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Branches and Goals of Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics studies the complex processes in human mind while listening and reading, and
mechanisms involved in those processes. It studies the way children acquire their mother tongue
(L1) and also different parts and language representation in human brain. These aspects are studied
under the following branches of Psycholinguistics:
1. Language Acquisition
Language acquisition studies the processes by which children acquire the capacity to perceive and
comprehend language as well as to use and produce the words and sentences to communicate. It
refers to first language acquisition which study infants’ acquisition of their native language with
grammatical rules despite of their limited mental abilities and that too in a very brief span of their
lives. It is a process which can take place at any period of one's life. In the sense of first language
acquisition, however, it refers to the acquisition (unconscious learning) of one's native language
(or languages in the case of bilinguals) during the first 6 or 7 years of one's life (roughly from birth
to the time one starts school). The central issues discussed in Language acquisition are:

 Acquisition Studies: How to study children and what experiments can be used.

 Strategies: what are the central strategies that children apply when they acquire their mother
tongue. For example, if they overgeneralize morphological aspects in what they produce.

 Phases: what are the phases involved in language acquisition at different ages and what is their
order like, for instance, cooing, babbling, one-word stage, two-word stage and so on.

2. Language Processing
Language processing is the study of how humans comprehend and produce language. It involves
the analysis, classification and interpretation of a stimulus. In psycholinguistics, particularly used
for the cognitive operations underlying (a) the four language skills (speaking, listening, reading,
writing); (b) the retrieval of lexical items; and (c) the construction of meaning representations. The
term sometimes refers more narrowly to the receptive process of listening and reading. It involves:

 Speech production: Research in speech production has aimed to identify the stages through
which a speaker passes in assembling an utterance.

 Comprehension: Understanding what other people say and write (i.e., language
comprehension) is a complex process. It involves a variety of capacities, skills, processes,
knowledge, and dispositions that are used to derive meaning from spoken, written, and
signed language. It is thought to occur in the Wernicke’s area of the brain which is located
in the left temporal lobe.

3. Neurolinguistics
The study of the with the relationship between language and the structure and functioning of the
brain is called Neurolinguistics. It is the study of how the brain stores and transmits language.
Important areas of research in neurolinguistics include where language is localised in the brain
(cortex, hemispheres, cerebellum) which parts of the brain are active during different linguistic
processes and the effects of brain damage or disease on language. It aims at clarifying how
language structures can be instantiated in the brain, i.e. how patterns and rules exhibited in human
languages are represented and grounded in the brain. In addition, neurolinguistics has a
fundamental clinical impact for assessment and treatment of patients suffering from aphasia and
other language pathologies. Paul Broca and Carl Wernicke were the early psychologists who
studied such damage. Nowadays this research domain is totally integrated and a very vital area in
the neuroscience of language.
Conclusion
Psycholinguistics is an area of study which draws from linguistics and psychology and
focuses upon the acquisition, processing, comprehension and production of language. It is the
discipline that investigates and describes the psychological processes that make it possible for
humans to master and use language.

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