Today's study #1 psycholinguistics

Hello. This is Bento.

From this blog, I am going to write some essays or articles about what I studied about every two day.

I usually study psychology, so the main theme of my blog will be psychology, I assume.

Today, I studied psycholinguistics which is like a combination of psychology and linguistics; it studies about production or perception of languages.

Firstly, let me explain some mechanisms how babies acquire their mother tongue.

I was interested in one theory, joint attention.

It is a kind of attention which babies do. It is said they pay attention to what their parent look at or point.

Thanks to this function, babies can understand the relationships between what their parents point and the words representing them.

In addtion, they have another quite interesting function, immediate mapping.

This means babies learn a word stands for something once they are taught the relationship through pointing something.

Also, when they already know one word and don't know the other word (for example, there are an apple and a kiwi, and they don't know the word kiwi), they can understand what the word means (such as kiwi) like elimination method (what is more, they can do it really immediately).

However, these theories cannot explain how children at school age acquire a lot of words which are abstruct or vague such as happiness, invention or effect.

At least, we can say that the level of comprehension of meanings of words will change from vague to accurate.

Besides, the meanings themselves for them are getting better. For example, "He is cold" doesn't mean the man is completely covered by ice, but means he is not considerate.

That's all for today's blog.

Actually I studied a lot more, but I am exhausted in writing academic materials in English far from my mother tongue.

I have heard that reading skilles are improved through writing (presumably even in unfamiliar languages).

I barely speak and write English, but I can hardly read or listen because I am not used to English syntax or grammar yet.

 I believe "continuation will be power."

If you had a fun through this blog, I will be so glad.

Thank you for reading :)