Psycholinguistics:introduction

Psycholinguistics is the discipline of psychology that studies the mental mechanisms of language processing—speaking, listening, reading, and writing—in both a native and a second tongue. Psycholinguistics also studies the processes underlying the acquisition of language, how language processes break down in language pathologies such as dyslexia and aphasia, and how these processes relate to brain function.

Psycholinguistics borrows many of its theoretical constructs from linguistics. Levels of processing, distinguished in theories of language comprehension or language production, correspond to linguistic levels, such as semantics (meaning), the lexicon (vocabulary), syntax (sentence structure), morphology (units that make up words), phonology, and phonetics (sound systems). Furthermore, the processing units that these theories assume correspond to linguistic units, such as the phoneme, the syllable, the morpheme, and the clause. Psycholinguistic experiments provide information about the psychological reality of linguistic units and the way linguistic information is represented and processed in the mind of the language user.

A crucial difference between linguistics and psycholinguistics is the latter’s focus on the mental process. For instance, in natural speech we can easily produce two words per second. How do speakers find these words so quickly in their (vast) mental lexicon, which contains at least 10,000 words? What happens to these processes when we are unable to say a word, but it is on the tip of our tongue? As another example, when listening to sentences, we can sometimes be led up the ‘garden path’. A classic example is ‘the horse raced past the barn fell’. Here, one builds up a structural representation of the sentence, but upon reading the last word (‘fell’), it turns out to be wrong. How do readers build up a structural representation? What went