psycholinguistics

psycholinguistics
/suy'koh ling gwis"tiks/, n. (used with a sing. v.)
the study of the relationship between language and the cognitive or behavioral characteristics of those who use it.
[1935-40; PSYCHO- + LINGUISTICS]

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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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      the study of psychological aspects of language. Experiments investigating such topics as short-term and long-term memory, perceptual strategies, and speech perception based on linguistic models are part of this discipline. Most work in psycholinguistics has been done on the learning of language by children. Language is extremely complex, yet children learn it quickly and with ease; thus, the study of child language is important for psychologists interested in cognition and learning and for linguists concerned with the insights it can give about the structure of language. In the 1960s and early '70s much research in child language used the transformational-generative model proposed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky; the goal of that research has been to discover how children come to know the grammatical processes that underlie the speech they hear. The transformational model has also been adapted for another field of psycholinguistics, the processing and comprehension of speech; early experiments in this area suggested, for example, that passive sentences took longer to process than their active counterparts because an extra grammatical rule was necessary to produce the passive sentence. Many of the results of this work were controversial and inconclusive, and psycholinguistics has been turning increasingly to other functionally related and socially oriented models of language structure.

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Universalium. 2010.

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Look at other dictionaries:

  • Psycholinguistics — or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack… …   Wikipedia

  • psycholinguistics — [sī΄kō liŋ gwis′tiks] n. the branch of linguistics that analyzes the psychological factors involved in the perception of and response to linguistic phenomena …   English World dictionary

  • psycholinguistics — noun plural but singular in construction Date: 1936 the study of the mental faculties involved in the perception, production, and acquisition of language • psycholinguist noun • psycholinguistic adjective …   New Collegiate Dictionary

  • psycholinguistics — noun The study of the comprehension and production of language in its spoken, written and signed forms …   Wiktionary

  • psycholinguistics — Study of a host of psychological factors associated with speech, including voice, attitudes, emotions, and grammatical rules, that affect communication and understanding of language. [psycho + L. lingua, tongue] * * * psy·cho·lin·guis·tics .sī kō …   Medical dictionary

  • psycholinguistics — plural noun [treated as sing.] the study of the relationships between linguistic behaviour and psychological processes, including the process of language acquisition. Derivatives psycholinguist noun psycholinguistic adjective …   English new terms dictionary

  • psycholinguistics — psy·cho·linguistics …   English syllables

  • psycholinguistics — UK [ˌsaɪkəʊlɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks] / US [ˌsaɪkoʊlɪŋˈɡwɪstɪks] noun [uncountable] linguistics the scientific study of the way that the brain produces and deals with language Derived word: psycholinguistic adjective …   English dictionary

  • psycholinguistics — psy•cho•lin•guis•tics [[t]ˌsaɪ koʊ lɪŋˈgwɪs tɪks[/t]] n. (used with a sing. v.) psl ling. the study of the relationship between language and the cognitive or behavioral characteristics of those who use it • Etymology: 1935–40 psy cho•lin′guist, n …   From formal English to slang

  • psycholinguistics — /ˌsaɪkoʊlɪŋˈgwɪstɪks/ (say .suykohling gwistiks) noun the study of relations between linguistic events and mental processes. –psycholinguistic, adjective –psycholinguist /saɪkoʊˈlɪŋgwəst/ (say suykoh ligwuhst), noun …  

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