Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is 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, use, comprehend, and produce language.
Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener.
Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, mainly due to their location in departments other than applied sciences. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain processes language, and less so the known processes of social sciences, human development, communication theories, and infant development, among others.
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.

Areas of study

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?

A researcher interested in language comprehension may study word recognition during reading, to examine the processes involved in the extraction of orthographic, morphological, phonological, and semantic information from patterns in printed text. A researcher interested in language production might study how words are prepared to be spoken starting from the conceptual or semantic level. Developmental psycholinguists study infants' and children's ability to learn and process language.
Psycholinguistics further divide their studies according to the different components that make up human language.
Linguistics-related areas include:

Phonetics and phonology are 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 between related words and the formation of words based on rules.
Syntax is the study of how words are combined 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.
Linguistic relativity is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world.
History

In seeking to understand the properties of language acquisition, psycholinguistics has roots in debates regarding innate versus acquired behaviors. For some time, the concept of an innate trait was something that was not recognized in studying the psychology of the individual. However, with the redefinition of innateness as time progressed, behaviors considered innate could once again be analyzed as behaviors that interacted with the psychological aspect of an individual. After the diminished popularity of the behaviorist model, ethology reemerged as a leading train of thought within psychology, allowing the subject of language, an innate human behavior, to be examined once more within the scope of psychology.

Origin of "psycholinguistics"

The theoretical framework for psycholinguistics ostensibly began to be developed near the end of the 19th century as the "psychology of language". The work of Edward Thorndike and Frederic Bartlett laid the foundations of what would come to be known as "psycholinguistics."
The use of the term "psycholinguistic" is first encountered in adjective form in psychologist Jacob Kantor 1936 book An Objective Psychology of Grammar.
The term "psycholinguistics" came into wider usage in 1946 when Kantor's student Nicholas Pronko published an article entitled "Psycholinguistics: A Review". Pronko's intention was to unify related theoretical approaches under a single name. The term was used for the first time to talk about an interdisciplinary field "that could be coherent", in Charles E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok's Psycholinguistics: A Survey of Theory and Research Problems.

Theories

Language acquisition

Though there is still much debate, there are two primary theories on childhood language acquisition:

the behaviorist perspective, whereby all language must be learned by the child; and
the innatist perspective, which believes that the abstract system of language cannot be learned, but that humans possess an innate language faculty or access to what has been called "universal grammar".

The innatist perspective began in 1959 with Noam Chomsky's highly critical review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. This review helped start what has been called the cognitive revolution in psychology. Chomsky posited that humans possess a special, innate ability for language, and that complex syntactic features, such as recursion, are "hard-wired" in the brain. These abilities are thought to be beyond the grasp of even the most intelligent and social non-humans. When Chomsky asserted that children acquiring a language have a vast search space to explore among all possible human grammars, there was no evidence that children received sufficient input to learn all the rules of their language. Hence, there must be some other innate mechanism that endows humans with the ability to learn language. According to the "innateness hypothesis", such a language faculty is what defines human language and makes that faculty different from even the most sophisticated forms of animal communication.
The field of linguistics and psycholinguistics has since been defined by pro-and-con reactions to Chomsky. The view in favor of Chomsky still holds that the human ability to use language is qualitatively different from any sort of animal ability.
The view that language must be learned was especially popular before 1960 and is well represented by the mentalistic theories of Jean Piaget and the empiricist Rudolf Carnap. Likewise, the behaviorist school of psychology puts forth the point of view that language is a behavior shaped by conditioned response; hence it is learned. The view that language can be learned has had a recent resurgence inspired by emergentism. This view challenges the "innate" view as scientifically unfalsifiable; that is to say, it cannot be tested. With the increase in computer technology since the 1980s, researchers have been able to simulate language acquisition using neural network models.

Language comprehension

The structures and uses of language are related to the formation of ontological insights. Some see this system as "structured cooperation between language-users" who use conceptual and semantic difference in order to exchange meaning and knowledge, as well as give meaning to language, thereby examining and describing "semantic processes bound by a 'stopping' constraint which are not cases of ordinary deferring." Deferring is normally done for a reason, and a rational person is always disposed to defer if there is good reason.
The theory of the "semantic differential" supposes universal distinctions, such as:

Typicality: that included scales such as "regular–rare", "typical–exclusive";
Reality: "imaginary–real", "evident–fantastic", "abstract–concrete";
Complexity: "complex–simple", "unlimited–limited", "mysterious–usual";
Improvement or Organization: "regular–spasmodic", "constant–changeable", "organized–disorganized", "precise–indefinite";
Stimulation: "interesting–boring", "trivial–new".
Reading

One question in the realm of language comprehension is how people understand sentences as they read. Experimental research has spawned several theories about the architecture and mechanisms of sentence comprehension. These theories are typically concerned with the types of information, contained in the sentence, that the reader can use to build meaning and the point at which that information becomes available to the reader. Issues such as "modular" versus "interactive" processing have been theoretical divides in the field.
A modular view of sentence processing assumes that the stages involved in reading a sentence function independently as separate modules. These modules have limited interaction with one another. For example, one influential theory of sentence processing, the "garden-path theory", states that syntactic analysis takes place first. Under this theory, as the reader is reading a sentence, he or she creates the simplest structure possible, to minimize effort and cognitive load. This is done without any input from semantic analysis or context-dependent information. Hence, in the sentence "The evidence examined by the lawyer turned out to be unreliable", by the time the reader gets to the word "examined" he or she has committed to a reading of the sentence in which the evidence is examining something because it is the simplest parsing. This commitment is made even though it results in an implausible situation: evidence cannot examine something. Under this "syntax first" theory, semantic information is processed at a later stage. It is only later that the reader will recognize that he or she needs to revise the initial parsing into one in which "the evidence" is being examined. In this example, readers typically recognize their mistake by the time they reach "by the lawyer" and must go back and reevaluate the sentence. This reanalysis is costly and contributes to slower reading times. A 2024 study found that during self-paced reading tasks, participants progressively read faster and recalled information more accurately, suggesting that task adaptation is driven by learning processes rather than by declining motivation.
In contrast to the modular view, an interactive theory of sentence processing, such as a constraint-based lexical approach assumes that all available information contained within a sentence can be processed at any time. Under an interactive view, the semantics of a sentence can come into play early on to help determine the structure of a sentence. Hence, in the sentence above, the reader would be able to make use of plausibility information in order to assume that "the evidence" is being examined instead of doing the examining. There are data to support both modular and interactive views; which view is correct is debatable.
When reading, saccades can cause the mind to skip over words because it does not see them as important to the sentence, and the mind completely omits it from the sentence or supplies the wrong word in its stead. This can be seen in "Paris in thethe Spring". This is a common psychological test, where the mind will often skip the second "the", especially when there is a line break in between the two.