Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects.A short list of books that deal with psycholinguistics, written in language accessible to the non-expert, includes: Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The field is concerned with psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce language. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms in which languages are processed and represented in the brain. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the brain processes language, and less so the known processes of social sciences, human development, communication theories and infant development, among others. 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. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were found in philosophical and educational fields, due mainly to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Psycholinguistics has roots in education and philosophy, and 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. Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field. Hence, it is studied by researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, such as psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, speech and language pathology, and discourse analysis. 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 people acquire a new language (second language acquisition)? Subdivisions in psycholinguistics are also made based on the different components that make up human language.