Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that studies how humans produce and understand language. This field is a combination of both psychology and linguistics. Psycholinguistics is primarily concerned with the processes that occur in the brain when an individual is producing everyday language, as well as the processes that occur when we receive language.

Overview

Psycholinguistics is a branch of study which combines the disciplines of psychology and linguistics. It is concerned with the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. The discipline is mainly concerned with the processes in which the brain processes language, and it has been heavily influenced by recent developments in neurolinguistics.

History

The field of psycholinguistics was established in the 1950s and was developed as a response to behaviorism. It was influenced by the Chomskyan revolution in linguistics, which proposed that the ability to produce language is innate to humans.

Areas of Study

Psycholinguistics covers a wide range of topics, including:

• The cognitive and neural processes that allow humans to acquire, use, and understand language.
• The ways in which children learn language, known as language acquisition.
• The ways in which adults learn a second language, known as second language acquisition.
• The ways in which language is processed in the brain, known as neurolinguistics.
• The ways in which language can be modeled as a cognitive system, known as computational linguistics.

See Also

• Linguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Neurolinguistics
• Language Acquisition
• Second Language Acquisition
• Computational Linguistics