is, there is a distinction between "oi," a bimoraic syllable, and "io," which is two syllables.


Most dialects of Japanese, including the standard, use morae, known in Japanese as "haku" () or "mōra" (), rather than syllables, as the basis of the sound system. Writing Japanese in kana (hiragana and katakana) is said by those scholars who use the term "mora" to demonstrate a moraic system of writing. For example, in the two-syllable word "mōra", the "ō" is a long vowel and counts as two morae. The word is written in three symbols, , corresponding here to "mo-o-ra", each containing one mora. Therefore, scholars argue that the 5/7/5 pattern of the "haiku" in modern Japanese is of morae rather than syllables.


The Japanese syllable-final "n" is also said to be moraic, as is the first part of a geminate consonant. For example, the Japanese name for "Japan", , has two different pronunciations, one with three morae ("Nihon") and one with four ("Nippon"). In the hiragana spelling, the three morae of "Ni-ho-n" are represented by three characters (), and the four morae of "Ni-p-po-n" need four characters to be written out as .


Similarly, the names "Tōkyō" ("To-u-kyo-u", ), "Ōsaka" ("O-o-sa-ka", ), and "Nagasaki" ("Na-ga-sa-ki", ) all have four morae, even though, on this analysis, they can be said to have two, three and four syllables, respectively. The number of morae in a word is not always equal to the number of graphemes when written in kana; for example, even though it has four morae, the Japanese name for "Tōkyō" () is written with five graphemes, because one of these graphemes () represents a "yōon", a feature of the Japanese writing system that indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized.


In Luganda, a short vowel constitutes one mora while a long vowel constitutes two morae. A simple consonant has no morae, and a doubled or prenasalised consonant has one. No syllable may contain more than three morae. The tone system in Luganda is based on morae. See Luganda tones.


In Sanskrit, the mora is expressed as the "mātrā". For example, the short vowel "a" (pronounced like a schwa) is assigned a value of one "mātrā", the long vowel "ā" is assigned a value of two "mātrā"s, and the compound vowel (diphthong) "ai" (which has either two simple short vowels, "a"+"i", or one long and one short vowel, "ā"+"i") is assigned a value of two "mātrā"s. In addition, there is "plutham" (trimoraic) and "dīrgha plutham" ("long "plutham"" = quadrimoraic).


Sanskrit prosody and metrics have a deep history of taking into account moraic weight, as it were, rather than straight syllables, divided into "laghu" (, "light") and "dīrgha"/"guru" (/, "heavy") feet based on how many morae can be isolated in each word. Thus, for example, the word "kartṛ" (), meaning "agent" or "doer", does not contain simply two syllabic units, but contains rather, in order, a "dīrgha"/"guru" foot and a "laghu" foot. The reason is that the conjoined consonants "rt" render the normally light "ka" syllable heavy.


Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds. Extended inspection or analysis (staring at the word or phrase for a lengthy period of time) in place of repetition also produces the same effect.


Leon Jakobovits James coined the phrase "semantic satiation" in his 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University. It was demonstrated as a stable phenomenon that is possibly similar to a cognitive form of reactive inhibition. Prior to that, the expression "verbal satiation" had been used along with terms that express the idea of mental fatigue. The dissertation listed many of the names others had used for the phenomenon:


James presented several experiments that demonstrated the operation of the semantic satiation effect in various cognitive tasks such as rating words and figures that are presented repeatedly in a short time, verbally repeating words then grouping them into concepts, adding numbers after repeating them out loud, and bilingual translations of words repeated in one of the two languages. In each case, the subjects would repeat a word or number for several seconds, then perform the cognitive task using that word. It was demonstrated that repeating a word prior to its use in a task made the task somewhat more difficult.


An explanation for the phenomenon is that, in the cortex, verbal repetition repeatedly arouses a specific neural pattern that corresponds to the meaning of the word. Rapid repetition makes both the peripheral sensorimotor activity and central neural activation fire repeatedly. This is known to cause reactive inhibition, hence a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition. Jakobovits James (1962) calls this conclusion the beginning of "experimental neurosemantics".


Studies that further explored semantic satiation include the work of Pilotti, Antrobus, and Duff (1997), which claimed that it is possible that the true locus of this phenomenon is presemantic instead of semantic adaptation. There is also the experiment conducted by Kouinos et al. (2000), which revealed that semantic satiation is not necessarily a byproduct of "impoverishment of perceptual inputs."


Jakobovits cited several possible semantic satiation applications and these include its integration in the treatment of phobias through systematic desensitization. He argued that "in principle, semantic satiation as an applied tool ought to work wherever some specifiable cognitive activity mediates some behavior that one wishes to alter." An application has also been developed to reduce speech anxiety by stutterers by creating semantic satiation through repetition, thus reducing the intensity of negative emotions triggered during speech.


There are studies that also linked semantic satiation in education. For instance, the work of Tian and Huber (2010) explored the impact of this phenomenon on word learning and effective reading. The authors claimed that this process can serve as a unique approach to test for discounting through loss of association since it allows the separation of the "lexical level from semantic level effects in a meaning-based task that involves repetitions of words." Semantic satiation has also been used as a tool to gain more understanding on language acquisition such as those studies that investigated the nature of multilingualism.


Speech shadowing is a psycholinguistic experimental technique in which subjects repeat speech at a delay to the onset of hearing the phrase. The time between hearing the speech and responding, is how long the brain takes to process and produce speech. The task instructs participants to shadow speech, which generates intent to reproduce the phrase while motor regions in the brain unconsciously process the syntax and semantics of the words spoken. Words repeated during the shadowing task would also imitate the parlance of the shadowed speech.


The reaction time between perceiving speech and then producing speech has been recorded at 250 ms for a standardised test. However, for people with left dominant brains, the reaction time has been recorded at 150 ms. Functional imaging finds that the shadowing of speech occurs through the dorsal stream. This area links auditory and motor representations of speech through a pathway that starts in the superior temporal cortex, extends to the inferior parietal cortex and ends with the posterior and inferior frontal cortexes, specifically in Broca's area.


The speech shadowing technique was created as a research technique by the Leningrad Group led by Ludmilla Chistovich and Valerij Kozhevnikov in the late 1950s. In the 1950s, the Motor theory of speech perception was also in development through Alvin Liberman and Franklin S. Cooper. It has been used for research on stuttering and divided attention, with focus on the distraction of conversational audio while driving. Speech shadowing also has applications for language learning, as an interpretation method and in singing.


Ludmilla Chistovich and Valerij Kozhevnikov focused on research of the mental processes that stimulate the functions of perception and production of speech in communication. In linguistics, speech perception was the chronological process that analysed steadily paced and similar sounding words but Chistovich and Kozhevnikov found speech perception to be the staggered integration of syllables known as non-linear dynamics. This refers to the diversity of tones and syllables in speech, which is perceived without a conscious detection of delay and forgotten with the limited working memory capacity. This observation developed research towards the speech shadowing technique for research in psycholinguistics.


Shadowing was used to measure the reaction time taken to repeat consonant-vowel syllables.  Alveolar consonants were measured when the tongue first touched an artificial palate and labial consonants were measured by the contact of metal pieces when the upper and lower lips pressed together.  The participant would begin to mimic the consonant as the speaker finished the utterance of the consonant. This consistent rapid response shifted research focus towards close speech shadowing.


Close speech shadowing is when the technique requires an immediate repetition, at the fastest pace a person is able to achieve. It does not allow people to hear the entire phrase beforehand or to understand the words vocalised until the end of a sentence. It was found that close speech shadowing would occur at the shortest delay of 250 ms. It has also been found to occur with a minimum delay between 150 m/s in left-hemisphere dominant brains.  The left hemisphere is associated with enhanced performance with linguistic skill and information processing. It engages with analytic patterns of thought and experiences ease with the speech shadowing task.


The short delay of response occurs as the motor regions of the brain have recorded cues that are related to consonants.  The brain would then estimate the adjacent vowel syllable before it is heard.  When the vowel is registered through the auditory system, it would confirm the action to produce speech based on the estimate.  If the vowel estimate is denied, a short delay in response occurs as the motor region configures an alternate vowel.


Research has developed a biological model as to how the meaning of speech can be perceived instantaneously even though the sentence has never been heard before. An understanding of syntactic, lexical and phonemic characteristics is first required for this to occur. Speech perception also requires the physical components of the auditory system to recognise similarities in sounds. Within the basilar membrane, energy is transferred, and specific frequencies can be detected and activate auditory hairs. The auditory hairs can be stimulated to sharpened activity when a tonal emission is held for 100 ms. This length of time indicates that speech shadowing ability can be enhanced by a moderately paced phrase.


Shadowing is more complex than only the use of the auditory system.  A shadow response can reduce the delay by analysing the temporal difference between the pronunciation of phonemes within a syllable.  During a shadowing task, the process of perceiving speech and a subsequent response by the production of speech does not occur separately, it would partially overlap.  The auditory system shifts between a translation stage of perceiving phonemes and a choice phase of anticipating the following phonemes to create an immediate response. This period of overlap occurs in 20 – 90 ms, depending on the combination of vowels with consonants.


Speech perception also has links to phonological processing skills.  This includes recognition of all phonemes in a language and how they can combine to form common syllables.  A low understanding of phonological norms can negatively affect performance in a speech shadowing task.  This is measured through the inclusion of proper and nonsense words in the task.  High phonological processing skills produced shorter reaction times and low phonological processing skilled participants experienced uncertainty and slower responses.


The speech shadowing technique is part of research methods that examine the mechanics of stuttering and identifies practical improvement strategies.  A primary characteristic of stuttering is a repeated movement, characterised by the repetition of a syllable.  In this activity, stutters are made to shadow a repeated movement that is internally or externally sourced.  It reduces the likelihood of stuttering as the linguistic mental block is overturned and conditioned to provide an opening for fluid speech. Mirror neurones of the frontal lobe are active during this exercise and act to link speech perception and production. This process combined with cortical priming is engaged to produce the visible response.


Another primary characteristic of stuttering is a fixed posture, involving the prolongation of sounds.  Speech shadowing research involving fixed postures produces no benefit in improving speech flow. The elongation of words in this stuttering characteristic does not align with the auditory system, which functions efficiently with moderately paced speech.


Speech shadowing has also been used in research into pseudo-stuttering, a voluntary speech impediment.  Pseudo-stuttering involves identifying primary stuttering characteristics and realistic shadowing. It is used as an activity when studying fluency disorders, for students to experience how psychological and social outcomes are impacted by stuttering with strangers. Participants of this activity reported feelings of anxiety, frustration and embarrassment, which aligned with the reported emotional states of natural stutterers. The participants also reported lowered expectations towards sufferers in public situations.


The speech shadowing technique is used in dichotic listening tests, produced by E. Colin Cherry in 1953. During dichotic listening tests, subjects are presented with two different messages, one in the right ear and one in the left ear. The participants are instructed to focus on one of the two messages and to shadow the attended message out loud. The perceptual ability of the participant is measured as subjects attend to the instructed message while the alternate message behaves as a distraction. Various stimuli are then presented to the other ear, and subjects are afterwards queried on what can be recalled from these messages despite instruction to ignore. Speech shadowing has here been manipulated as an experimental technique to study and test divided attention.


Research into the effect of audio stimuli resulting from mobile phone use while driving, has used the speech shadowing technique in its methodology. Speech shadowing tasks that have combined a conversational stimulus with a visual stimulus while driving are reported by participants as a distraction that directs focus away from the road and visual periphery. The study concludes that the combination of audio and visual stimuli have little effect on a driver’s ability to manoeuvre a vehicle but it does impair spatial and temporal judgement, which is not detected by the driver. This includes a driver’s judgement of their speed, distance from a parallel vehicle and a delayed reaction to a sudden brake from a driver ahead.


The speech shadowing technique had also been used to research whether it is the action of producing speech or concentration on the semantics of speech that distracts drivers. The task of simple speech shadowing had no effects on driving ability but the combination of simple speech shadowing with a content associated follow-up activity showed impairment in reaction time. The high attentional demand required for this alternate task shifts concentration from the primary task of driving. This impairment is problematic as fast reaction time when driving is required to respond to general traffic signals and signage as well as unpredictable events to maintain safety.


When learning a foreign language, shadowing can be used as a technique to practice speech and to acquire knowledge. It follows an interactionist perspective of language development. The method of speech shadowing in a learning setting involves providing shadowing tasks of incremental semantic and pronunciation difficulty and rating the accuracy of the shadowed response. It was previously difficult to create a standardised scoring system as learners would slur and skip words when uncertain in order to keep up with the pace of the phrases that were to be shadowed. Automatic scoring using alignment-based and clustering-based scoring techniques were designed and are now implemented to improve the experience of learning of a foreign language through speech shadowing techniques.


Remote learning of language can occur without the presence of a real-time speaker through text-to-speech applications and using the principle of speech shadowing. As part of the process to perceive sound, the auditory system distinguishes formant frequencies.  The first formant characteristic perceived in the cochlear is the most prominent cue as it there is an attentional shift towards this signal. The formant characteristics of synthetically produced speech currently differs to speech produced by the human vocal tract.  This information received effects the pronunciation of speech produced in a shadowing activity. Applications for learning languages are focused on developing greater accuracy in pronunciation and pitch since these features are also replicated when shadowing speech.


Speech shadowing can be used in the alternate form of vocal shadowing.  It also requires the process of perception and production but with inverted energy distributions of a low input and a large output. Vocal shadowing perceives pure tones and focuses on the manipulation of the vocal tract to produce a shadowed response. Singers in comparison to non-singers are able to produce a shadowed response phrase that includes more accuracy in achieving the target frequencies and rapid movement between the frequencies.  Research associates this ability with greater control and awareness of the vocal-fold breadth.  The glottal stop is a technique manipulated by singers during shadowing to enhance frequency change.


Letter frequency effect - the effect of letter frequency according to which the frequency with which the letter is encountered influences the recognition time of a letter. Letters of high frequency show a significant advantage over letters of low frequency in letter naming, same-different matching, and visual search. Letters of high frequency are recognized faster than letters of low frequency. Appelman and Mayzner (1981) in their re-analysis of the studies concerning letter frequency effect have found that in 3 out of 6 studies using reaction times (RTs) as a dependent variable the letter frequency correlated significantly with RTs.


Majority of studies on letter frequency effect failed to find a significant letter frequency effect. These studies, however, used the same-different matching task in which the participants see two letters and are to respond if these letters are same or different. Therefore, the absence of letter frequency effect in these studies may be due to the participants using the visual form of a letter instead of a letter itself to match the letters.


The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.


Linguistic relativity has been understood in many different, often contradictory ways throughout its history. The idea is often stated in two forms: the "strong hypothesis", now referred to as linguistic determinism, was held by some of the early linguists before World War II, while the "weak hypothesis" is mostly held by some of the modern linguists.


The term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Sapir and Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this hypothesis is also a later invention; Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.


The principle of linguistic relativity and the relation between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields from philosophy to psychology and anthropology, and it has also inspired and colored works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages.


From the late 1980s, a new school of linguistic relativity scholars has examined the effects of differences in linguistic categorization on cognition, finding broad support for non-deterministic versions of the hypothesis in experimental contexts. Some effects of linguistic relativity have been shown in several semantic domains, although they are generally weak. Currently, a balanced view of linguistic relativity is espoused by most linguists holding that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in non-trivial ways, but that other processes are better seen as arising from connectionist factors. Research is focused on exploring the ways and extent to which language influences thought.


In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea of the existence of different national characters, or "Volksgeister", of different ethnic groups was the moving force behind the German romantics school and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism.


Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg inspired several of the German Romantics. As early as 1749, he alludes to something along the lines of linguistic relativity in commenting on a passage in the table of nations in the book of Genesis:


In 1771 he spelled this out more explicitly:


Johann Georg Hamann is often suggested to be the first among the actual German Romantics to speak of the concept of "the genius of a language." In his "Essay Concerning an Academic Question", Hamann suggests that a people's language affects their worldview:


In 1820, Wilhelm von Humboldt connected the study of language to the national romanticist program by proposing the view that language is the fabric of thought. Thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinker's native language. This view was part of a larger picture in which the world view of an ethnic nation, their "Weltanschauung", was seen as being faithfully reflected in the grammar of their language. Von Humboldt argued that languages with an inflectional morphological type, such as German, English and the other Indo-European languages, were the most perfect languages and that accordingly this explained the dominance of their speakers over the speakers of less perfect languages. Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820:


In Humboldt's humanistic understanding of linguistics, each language creates the individual's worldview in its particular way through its lexical and grammatical categories, conceptual organization, and syntactic models.


Herder worked alongside Hamann to establish the idea of whether or not language had a human/rational or a divine origin. Herder added the emotional component of the hypothesis and Humboldt then took this information and applied to various languages to expand on the hypothesis.


Boas' student Edward Sapir reached back to the Humboldtian idea that languages contained the key to understanding the world views of peoples. He espoused the viewpoint that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross-translation. Sapir also thought because language represented reality differently, it followed that the speakers of different languages would perceive reality differently.


On the other hand, Sapir explicitly rejected strong linguistic determinism by stating, "It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language."


Sapir was explicit that the connections between language and culture were neither thoroughgoing nor particularly deep, if they existed at all:


Sapir offered similar observations about speakers of so-called "world" or "modern" languages, noting, "possession of a common language is still and will continue to be a smoother of the way to a mutual understanding between England and America, but it is very clear that other factors, some of them rapidly cumulative, are working powerfully to counteract this leveling influence. A common language cannot indefinitely set the seal on a common culture when the geographical, physical, and economics determinants of the culture are no longer the same throughout the area."


While Sapir never made a point of studying directly how languages affected thought, some notion of (probably "weak") linguistic relativity underlay his basic understanding of language, and would be taken up by Whorf.


More than any linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf has become associated with what he called the "linguistic relativity principle". Studying Native American languages, he attempted to account for the ways in which grammatical systems and language-use differences affected perception. Whorf's opinions regarding the nature of the relation between language and thought remain under contention. Critics such as Lenneberg, Black, and Pinker attribute to Whorf a strong linguistic determinism, while Lucy, Silverstein and Levinson point to Whorf's explicit rejections of determinism, and where he contends that translation and commensuration are possible.


Detractors such as Lenneberg, Chomsky and Pinker criticized him for insufficient clarity in his description of how language influences thought, and for not proving his conjectures. Most of his arguments were in the form of anecdotes and speculations that served as attempts to show how 'exotic' grammatical traits were connected to what were apparently equally exotic worlds of thought. In Whorf's words:


Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of less-studied languages).


One of Whorf's examples was the supposedly large number of words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, an example which later was contested as a misrepresentation.


Another is the Hopi language's words for water, one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts such as snow or water, is not always possible.


Whorf’s argument about Hopi speakers’ conceptualization about time is an example of the structure-centered approach to research into linguistic relativity, which Lucy identified as one of three main strands of research in the field. The "structure-centered" approach starts with a language's structural peculiarity and examines its possible ramifications for thought and behavior. The defining example is Whorf's observation of discrepancies between the grammar of time expressions in Hopi and English. More recent research in this vein is Lucy's research describing how usage of the categories of grammatical number and of numeral classifiers in the Mayan language Yucatec result in Mayan speakers classifying objects according to material rather than to shape as preferred by English speakers.


Whorf died in 1941 at age 44, leaving multiple unpublished papers. His line of thought was continued by linguists and anthropologists such as Hoijer and Lee who both continued investigations into the effect of language on habitual thought, and Trager, who prepared a number of Whorf's papers for posthumous publishing. The most important event for the dissemination of Whorf's ideas to a larger public was the publication in 1956 of his major writings on the topic of linguistic relativity in a single volume titled "Language, Thought and Reality".


In 1953, Eric Lenneberg criticized Whorf's examples from an objectivist view of language holding that languages are principally meant to represent events in the real world and that even though languages express these ideas in various ways, the meanings of such expressions and therefore the thoughts of the speaker are equivalent. He argued that Whorf's English descriptions of a Hopi speaker's view of time were in fact translations of the Hopi concept into English, therefore disproving linguistic relativity. However Whorf was concerned with how the habitual "use" of language influences habitual behavior, rather than translatability. Whorf's point was that while English speakers may be able to "understand" how a Hopi speaker thinks, they do not "think" in that way.


Lenneberg's main criticism of Whorf's works was that he never showed the connection between a linguistic phenomenon and a mental phenomenon. With Brown, Lenneberg proposed that proving such a connection required directly matching linguistic phenomena with behavior. They assessed linguistic relativity experimentally and published their findings in 1954.


Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated a formal hypothesis, Brown and Lenneberg formulated their own. Their two tenets were (i) "the world is differently experienced and conceived in different linguistic communities" and (ii) "language causes a particular cognitive structure". Brown later developed them into the so-called "weak" and "strong" formulation:


Brown's formulations became widely known and were retrospectively attributed to Whorf and Sapir although the second formulation, verging on linguistic determinism, was never advanced by either of them.


Since Brown and Lenneberg believed that the objective reality denoted by language was the same for speakers of all languages, they decided to test how different languages codified the same message differently and whether differences in codification could be proven to affect behavior.


Universalist scholars ushered in a period of dissent from ideas about linguistic relativity. Lenneberg was one of the first cognitive scientists to begin development of the Universalist theory of language that was formulated by Chomsky as Universal Grammar, effectively arguing that all languages share the same underlying structure. The Chomskyan school also holds the belief that linguistic structures are largely innate and that what are perceived as differences between specific languages are surface phenomena that do not affect the brain's universal cognitive processes. This theory became the dominant paradigm in American linguistics from the 1960s through the 1980s, while linguistic relativity became the object of ridicule.


Today many followers of the universalist school of thought still oppose linguistic relativity. For example, Pinker argues in "The Language Instinct" that thought is independent of language, that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, called "mentalese." Pinker attacks what he calls "Whorf's radical position," declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make."


Pinker and other universalists have been accused by relativists of misrepresenting Whorf's views and arguing against strawmen.


Joshua Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind".


Joshua Fishman argued that Whorf's true position was largely overlooked. In 1978, he suggested that Whorf was a "neo-Herderian champion" and in 1982, he proposed "Whorfianism of the third kind" in an attempt to refocus linguists' attention on what he claimed was Whorf's real interest, namely the intrinsic value of "little peoples" and "little languages". Whorf had criticized Ogden's Basic English thus:


Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis proposes that language "influences" thought and the strong version that language "determines" thought, Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind" proposes that language "is a key to culture".


In his book "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind", Lakoff reappraised linguistic relativity and especially Whorf's views about how linguistic categorization reflects and/or influences mental categories. He concluded that the debate had been confused. He described four parameters on which researchers differed in their opinions about what constitutes linguistic relativity:


Lakoff concluded that many of Whorf's critics had criticized him using novel definitions of linguistic relativity, rendering their criticisms moot.


The publication of the 1996 anthology "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity" edited by Gumperz and Levinson began a new period of linguistic relativity studies that focused on cognitive and social aspects. The book included studies on the linguistic relativity and universalist traditions. Levinson documented significant linguistic relativity effects in the linguistic conceptualization of spatial categories between languages. For example, men speaking the Guugu Yimithirr language in Queensland gave accurate navigation instructions using a compass-like system of north, south, east and west, along with a hand gesture pointing to the starting direction.


Lucy defines this approach as “domain-centered,” because researchers select a semantic domain and compare it across linguistic and cultural groups. Space is another semantic domain that has proven fruitful for linguistic relativity studies. Spatial categories vary greatly across languages. Speakers rely on the linguistic conceptualization of space in performing many ordinary tasks. Levinson and others reported three basic spatial categorizations. While many languages use combinations of them, some languages exhibit only one type and related behaviors. For example, Yimithirr only uses absolute directions when describing spatial relations— the position of everything is described by using the cardinal directions. Speakers define a location as "north of the house", while an English speaker may use relative positions, saying "in front of the house" or "to the left of the house".


Separate studies by Bowerman and Slobin treated the role of language in cognitive processes. Bowerman showed that certain cognitive processes did not use language to any significant extent and therefore could not be subject to linguistic relativity. Slobin described another kind of cognitive process that he named "thinking for speaking" – the kind of process in which perceptional data and other kinds of prelinguistic cognition are translated into linguistic terms for communication. These, Slobin argues, are the kinds of cognitive process that are at the root of linguistic relativity.


Researchers such as Boroditsky, Majid, Lucy and Levinson believe that language influences thought in more limited ways than the broadest early claims. Researchers examine the interface between thought (or cognition), language and culture and describe the relevant influences. They use experimental data to back up their conclusions. Kay ultimately concluded that "[the] Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left". His findings show that accounting for brain lateralization offers another perspective.


Recent studies have also taken the "behavior centered" approach, which starts by comparing behavior across linguistic groups and then searches for causes for that behavior in the linguistic system. In an early example of this approach, Whorf attributed the occurrence of fires at a chemical plant to the workers' use of the word 'empty' to describe the barrels containing only explosive vapors.


More recently, Bloom noticed that speakers of Chinese had unexpected difficulties answering counter-factual questions posed to them in a questionnaire. He concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in Chinese. Other researchers attributed this result to Bloom's flawed translations. Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process while Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker.


Everett's work on the Pirahã language of the Brazilian Amazon found several peculiarities that he interpreted as corresponding to linguistically rare features, such as a lack of numbers and color terms in the way those are otherwise defined and the absence of certain types of clauses. Everett's conclusions were met with skepticism from universalists who claimed that the linguistic deficit is explained by the lack of need for such concepts.


Recent research with non-linguistic experiments in languages with different grammatical properties (e.g., languages with and without numeral classifiers or with different gender grammar systems) showed that language differences in human categorization are due to such differences. Experimental research suggests that this linguistic influence on thought diminishes over time, as when speakers of one language are exposed to another.


Kashima & Kashima showed that people living in countries where spoken languages often drop pronouns (such as Japanese) tend to have more collectivistic values than those who use non–pronoun drop languages such as English. They argued that the explicit reference to “you” and “I” reminds speakers the distinction between the self and other.


Psycholinguistic studies explored motion perception, emotion perception, object representation and memory. The gold standard of psycholinguistic studies on linguistic relativity is now finding non-linguistic cognitive differences in speakers of different languages (thus rendering inapplicable Pinker's criticism that linguistic relativity is "circular").


Recent work with bilingual speakers attempts to distinguish the effects of language from those of culture on bilingual cognition including perceptions of time, space, motion, colors and emotion. Researchers described differences between bilinguals and monolinguals in perception of color, representations of time and other elements of cognition.


Linguistic relativity inspired others to consider whether thought could be influenced by manipulating language.


The question bears on philosophical, psychological, linguistic and anthropological questions.


A major question is whether human psychological faculties are mostly innate or whether they are mostly a result of learning, and hence subject to cultural and social processes such as language. The innate view holds that humans share the same set of basic faculties, and that variability due to cultural differences is less important and that the human mind is a mostly biological construction, so that all humans sharing the same neurological configuration can be expected to have similar cognitive patterns.


Multiple alternatives have advocates. The contrary constructivist position holds that human faculties and concepts are largely influenced by socially constructed and learned categories, without many biological restrictions. Another variant is idealist, which holds that human mental capacities are generally unrestricted by biological-material strictures. Another is essentialist, which holds that essential differences may influence the ways individuals or groups experience and conceptualize the world. Yet another is relativist (Cultural relativism), which sees different cultural groups as employing different conceptual schemes that are not necessarily compatible or commensurable, nor more or less in accord with external reality.


Another debate considers whether thought is a form of internal speech or is independent of and prior to language.


In the philosophy of language the question addresses the relations between language, knowledge and the external world, and the concept of truth. Philosophers such as Putnam, Fodor, Davidson, and Dennett see language as representing directly entities from the objective world and that categorization reflect that world. Other philosophers (e.g. Quine, Searle, Foucault) argue that categorization and conceptualization is subjective and arbitrary.


Another question is whether language is a tool for representing and referring to objects in the world, or whether it is a system used to construct mental representations that can be communicated.


Sapir/Whorf contemporary Alfred Korzybski was independently developing his theory of general semantics, which was aimed at using language's influence on thinking to maximize human cognitive abilities. Korzybski's thinking was influenced by logical philosophy such as Russell and Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica" and Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus". Although Korzybski was not aware of Sapir and Whorf's writings, the movement was followed by Whorf-admirer Stuart Chase, who fused Whorf's interest in cultural-linguistic variation with Korzybski's programme in his popular work "The Tyranny of Words". S. I. Hayakawa was a follower and popularizer of Korzybski's work, writing "Language in Thought and Action". The general semantics movement influenced the development of neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), another therapeutic technique that seeks to use awareness of language use to influence cognitive patterns.


Korzybski independently described a "strong" version of the hypothesis of linguistic relativity.


In their fiction, authors such as Ayn Rand and George Orwell explored how linguistic relativity might be exploited for political purposes. In Rand's "Anthem", a fictive communist society removed the possibility of individualism by removing the word "I" from the language. In Orwell's "1984" the authoritarian state created the language Newspeak to make it impossible for people to think critically about the government, or even to contemplate that they might be impoverished or oppressed, by reducing the number of words to reduce the thought of the locutor.


APL programming language originator Kenneth E. Iverson believed that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages (without actually mentioning it by name). His Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought", was devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer algorithms.


The essays of Paul Graham explore similar themes, such as a conceptual hierarchy of computer languages, with more expressive and succinct languages at the top. Thus, the so-called "blub" paradox (after a hypothetical programming language of average complexity called "Blub") says that anyone preferentially using some particular programming language will "know" that it is more powerful than some, but not that it is less powerful than others. The reason is that "writing" in some language means "thinking" in that language. Hence the paradox, because typically programmers are "satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs".


In a 2003 presentation at an open source convention, Yukihiro Matsumoto, creator of the programming language Ruby, said that one of his inspirations for developing the language was the science fiction novel "Babel-17", based on the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis.


Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life" developed the concept of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis as applied to an alien species which visits Earth. The aliens' biology contributes to their spoken and written languages, which are distinct. In the 2016 American film "Arrival", based on Chiang's short story, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the premise. The protagonist explains that "the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is the theory that the language you speak determines how you think".


In his science fiction novel "The Languages of Pao" the author Jack Vance describes how specialized languages are a major part of a strategy to create specific classes in a society, to enable the population to withstand occupation and develop itself.


In the Samuel R. Delany science fiction novel, "Babel-17," the author describes a highly advanced, information-dense language that can be used as a weapon. Learning it turns one into an unwilling traitor as it alters perception and thought.


The Totalitarian regime depicted in George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty Four" in effect acts on the basis of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, seeking to replace English with "Newspeak", a language constructed specifically with the intention that thoughts subversive of the regime cannot be expressed in it, and therefore people educated to speak and think in it would not have such thoughts.


Intentionality is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it has been regarded as the characteristic "mark of the mental" by many philosophers. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of "intentional inexistence": to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states.


The earliest theory of intentionality is associated with Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument for the existence of God, and with his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality. The idea fell out of discussion with the end of the medieval scholastic period, but in recent times was resurrected by empirical psychologist Franz Brentano and later adopted by contemporary phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl. Today, intentionality is a live concern among philosophers of mind and language. A common dispute is between naturalism about intentionality, the view that intentional properties are reducible to natural properties as studied by the natural sciences, and the phenomenal intentionality theory, the view that intentionality is grounded in consciousness.


The concept of intentionality was reintroduced in 19th-century contemporary philosophy by Franz Brentano (a German philosopher and psychologist who is generally regarded as the founder of act psychology, also called intentionalism) in his work "Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint" (1874). Brentano described intentionality as a characteristic of all acts of consciousness that are thus "psychical" or "mental" phenomena, by which they may be set apart from "physical" or "natural" phenomena.


Brentano coined the expression "intentional inexistence" to indicate the peculiar ontological status of the contents of mental phenomena. According to some interpreters the "in-" of "in-existence" is to be read as locative, i.e. as indicating that "an intended object ... exists in or has "in-existence", existing not externally but in the psychological state" (Jacquette 2004, p. 102), while others are more cautious, stating: "It is not clear whether in 1874 this ... was intended to carry any ontological commitment" (Chrudzimski and Smith 2004, p. 205).


A major problem within discourse on intentionality is that participants often fail to make explicit whether or not they use the term to imply concepts such as agency or desire, i.e. whether it involves teleology. Dennett (see below) explicitly invokes teleological concepts in the "intentional stance". However, most philosophers use "intentionality" to mean something with no teleological import. Thus, a thought of a chair can be about a chair without any implication of an intention or even a belief relating to the chair. For philosophers of language, what is meant by intentionality is largely an issue of how symbols can have meaning. This lack of clarity may underpin some of the differences of view indicated below.


To bear out further the diversity of sentiment evoked from the notion of intentionality, Husserl followed on Brentano, and gave the concept of intentionality more widespread attention, both in continental and analytic philosophy. In contrast to Brentano's view, French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre ("Being and Nothingness") identified intentionality with consciousness, stating that the two were indistinguishable. German philosopher Martin Heidegger ("Being and Time"), defined intentionality as "care" ("Sorge"), a sentient condition where an individual's existence, facticity, and being in the world identifies their ontological significance, in contrast to that which is merely ontic ("thinghood").