Psycholinguistics: Linguistics and Language Production

Psycholinguistics Psycholinguistics studies the relationship between language and mind. It studies how are language and speech acquired, produced, comprehended, and lost. Language acquisition and language dissolution happen over time or diachronically. While language production and comprehension happen at a certain point of time or synchronically.

Firstly, this paper will talk about language acquisition. Children are a focus of attention and affection in all societies. They go through many stages in language acquisition such as crying, cooing, babbling, first word, birth of grammar and childish creativity. During the very first few weeks of a child's life, crying is his only way to show what he needs. Crying is unaffected by intentional control from the nervous system, which is responsible for human behavior. At the very beginning, baby's crying is completely iconic. For example, when the child is hungry, his or her crying becomes louder and louder, it also increases in pitch. During the first two months of the child's life, his or her crying becomes more symbolic.

At these early stages, babies cannot depend on themselves. They depend completely on their caretakers for several years. This creates on enormous degree of early bonding and socialization. As a result of the extensive interaction between the children and their caretakers, children start to coo, making soft gurgling sounds, to express satisfaction. The cooing stage emerges at two months. When the child is about six months old, he or she starts to babble. This babbling stage refers to the natural tendency of children to create strings of consonant-vowel syllable clusters as a kind of vocalic play. Psycholinguists distinguished between marginal babbling and canonical babbling. Marginal babbling is an early stage similar to cooing where the child produce few and random consonants. While canonical babbling emerges at eight months when the child's vocalization narrow down to