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according to the situation, whether it is public or private, formal or informal, who is being addressed, and who might be able to overhear.
2.1.2. Psycholinguistics
Hartley 1982: 16 explains that psycholinguistics investigates the interrelation of language and mind, in processing and producing utterances and in
language acquisition. While Gleason and Ratner 1998: 3 state that psycholinguistics or the psychology of language is concerned with discovering the
psychological processes by which humans acquire and use language. Psycholinguistics addresses three major concerns:
1 Comprehension.
It is how people understand spoken and written language. This is a broad area of investigation that involves scrutiny of the comprehension process at many levels,
including investigation of how speech signals are interpreted by listeners speech perception, how the meanings of words are determined lexical access, how
grammatical structure of sentences is analyzed to obtain larger units of meaning sentence processing and how longer conversations or texts are appropriately
formulated and evaluated discourse. 2
Speech Production. It is how people produce language. This major learns speakers’ mistakes
speech errors and form breaks in the ongoing rhythm of connected speech hesitation and pausal phenomena or speech disfluencies.
3 Acquisition
It is how people learn language. The major focus in this domain has been on how children acquire a first language developmental psycholinguistics.
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Scovel 1998: 31 says, “psycholinguistshave become excited about a new way of discovering how we put words into our mouths”. There are several processes
that must first be acknowledged by psycholinguist who wishes to understand how a sentence is processed. As mentioned by Gleason and Ratner 1998: 8 the processes
are : 1
The sounds of the message must be isolated and recognized. 2
The words must be identified and associated with their meanings. 3
The grammatical structure of the message must be analyzed sufficiently to determine the roles played by each word.
4 The resulting interpretation of the message must be evaluated in the light of
past experience and current context.
2.1.3 Competence and Performance
