Study Of Psycholinguistics On Perspective Of Connectionism

Connectionism is a cognitive theory first appeared in the 1940s. It takes "psychological activities are like brains" as its metaphorical basis, and it takes cognitive processes as analogues as the holistic activities of neural nets. Connectionism once declined in late 1960s, and had not revived until early 1980s. From then on, it becomes a great challenge to traditional cognitive theories.Psycholinguistics id a discipline which studies the psychological processes in linguistic activities, it deals with how human individuals master and exercise linguistic systems, how linguistic system functions in practical communications, and what knowledge and abilities shall be obtained in order to master and exercise this system.Connectionist psycholinguistics could be considered as a new stage of the development of psycholinguistics, and it could also be considered as the application of connectionist theories in psycholinguistic studies. Plenty of psycholinguistics theories are involved in the development of connectionism, and the development of connectionism also directs a new way for the psycholinguistics studies. As far as the close connection between connectionism and psycholinguistics, some advantages and deficiencies has been brought to the connectionist psycholinguistics. The studies of connectionist psycholinguistics have been discussed a lot. However, connectionist psycholinguistics was mostly considered as a theoretical system in former studies, the influences of it advantages and deficiencies to the development of psycholinguistics have barely been dealt with. I tried to treat the connectionist psycholinguistics as the psycholinguistics in a connectionist vision, through the fundamental theories of connectionism and their application in psycholinguistics studies, the advantages and limits of connectionist psycholinguistics are analyzed in this essay in the following aspects:1.Consider the relation of connectionism and psycholinguistics from the point of view of the involvement of connectionism in the development of psycholinguistics.2. Survey the affect of connectionism to psycholinguistics from through the analysis of the application of connectionism in psycholinguistics studies.3. The advantages and limits of connectionist psycholinguisticsThrough the analysis we may see that, connectionist psycholinguistics has its advantages in some fields. However, as a real system has not been formed in connectionist psycholinguistics, it is more like the application of the connectionist ideas in certain fields of psycholinguistics studies. At the same time, connectionism is in fact a combination of associatilnism psychology and contemporary neurophysiology, and, there are even certain system theories and information-processing theories applied in it. Therefore, connectionist psycholinguistics not only exceeds traditional psycholinguistics, but also succeeds some of its limits.