Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and other aspects of mind and brain. The discipline is mainly concerned with the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that enable humans to learn, comprehend, and produce language. Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, mainly due to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain processes language, and less so the known processes of social sciences, human development, communication theories, and infant development, among others. There are several subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain. For example, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right, and developmental psycholinguistics, as a branch of psycholinguistics, concerns itself with a child's ability to learn language.
Areas of study Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that consists of researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, including psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, speech and language pathology, and discourse analysis. Psycholinguists study how people acquire and use language, according to the following main ways:
language development: how do children learn language? language comprehension: how do people understand language? language production: how do people speak or sign language? second language acquisition: how do people who already know one language acquire another one? A researcher interested in language comprehension may study word recognition during reading, to examine the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text. A researcher interested in language production might study how words are prepared to be spoken starting from the conceptual or semantic level (this concerns connotation, and possibly can be examined through the conceptual framework concerned with the semantic differential). Developmental psycholinguists study infants' and children's ability to learn and process language. Psycholinguistics further divide their studies according to the different components that make up human language. Linguistics-related areas include:
Phonetics and phonology are the study of speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these sounds. Morphology is the study of word structures, especially between related words (such as dog and dogs) and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation). Syntax is the study of how words are combined to form sentences. Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences. Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of sentences. Pragmatics is concerned with the role of context in the interpretation of meaning. Linguistic relativity is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world.
History In seeking to understand the properties of language acquisition, psycholinguistics has roots in debates regarding innate versus acquired behaviors (both in biology and psychology). For some time, the concept of an innate trait was something that was not recognized in studying the psychology of the individual. However, with the redefinition of innateness as time progressed, behaviors considered innate could once again be analyzed as behaviors that interacted with the psychological aspect of an individual. After the diminished popularity of the behaviorist model, ethology reemerged as a leading train of thought within psychology, allowing the subject of language, an innate human behavior, to be examined once more within the scope of psychology.
Origin of "psycholinguistics" The theoretical framework for psycholinguistics ostensibly began to be developed near the end of the 19th century as the "psychology of language". The work of Edward Thorndike and Frederic Bartlett laid the foundations of what would come to be known as "psycholinguistics." The use of the term "psycholinguistic" is first encountered in adjective form in psychologist Jacob Kantor 1936 book An Objective Psychology of Grammar. The term "psycholinguistics" came into wider usage in 1946 when Kantor's student Nicholas Pronko published an article entitled "Psycholinguistics: A Review". Pronko's intention was to unify related theoretical approaches under a single name. The term was used for the first time to talk about an interdisciplinary field "that could be coherent", in Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok's Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems (1954).
Theories
Language acquisition
Though there is still much debate, there are two main positions on children's language development:
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