Introduction
Cognitive psychology plays a vital role in people’s everyday life. It is clear that people’s mental processes occur based on thorough thinking or decision-making, and cognitive functions are behind these processes. Nowadays, psychologists and researchers pay special attention to the language processing that conditions why people choose this or that word for explaining the situation. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the concept of cognitive psychology and trace the implementation of language processing in the specific article.
Main body
The article chosen is titled Beyond linear order: The role of argument structure in speaking and was published by S. Momma and V. Ferreira in November of 2019. The presented study examines how people organize sentences and speech structures in which two words are dependent upon each other hierarchically – arguments and verbs – present to be quite apart in the linear order of speech. Moreover, it investigates how the planning process is shaped with the usage of linear and hierarchical aspects of a sentence. The final experiment suggests that “retrieve sentence-final verbs before the articulation of their sentence-initial patient or theme arguments, but not agent arguments, and before retrieving sentence-medial nouns inside modifiers” (Momma & Ferreira, 2019, p. 1). As a result, it was found that the linear structure of a sentence is dependent upon the time and hierarchical planning of a sentence.
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive psychology is an area of psychology that explores human cognition, that is, it includes the processes of learning, perceiving, evaluating, transmitting, and reasoning information. The term “knowledge” comes from the Latin word “cognoscere” or “know” (Mazzone, 2018). In essence, this is a study of how people gain and apply knowledge. It is tautly connected with the highly disciplinary cognitive science and is impacted by artificial intelligence linguistics, computer science, biology, physics, philosophy, anthropology, and neurobiology. The study of such psychology is based on two assumptions. Primarily, human cognition can, at least in principle, be fully disclosed by the scientific method, that is, individual aspects of mental processes can be revealed and perceived (Mazzone, 2018). Furthermore, internal mental processes can be explained in terms of rules or algorithms in information processing models.
Conventionally, cognitive psychology is composed of memory, concept formation, reasoning, human perception, learning, attention, judgment and decision-making, language processing, and problem-solving. Some psychologists and scientists suggest that the field of cognitive psychology was significantly enhanced by social, cultural, evolutional factors, emotions, consciousness that also significantly contributed to its development (Mazzone, 2018). The evidence from cognitive psychology has enhanced people’s understanding of how humans receive information, learn languages, or recall memories. By knowing how the human brain functions, psychologists can reveal someone’s problems and help to combat the disorders.
Much scientific evidence proves that cognitive psychology is likely to affect every decision people make. For example, psychologists have found that while human’s short-term memory is quite short and limited (lasts only 20-30 seconds and can hold from five to nine elements), rehearsal strategies can increase the likelihood that information will be transferred to long-term memory, which is much more stable and durable. There are many practical uses for this cognitive study, such as helping to overcome memory impairments, finding solutions to help people recover from traumatic brain damages, treating learning disabilities, enhancing decision-making accuracy, and shaping educational programs to improve learning. Studying how people reflect, reason, and process information, lets scientists better comprehend how the human brain functions, and also allows psychologists to develop new ways to help people overcome psychological difficulties.
Language Processing
The chosen article tautly deals with language processing; therefore, it is necessary to describe this process and review its components. Language can be defined as a complicated method that people use to communicate with each other. It is worth noting that the language must have a structure and be based on words that are stored in the minds of people, that is, the lexicon. From this point of view, if a language is a system and structure for using words in proper conversation and writing, vocabulary is a set of words that persist in the human mind. Adults can save 50,000 words of their first language and thousands of words of their second language in the form of lexicons.
Words from the lexicon stored in people’s memory are also categorized to help people choose the most appropriate option during a conversation or letter. Thus, language processes are closely related to people’s cognition and memory, so language plays an essential role in cognitive psychology, providing a person with knowledge of the world and fixing it in words. Over the past two decades, the study of the processing of language has gained a great deal. The majority of this extension of exploration and intrigue was brought about by the merger of productive hypothetical points of view, refined trial issues, and new and better neuroimaging research techniques. The focal point of psycholinguistics has generally been the investigation of standard and debilitated individuals utilizing social strategies, for example, blunder rate, estimation of response time, and, all the more as of late, eye following.
Language processing is a complex cognitive function that is sensitive to various types of information (Taweh, 2018). It cooperates with other psychological capacities, for example, consideration and memory, and at times, these subjective capacities are incorporated with the language’s very handling. It is also extremely sensitive, so some accounts use certain types of information at the beginning of the processing flow, and others later. Disclosures about language handling depend on estimations that individuals take during explicit sessions. Since there is a wide assortment of such undertakings, researchers frequently receive different outcomes in various investigations (Taweh, 2018). This is valid for any logical examination, and just further work will help kill these distinctions. Language handling, at last, depends on the principal capacity to distinguish the basic parts of discourse sounds or phonemes (Taweh, 2018). The location of phonemes permits the audience to coordinate sounds into significant words. Additionally, considering the way that there is a need to appreciate a system that ascents up out of the complexities of the neurological structure, analysts are essentially amassing theories of the normally imperceptible by using conspicuous wonders (e.g., speaker impulses, reaction times, getting events, and others).
Therefore, the article is closely related to the processes of language cognition. It reveals the problems of sentence order and the way people use sentence planning in their everyday speech. It also reflects the argument structure and how people choose grammatical construction and words with the needed connotation to create an argument. The sentence is thought to have a linear word order. According to Momma and Ferreira (2018), “word-order is an observable property of linguistic input, so it is reasonable to assume that speakers learn to plan words according to the surface word-order of their language when developing their language skills” (p. 2). The article also explained the dependencies between grammatical structures and cognitive abilities and how the entire word choice occurs. Moreover, it revealed how the human brain translates concepts into syntactic or lexical structures and notions (Momma & Ferreira, 2018). The language processes were demonstrated, and the article revealed the relation of the argument and linear word order. So, cognitive processes play an essential role in creating any type of cognitive activity.
From the theoretical part, I learned that language processing is portrayed as a relatively new field of cognitive psychology and that it is essential in understanding people’s choice of words. However, it is still thought to be a novelty so that the public may view these mechanisms as something complex. The chosen material is likely to have a broader implication in the field of cognitive psychology as it presents relevant information to natural language processing (NLP). Therefore, the research would be useful for further investigation. If the article is to have other variables and data, the results are likely to change, and probably new facts about language processing will be revealed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it seems relevant to state that cognitive psychology is a field that investigates different mental activities and is used to understand language processing. In turn, language processing suggests the transmission of different concepts into words, structures, and speech. The article may have implications for further development of the concept translation into speech. Therefore, the chosen article is connected to the presented notions as it presents the model of verbs’ argument that is crucial in the process of concept translation into semantic-syntax structures.
References
Mazzone, M. (2018). Cognitive pragmatics: Mindreading, inferences, consciousness. De Gruyter.
Momma, S., & Ferreira, V. S. (2019). Beyond linear order: The role of argument structure in speaking. Cognitive Psychology, 114, 1-36.
Taweh, B. (2018). Applied natural language processing with python: Implementing machine learning and deep learning algorithms for natural language processing.