Definition of psycholinguistics:

Psycholinguistics is the study of how people acquire, understand and produce language.

Psycholinguistics is the study of the language processing mechanisms. Psycholinguistics deals

with the mental processes a person uses in producing and understanding language. It is

concerned with the relationship between language and the human mind, for example, how

word, sentence, and discourse meaning are represented and computed in the mind.

Definition of psychology:

Psychology is the scientific study of human behavior and cognition.

Psycholinguistics attracts supporters from both linguistics and psychology, though both of

them have somewhat different approaches especially in methodology.

In this branch, you may have people who are more leaning to study psycholinguistics from a

linguistic perspective, but other people study it from a psychological perspective/view.

Therefore, we will have psycholinguistics and we will have another term which is psychology

of language. For linguists, data should be collected from a context in which language is being

used (studying language in its formal context). For psychologists point of view, they are more

critical of the mentioned approach (If you study language this way, data is never inclusive).

This means that data you collect and the findings you get are not that sure on which you can

build future deductions. Therefore, they tend to take language into laboratories because of the

advancement of science and medicine.

Psychology of language or psycholinguistics is the study of the psychological and

neurobiological factors that enable humans use, acquire, comprehend and produce language.

Scope of psycholinguistics:
Acquisition

Comprehension

Loss

Production

Does language bear/shape/represent thought?

According to Sapir and Whorf hypothesis, the language we speak shapes the way we think

and the way we perceive the world. To put it differently, the hypothesis states that the way

people think is strongly affected by their native language. However, this hypothesis is proven

to be wrong later on by followers of Chomsky.

Three major aspects of psycholinguistic research:

Language acquisition: how human being acquire language.

Language production: how we create and express meaning through language.

Language comprehension: how we perceive and understand speech and written language.

Definition of linguistics:

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. What makes it scientific? Linguists use

scientific method. This latter means the formation of hypotheses that explain data and the

testing of those hypotheses against further data.

Definition of aphasia, Broca’s aphasia and Wernicke’s aphasia

Aphasia is language disorder resulting from trauma to the brain

Wernicke’s aphasia is a form of aphasia characterized by fluent speech that makes little sense
The difference between the mind and the brain

The difference between classical conditioning and operant conditioning