The term psycholinguistics is a combination of psychology and linguistics, both of which are branches of sciences. Psychology covers the systematic study of human experience and behavour (Knight & Hilgert in Ahmadi, 1992), whereas linguistic scientifically Studies language including everything it is constituted of and related to. Hence, psycholinguistics is, to be oversimplified, concerned with the study of language with relation of psychology including human experience and behavour.
Psycholinguistics appears to be interdisciplinary in nature, and is studied by people in a variety of fields such as psychology, congenetive science, linguistics and so on. It as a separate branch of study emerged in the late 1950s and 1960s as a result of the Chomskyan revolution. The ideas presented by Chomsky became so important that they quickly gained a lot of publicity and had a big impact on a large number of contemporary views on language and language acquisition.
As a consequence psycholinguistics also started investigating such matter as the processing of deep and surface structures of sentences. In the early years of development of psycholinguistics, special experiments were designed in order to examine whether the focus of the processing the deep syntactic structure only. On the bases of transformation of sentences, it was initially discovered that that case of processing was connected with syntactic complexity. However, it later became clear that only syntactic complexity adds to the difficulty of processing, but also a semantic factors have a strong impact upon it.
Further, psycholinguistics investigate how a child acquires his/her mother tongue. While Skinner (1957) considered language learning as a linguistic habit formation through the mechanism of stimulus, response and reinforcement (the behaviorist theory) , Chomsky (1957, 1968) uncovered the language acquisition device (LAD) responsible for language learning (the innate theory) , Lenneberg (1966, 1967, 1969) claimed a close correspondence between physical maturity and the stages of language development (the biological theory) , Piaget (1954, 1969) advocated the active mental processes and functioning of intelligence causing language acquisition (the cognitive theory) , and Halliday (1975) maintained language develops since a child has to interact with others of his /her environment (the sociolinguistics theory) . Besides , psycholinguistics studies how a child develops ability in his/her first language or mother tongue by going through several stages from the pre-linguistic stage to the adult stage.
Furthermore, psycholinguistics studies the nature and process of second language learning through concepts of the monitor (Krashen, 1977, 1981) , interlanguage (Spelunker, 1972), Acculturation (Schumann, 1978, 1990), Universal Grammar (Chomsky, 1980) and so forth. Moreover, it covers the study of second language (L2) learner factors such a aptitude, attitudes, motivation , age , intelligence, cognitive styles, personality and others affecting the rate of learning or achievement.
Thus , psycholinguistics , a branch of linguistics , encompasses the scientific study especially of child language acquisition, explanation of first and second language (L1 &L2) learning/acquisition, learner factors impacting upon second language (L2) learning and so forth.
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