What is Psycholinguistics?

The goal of psycholinguistics is to explain how people learn, speak, and understand language. It is a multi-disciplinary field that combines psychology and linguistics. It also has ties to neuroscience and to education.
 

Psycholinguistics at Illinois.

The University of Illinois is a major center for the study of language and psychology. The faculty's research interests (see below) cover all of the basic areas of contemporary psycholinguistics and several closely allied areas. Within the psychology department, our expertise spans language production ( Bock ,Dell ), language comprehension (Federmeier, Garnsey ,McConkie ,Murphy ,Shoben ), and language acquisition (Fisher ,Miller ). Within each of these subareas, the specializations cover the full spectrum of processing questions. In language production, we study the cognitive processes that convert ideas into words and sentences ( Bock ,Dell ), and make words and sentences into sounds ( Dell ). In language comprehension, we are engaged in work on auditory word recognition ( Fisher ,Garnsey ), parsing and sentence comprehension (Federmeier, Garnsey ), discourse comprehension (Garnsey), word meaning (Federmeier, Shoben ), and knowledge representation ( Murphy, Shoben ). In language acquisition, we examine the earliest phases of children's phonological and lexical development ( Fisher ), their early comprehension processes ( Fisher ), their later acquisition of the concepts of number and time ( Miller ), and the development of reading ( McConkie ,Miller ). From linguistics, Adele Goldberg brings her theoretical and empirical focus on construction grammar to research on child language acquisition, word meaning, and language production. In addition, Illinois has other researchers interested in psycholinguistics from Linguistics, Educational Psychology, Speech and Hearing, East Asian Languages and Cultures, Spanish, Italian & Portuguese, Computer Science, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Much of the research in psycholinguistics at Illinois takes place at the University's Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, a center of multi-disciplinary research.

We pursue psycholinguistic research with a variety of methods. In addition to the widely used experimental methods of cognitive psychology (reaction time, recall, recognition), we have expertise in the use of event-related brain potentials ( Federmeier, Garnsey ), eye-movement monitoring ( Bock, Garnsey, McConkie, Miller ), neural network modelling ( Dell ), and longitudinal and cross-sectional developmental assessment ( Fisher ,Miller ). We also have expertise in applying these methods to special populations, including children ( Fisher, Miller, McConkie ), adults with brain damage ( Dell ,Garnsey ), and to speakers of such diverse languages as Chinese, Dutch, French, and Japanese ( Bock, Garnsey, Fisher, Miller ). We also are studying language processing through brain imaging techniques such as optical imaging and functional magnetic resonance imaging ( Garnsey ).