A broad-ranging area of study that is difficult to pin down specifically. In essence, it concerns the employment of formal linguistic models to reveal the cognitive process involved in language use. Such processes are taken to be capable of generating grammatically-correct and meaningful sentences as well as making possible the understanding of sentences, text, utterance and the likes. Increasingly it has been a cross-disciplinary enterprise that encompasses not only linguistics and psychology, but also biology, neuroscience, and information science. in this regard, some regard it as branch of cognitive science. At risk of oversimplification, there are two competing theoretical approaches in psycholinguistics. In modular theories, there is kernel of processing strategies applicable across all languages and which are available to developing children. Noam Chomsky’s language acquisition device is an early example of such a theory. In contrast, interactive theories stress that structures of a particular language emerge as a process of learning that relies on the acquisition of grammatical etc. cues available in the native language. The derivation of the term ‘psycholinguistics’ is generally accredited to Charles Osgood (1916-1991) and Thomas A. Seboek (1920-2001)in their book Psycholinguistics: A survey of theory and research problems (1954). This claim is challenged with reference to the book by Jacob Robert Kantor (1888-1984) entitled An objective psychology of grammar (1936).
See Cognitive science, Computational models, Deep and surface structure (linguistics), Language development, Linguistic anthropology, Linguistics, Morphology (linguistics), Mutual gaze, Performance (linguistics), Psycholinguistic guessing game, Utterance