Psycholinguistic Framework Of Language Essay

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1.1 A theoretical psycholinguistic framework of sentence processing
Human language is not simply naturally acquired devoid of any context or pressure. Instead, language acquisition is a dynamic process interacting with multiple factors, including auditory patterns, articulatory patterns, social patterns, patterns implicit in the input, and pressures arising from general aspects of the cognitive system (for a review, see MacWhinney, 1998). Under this conception, the Competition Model was proposed based on cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing in young children, and it treats language learning as an emergent process with the goal of investigating the competitive relationships between lexical items, phonological forms, and syntactic patterns during language processing (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982, 1989; Bates et al., 1984; MacWhinney, 1987). The term “competition” refers to the competition of assigning the actor’s role among several nouns in a sentence. For example, consider the sentence “The boy is petting the cat”: two nouns are involved in this sentence, and the competition occurs while …show more content…

However, findings from a cross-linguistic study concluded that it is not a universal predisposition for children to use word order as a cue to comprehend sentences. Rather, the use of a cue is dependent on the regularity and consistency of the language (Slobin & Bever, 1982), which is consistent with the claims of the Competition Model. According to this model, learning of language forms is closely associated with the accurate recording of multiple exposures to words and patterns in different contexts, and sentence interpretation is supported by linguistic cues (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982; Bates et al., 1984; MacWhinney,

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