Psycholinguistics in everyday life situations

Hi everybody!

Today only a short, but striking post:
We are supposed to find connections between the theory of our studies and situations in our everyday life. I thought that this is rather difficult, but today the theory became practice!

The following dialog between a fellow student and me took place:

A: What was the last book you've read?
B: Oh, I've read "Herr Lehmann" - but it wasn't as good as I had expected it.
A: I share your impression, but have you watched the film version?
B: No, not yet.
A: I've watched the film before reading the book. It was very funny, but the book was rather disappointing.
B: Your right, maybe I should have read the film before starting with the book...

So now, have you found the striking linguistic aspect?

It's in the last line. I should have read the film is the sentence where my fellow student produced a speech error in the form of a word revearsel. The technical term for this is slip-of-the tongue or Spoonerism. Such speech errors often create a comical effect.

See Yule (1996:166)

Welcome to my blog!

Hello to all members of the psycholinguistics course!

After a few days of hesitation I’ve started to create my first Blog!
Why hesitation you might ask – it’s easy: actually I’m not computer freak, on the contrary, I’ve to own up that I am still rather a fanatic of traditional means of communication. For instance, I would never give up writing fine letters to my friends. Of course, I am not complete dummy – I use e-mails and all that stuff in order to communicate in a faster way, but I don’t look forward to the time when people won’t use pens and papers anymore.
However, I am always open for new interesting things that could brighten up my life and I promise: I will do my best in learning how to deal with the secrets of the World Wide Web.
Maybe the course can be regarded as a good starting point in order to widen my technical horizon. So let’s start!

:-)

Today I would like to reflect upon our first session, therefore upon some topics of session plan. I think that the course will be very interesting, because psychology is a field that alway attracts my attention, unfortunately I don't know that much about it. Hence I look forward especially to the sessions concerning with language and the brain and the memory. With regard to the sessions about language acquisition and linguistic determinism I can say that I've already studied the topics in Linguistics I,2 - so maybe I can ad some useful pieces of information or links.

Furthermore I’ve tried to find some links, which are useful for first approaches to linguistic topics in general.

Links that I can recommend are:

The online lexicon for linguistic terms. Here your can find a high amount amount of entries, e.g. aphasia
http://culturitalia.uibk.ac.at/hispanoteca/Lexikon%20der%20Linguistik/Eingangsseite/Lexikon-Linguistik-Eingangsseite.htm

Very importan for linguists all over the world seems to be the web page
http://www.linguistlist.org/
The web page is strictly speaking a collection of many other important web pages. Here you can find bibliographies and abstracts from academic papers. You always will be linked to further web pages, sometimes you have to buy academic text, but in my opinion the abstracts are often sufficient enough in order to get an insight into a topic. As well interesting are the linguistic blogs. Go to publications and choose blogs and you will find the thoughts of many linguistic bloggers. I've chosen one block for you as an example:

The Web of Language

http://webtools.uiuc.edu/blog/view?blogId=25&topicId=359&count=1&ACTION=VIEW_TOPIC_DIALOGS&skinId=286

So, enjoy my thoughts and let's keep in touch!

best, Janine