Lign170 Lecture 1

A Brief and Friendly Introduction to Psycholinguistics
Roger Levy
UC San Diego Department of Linguistics

31 March 2009

What is “psycholinguistics”?
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Inherently, linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. How can a fixed set of knowledge and resources be deployed to manage this uncertainty? This is the study of language processing.

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◮

And how can such knowledge and resources be learned from finite input? This is the study of language acquisition.

Psycholinguistics studies these problems, through observational studies, experiments, and computational modeling.

What is “psycholinguistics”?
◮

Inherently, linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. How can a fixed set of knowledge and resources be deployed to manage this uncertainty? This is the study of language processing.

◮

◮

And how can such knowledge and resources be learned from finite input? This is the study of language acquisition.

Psycholinguistics studies these problems, through observational studies, experiments, and computational modeling.

What is “psycholinguistics”?
◮

Inherently, linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. How can a fixed set of knowledge and resources be deployed to manage this uncertainty? This is the study of language processing.

◮

◮

And how can such knowledge and resources be learned from finite input? This is the study of language acquisition.

Psycholinguistics studies these problems, through observational studies, experiments, and computational modeling.

What is “psycholinguistics”?
◮

Inherently, linguistic communication involves the resolution of uncertainty over a potentially unbounded set of possible signals and meanings. How can a fixed set of knowledge... [continues]

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