PSYCHOLINGUISTICS

History is marked by the very human urge to explore and venture.

From the earliest of recorded time, we have well-documented accounts of attempts to name and map the farthest reaches of the heavens, and as time has progressed over the centuries, humans have ventured to study the more immediate world - the flora, fauna, and terra firma closer to them. But it has only been very recently, within the last century or so, that we have dared to explore the most proximal portion of our universe  the human mind. It is not accident, of course, that the oldest science is astronomy and the newest is psychology, for distance not only prompts curiosity, it also fosters observational objectivity. Given the inordinate attention devoted to psychology in magazines, books, and television, it seems as if humanity is trying desperately to make up for lost time is its zeal to discover more about the human mind. �

Take a look at a Dickinsons poem about brain:

The brain is wider than the sky,

For put them side by side

The one the other will include

With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sky,

For, hold them blue to blue,

The one the other will absorb

As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,

For lift them, pound for pound,

And they will differ, if they do,

As syllable from sound.

Substituting mind for brain, we can share the poets perception that the mind seems to encompass everything within our natural universe. Indeed, because it can also conceive of the supernatural, perhaps Dickinson is right; the mind is made, or is part and parcel of, the very image of God. The task of the scientist, however, is the exact opposite of the Poets. Rather than to expand, enlarge, and enliven the universe through creativity, the scientist must describe, delimit, and delineate through objectivity, and thus we return to the essential conundrum  without simplistically reducing it to the less than two kilograms of soft tissue in the cranium, how do we study the human mind? In the last fifty years or so, scientist interested in this most proximal piece of nature have carved out a field of inquiry, which has begun to yield answers about the structure of the mind, and they have arrived at possession  speech and language. The use of language and speech as window to the nature and structure of the human mind is called Psycholinguistics (Tomas Scovel, 1998). ���