Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics

A subfield of cognitive science focusing on language comprehension, development, production, and reading.

Language processing

Involves perceptual processing, word recognition, parsing, semantic interpretation, mental models, and pragmatic interpretation.

Word superiority effect

Context is crucial for identifying letters efficiently.

Universal grammar

Chomsky's theory proposing an innate potential for language learning with specific grammar rules.

Deep and surface structure

Shows the independence of meaning and grammar in language.

Language comprehension

Involves moment-by-moment decoding, word recognition, parsing, and inference for understanding.

Mental lexicon

Contains information about spelling, pronunciation, grammar, and semantics for word recognition.

Parsing

Assigning sentence elements to grammatical classes, which can be challenging without clear clause markers.

Behaviorist critique

Criticism of Skinner's theory of language development.

Linguistic relativity

Hypothesis suggesting that language structures thought, evident in differences between languages like Hopi and Eskimo.