At its heart, psycholinguistic work consists of two questions. One is, What knowledge of language is needed for us to use language? In a sense, we must know a language to use it, but we are not always fully aware of this knowledge. A distinction may be drawn between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge of how to perform. various acts, whereas explicit knowledge refers to the knowledge of the processes or mechanisms used in these acts. We sometimes know how to do something without knowing how we do it. For instance, a baseball pitcher(投手)might know how to throw a baseball 90 miles an hour but might have little or no explicit knowledge of the muscle groups that are involved in this act. Similarly, we may distinguish between knowing how to speak and knowing what processes are involved in producing speech. Generally speaking, much of our linguistic knowledge is tacit rather than explicit.
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