Psycholinguistics as a Cross-Disciplinary Science
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce 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, linguistics, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain; for example, neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.
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 children's ability to learn language.
Areas of study
Psycholinguistics is studied by researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, such as psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, and speech and language pathology. Psycholinguists study many different topics, but these topics can generally be divided into answering the following questions: (1) how do children acquire language (language acquisition)?; (2) how do people process and comprehend language (language comprehension)?; (3) how do people produce language (language production)?; and (4) how do adults acquire a new language (second language acquisition)?
Psycholinguistics is also referred to as the study of psychological states and mental activity associated with the use of language. An important focus of psycholinguistics is the largely unconscious application of grammatical rules that enable people to produce and comprehend intelligible sentences. Psycholinguists investigate the relationship between language and thought, a perennial subject of debate being whether language is a function of thinking or thought a function of the use of language. However, most problems in psycholinguistics are more concrete, involving the study of linguistic performance and language acquisition, especially in children. The work of Noam Chomsky and other proponents of transformational grammar have had a marked influence on the field. Neurolinguists study the brain activity involved in language use, obtaining much of their data from people whose ability to use language has been impaired due to brain damage.
There are several subdivisions within psycholinguistics that are based on the components that make up human language.
Phonetics and phonology are concerned with 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 the relationships 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 the patterns which dictate how words are combined together 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.
The study of word recognition and reading examines the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text