Definition: The study of the mental aspects of language and speech–a branch of both linguistics and psychology.
Etymology: From the Greek, “mind” + the Latin, “tongue”
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language.
Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned.
Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language.
Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc.
Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants’ and children’s ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observations such as those made by Jean Piaget in his research on the development of children). Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as psychology, cognitive science, and linguistics.
There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up human language.
“Psycholinguists study how word meaning, sentence meaning, and discourse meaning are computed and represented in the mind. They study how complex words and sentences are composed in speech and how they are broken down into their constituents in the acts of listening and reading. In short, psycholinguists seek to understand how language is done. . . .
“In general, psycholinguistic studies have revealed that many of the concepts employed in the analysis of sound structure, word structure, and sentence structure also play a role in language processing. However, an account of language processing also requires that we understand how these linguistic concepts interact with other aspects of human processing to enable language production and comprehension.”
(William O’Grady, et al., Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001).
My Diary - Leonardo Cardillo 