Post 1: The Islamization of Psycholinguistics

   The subject that our group had chosen is Psycholinguistics. As we know, Psycholinguistics has a very wide scope of study. It is the study of mental processes involved in the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language.   According to Steinberg and Sciarini (2006) in their book An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, psycholinguistics is the psychology of language as it relates to learning, mind and brain as well as various aspects of society and culture. Meanwhile according to Merriam-Webster dictionary, psycholinguistics is the study of the mental faculties which involved in the perception, production, and acquisition of language. There are variations of definition regarding the term which simply associated with psychology and language.

     Human being is the most unique creation that Allah ever created as He created them in good shape, excellent condition and the most crucial part is the brilliant human’s mind which also known as aql. He created human on purpose and the purpose of human’s creation is to serve Allah and to appreciate Allah such as appreciate the knowledge that He gives to human being and to follow His order. If we see the psycholinguistics study from Islamic perspective, we should realize how almighty and all-knowing Allah is yet we are not. Allah creates human brain with a lot of function in it and one of it is the production of language in human brain. In linguistics, Noam Chomsky explains how man can acquire language. Chomsky introduces the theory of Universal Grammar and about the Language Acquisition Device in human brain. This study has been found many years later after the creation of man and the revelation of Quran. However, Allah has already explains about the function and the miracle of human brain in the Quran before Chomsky attempted to found the theory of language acquisition in human brain.

In short, the psycholinguistics study enable us to understand more about how we as a human can acquire language through the brain that has been given by Allah only to human being. In addition, from the study we realize how Almighty and All Knowing Allah is. As a Muslim, we should study the Quran more as all of the knowledge that we need is actually all in the Quran.