Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language

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is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical ventures, due mainly to a lack of cohesive data on how the human brain functioned. Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and information theory to study how the brain processes language. There are a number of subdisciplines, with neurolinguistics and psycholinguistics being the two most popular.

Related Topics:
Psychological - Neurobiological - Human - Language - Biology - Neuroscience - Cognitive science - Information theory - Neurolinguistics

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Psycholinguistics covers the cognitive processes that make it possible to generate a grammatical and meaningful sentence out of vocabulary and grammatical structures, as well as the processes that make it possible to understand utterances, words, text, etc. Developmental psycholinguistics studies infants' and children's ability to learn language, usually with experimental or at least quantitative methods (as opposed to naturalistic observation like Darwin and Piaget emphasized when studying their own children).

Related Topics:
Sentence - Vocabulary - Grammatical structures - Text

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