Psycholinguistics

Origin of the term

The term psycholinguistics was coined in 1936 by Jacob Robert
Kantor in his book An Objective Psychology of Grammar and started
being used among his team at Indiana University, but its use finally
became frequent thanks to the 1946 article "Language and
psycholinguistics: a review", by his student Nicholas Pronko, where it
was used for the first time to talk about an interdisciplinary science
"that could be coherent", as well as in the title of Psycholinguistics: A
Survey of Theory and Research Problems,in a 1954 book by Charles
E. Osgood and Thomas A. Sebeok.
The Term
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of
the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire,
use, comprehend and produce language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were
largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the
human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology,
neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information theory to study how
the brain processes language. 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.
Psycholinguistics 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.
A Brief History of Psycholinguistics
From the beginning of psychology, there has been an
interest in language. Wilhelm Wundt, for example, published
a book on language in 1900. This book, with 1367 pages,
covered a number of topics that are still very much relevant
in current psycholinguistics, including g child language
acquisition, sign language, language perception, and
grammatical structure. Bernard Delbruck suggested that
linguists might do better to part ways with psychology. This
is largely what happened, and for the next 40 years linguists
focused instead on the formal aspects of language, without
much reference to the mental processing needed for their
actual use.
Major Themes in Psycholinguistics

There are several key issues, or themes, that we

should be aware of when thinking about how people
process language. These are actually not limited to
language processing, but are related more broadly
about how and when information is processed.
1 theme
st

About the nature of information

flow: do people rely solely on the
information from the input that they
receive or do they also use info from
“higher” levels of processing to
understand language;
2 theme
nd

Also related to info flow – whether

individual processes related to
language need to completely finish
before further processing can
happen, or whether processes
related to the same info can
overlap.
3 theme
rd

3 theme – is whether a
rd

particular process is
automatic or controlled.
4 theme
th

4 theme – is the issue

th

of modularity
Psycholinguistic subfields
Two other major subfields of psycholinguistics investigate first language
acquisition, the process by which infants acquire language, and second language
acquisition. In addition, it is much more difficult for adults to acquire second
languages than it is for infants to learn their first language (bilingual infants are
able to learn both of their native languages easily). Thus, sensitive periods may
exist during which language can be learned readily.[18] A great deal of research in
psycholinguistics focuses on how this ability develops and diminishes over time. It
also seems to be the case that the more languages one knows, the easier it is to
learn more.
The field of aphasiology deals with language deficits that arise because of
brain damage. Studies in aphasiology can both offer advances in therapy for
individuals suffering from aphasia, and further insight into how the brain
processes language.