psycholinguistics

n. a branch of psychology that employs formal linguistic models to investigate language use and the cognitive processes that accompany it. Developmental psycholinguistics is the formal term for the branch that investigates language acquisition in children. In particular, various models of generative grammar have been used to explain and predict language acquisition in children and the production and comprehension of speech by adults. To this extent, psycholinguistics is a specific discipline, distinguishable from the more general area of psychology of language, which encompasses many other fields and approaches. —psycholinguistic adj.

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Psychology term of the day

January 23rd 2025

analogies test

a test of the participant’s ability to comprehend the relationship between two items and then extend that relationship to a different situation: For example, paintbrush is to paint as pen is to ___.