Psycholinguistics examines the interrelation between linguistic factors and aspects of mind and brain, focusing on the psychological and neurobiological mechanisms that enable language to be learned, comprehended and produced. It concerns the cognitive faculties and processes necessary for constructing grammatical language and for a listener to perceive it, and modern research in the field integrates biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics and information science to study how the mind and brain process language, with subdisciplines including neurolinguistics and developmental psycholinguistics, which addresses how children acquire language ability.
Facts
Central QuestionPsycholinguistics asks what psychological and neurobiological mechanisms let humans learn, comprehend and produce language, and what cognitive processes are needed to build and perceive its grammatical structures. 1 Key DebateThe field is divided between an innatist position, following Noam Chomsky's 1959 critique of B.F. Skinner, that humans possess an innate language faculty or access to a universal grammar, and an empiricist or behaviorist position that all language is learned as a conditioned response, with recent emergentist approaches challenging the innate position as scientifically unfalsifiable. 1 Connections
Sources
1. Psycholinguistics
Wikimedia FoundationLead section, opening sentence
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and other aspects of mind and brain.
Central Theoretical Debate section, Chomsky 1959 critique of Skinner
humans possess a special, innate ability for language
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