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

December 23rd 2024

total immersion

a program for second-language acquisition in which all instruction is in the new language and there is minimal use of the individual’s native language. In school-based immersion programs, the second language is incorporated into the teaching of other subjects, with the goal of creating a bilingual classroom. Early immersion refers to programs begun when children are in kindergarten or grade 1 and continued through the rest of elementary school.