In 1999 an additional course in psycholinguistics started at the Chair for students of philology at St. Petersburg State University. Psycholinguistics is an experimental discipline, which has been rapidly developing all over the world for several decades. There has been a long tradition in this field in Russia, thus placing Russian psycholinguistics to a strong position in academic world. The utmost need of doing experimental research on speech behaviour was acknowledged by a number of great linguists, such as W. von Humboldt, F. de Saussure, A. A. Potebnya, I. A. Boduen de Kurtene, L. V. Scherba, N. S. Trubetskoy, R. Jacobson, M. M. Bakhtin, V. N. Voloshinov, N. Chomsky, W. Chafe, Ch. Fillmore, etc.
Being an interdisciplinary field psycholinguistics acquires special grounding in several disciplines, from linguistics proper to neurosciences and the study of speech pathologies. According to the latest psycholinguistic textbooks and papers written by the experts in the field, the following sections are to be incorporated in the course: the main principles of neurosystem functioning; speech, visual and auditory systems and their functions; brain mechanisms ensuring speech and cognitive processes; models of lexicon usage; pathologies of speech functions; applied aspects of psycholinguistics, etc.
The area of mutual interest of two main parts of psycholinguistics, linguistics and psychology, proves highly efficient, since by using well developed experimental methods of psychology linguistics obtains an opportunity to verify its theoretical presuppositions, whereas psychology, and specifically neuropsychology, can not correct and estimate in a proper way speech behaviour and cognitive activities of humans without taking into consideration the achievements of linguistics in understanding the nature of language and speech.
Neurolinguistics as a part of psycholinguistics, whose aims are to study mental mechanisms of speech functions and which combines methods and paradigms of linguistics and neuropsychology, separated as a discipline only in the second half of the 20th century. Neurolinguistics began developing even more rapidly after the new methods of research appeared allowing the study of brain processes responsible for speech functions in healthy people. The interest of medical disciplines in linguistics is not accidental either, as it is caused by their need for accurate assessment of speech problems of the patients with brain impairments, for only in this way a successful rehabilitation of lost abilities becomes feasible.
Linguistics together with all disciplines mentioned above can accomplish its own tasks hoping to find answers to the most important theoretical problems whose solution is not possible by just psycholinguistics with the help of neurosciences. For example, the idea of modularity appeared independently in neurosciences and linguistics. One of linguistic schools claims that speech and cognitive functions are located separately in the brain and that language modules (such as lexicon and grammar) are also separated. The opponents of this school, on the contrary, consider brain processes ensuring speech functioning working as a neural network.
It is evident that we should discover general principles forming the basis for superior mental functions to understand mental organization of language competence and language behaviour. On the one hand, these principles should include sensor systems and the processes of perception, on the other – memory, attention, the structure of mental operations as basis of superior cognition, including the creative one. The syllabus offered for this programme aims at acquainting students with these problems and ideas not entirely traditional in linguistic education.
The idea of specific psycholinguistic education belongs to professors of the Philological Faculty of St Petersburg State University L. V. Sakharny and A. S. Shtern. For many years they had been giving lectures and organizing workshops on problems of psycholinguistics, thus creating the centre to unite specialists in the field not only from St Petersburg, but from many other cities and towns of former USSR. We are happy now to open a course in psycholinguistics for students of the Philological faculty.
Minerva
- A multimedia distant learning course of Neurolinguistics
The aim of Minerva Project is the hypertextual information-referential system of student distant learning as well as a means of neurolinguistic research supported by Internet- and WWW (World Wide Web)-assisted.
The course is developed to acquaint students with problems and the current state of disciplines dealing with language and cognitive activities, such as cognitive neuro- and psycholinguistics, language and speech impairment.
The course reflects the state of the art as it is contained the academic literature and the teaching practice; quite a number of them are the papers by the project's main executors, thus seriously supporting claims to adequately representing the latest standard of knowledge in the field.
We would like to let you know that the Second European Cognitive Science Conference (EuroCogSci07) will be held in Delphi, Greece, May 23-27, 2007. EuroCogSci07 is jointly organized by the Cognitive Science Society and by the Hellenic Cognitive Science Society.
Further information, including information about registration fees and accommodation can be found at the conference website:
