Psycholinguistics

psycholinguistics, 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.

Bibliography

See D. Foss and D. Hakes, Psycholinguistics (1978); V. C. Tartter, Language Processes (1986); A. Radford, Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax (1990).

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psycholinguistics

Study of the mental processes involved in the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. Much psycholinguistic work has been devoted to the learning of language by children and on speech processing and comprehension by both children and adults. Traditional areas of research include language production, language comprehension, language acquisition, language disorders, language and thought, and neurocognition. See also linguistics.

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Psycholinguistics

An area of study which draws from linguistics and psychology and focuses upon the comprehension and production of language. Although psychologists have long been interested in language, and the field of linguistics is an older science than psychology, scientists in the two fields have had little contact until the work of Noam Chomsky was published in the late 1950s. Chomsky's writing had the effect of making psychologists acutely aware of their lack of knowledge about the structure of language, and the futility of focusing attention exclusively upon the surface structure of language. As a result, psycholinguists, who have a background of training in both linguistics and psychology, have been attempting since the early 1960s to gain a better understanding of how the abstract rules which determine human language are acquired and used to communicate appropriately created meaningful messages from one person to another via the vocal-auditory medium. Research has been directed to the evolutionary development of language, the biological bases of language, the nature of the sound system, the rules of syntax, the nature of meaning, and the process of language acquisition.