Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is the study of the interfaces between language structure and language use: between thought and production, production and comprehension, and comprehension and thought, as well as the many other cognitive systems that shape the use of language as it is flowing into and out of the mind in real time. This chapter begins with a (very) brief, quite recent history of the field. Next, it focuses on a few central issues in comprehension and production, concluding with a (small) sampling of psycholinguistic research examining how these capacities develop both in children as they learn their native languages and in adults learning foreign languages. Common linguistic and cognitive threads woven throughout the history of psycholinguistics include the tension between linguistic theories on one hand, and the capacity‐limited processing characteristics of the human mind. The chapter highlights some of the efforts of psycholinguistic research to address this.