Studying Mental Processes: Overview of Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the scientific study of the mental processes underlying language acquisition, comprehension, and production. It is also the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, comprehend, and produce language. 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 acquisition: how do children acquire language?
• Language comprehension: how do people comprehend language?
• Language production: how do people produce language?
• Second language acquisition: how do people who already know one language acquire another one?

In psycholinguistics, 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.

Psycholinguistics is concerned with the nature of the processes that the brain undergoes in order to comprehend and produce language. For example, the cohort model seeks to describe how words are retrieved from the mental lexicon when an individual hears or sees linguistic input. Using new non-invasive imaging techniques, recent research seeks to shed light on the areas of the brain involved in language processing.

Psycholinguistics is also concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the listener's perception of these constructions. 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 processes language. It also involves the known processes of social sciences, human development, communication theories, and infant development, among others. Psycholinguistics further divide their studies according to the different components that make up human language.

Psycholinguistics has always been a very important factor of linguistics, as it not only explains the linguistics, but even provides a core support to it.