Jacob Robert Kantor's Theory Of Language

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History and definition Jacob Robert Kantor was the first linguists in coin the expression ‘psycholinguistic’ in his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar in 1936. The term remain used only by Kantor’s team work at Indiana University, until 1946 when a disciple of Kantor called Nicholas Henry Pronko used for first time the terminology psycholinguistic to combine linguistic and psychology into one single field of study, as an interdisciplinary science in the book Language and Psycholinguistic: a review. Later on, Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok spread the concept through the use of it in their work Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems. This area has drawn the interest of linguistics and psychologist in two major …show more content…

This paradigm postulates that the words chosen by a person go through several processing stages. The first stage is called conceptualization, this step is the cornerstone of psycholinguistic since has not been possible to access the information that can reveal how people pass from thoughts to speech. What is known is that at this point is decided what notion the person wants to express. The next stage is the selection of a syntactic word unit called lemma (Levelt 1999); a number of lemmas can be stimulate at once since there is a variety of concepts that can express the message because of similar semantic and conceptual features, as soon as the brain processes all the concepts and select the “most suitable” one a checking mechanism assesses that the chosen lemma in fact represent the intended concept.The following processing stage is the morpho-phonological encoding. It is triggered by the recovery of morpheme, the smallest meaningful unit in the language grammar, corresponding to the selected lemma, for example the lemma color has only one morpheme to bring back, but for colorless there are two. The generation of the phonological form of the word is the next step in the processing model (Levelt et al. 1999). Words are not only retrieval from the brain as a unit, in fact they are divided into isolated segments and in some cases group of segments for instance /st/, which are later on mapped onto the stress and intonation patterns

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