Editing Psycholinguistics (section)

==Areas of study==
Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field that consists of researchers from a variety of different backgrounds, including [[psychology]], [[cognitive science]], [[linguistics]], [[speech and language pathology]], and [[discourse analysis]]. Psycholinguists study how people acquire and use language, according to the following main ways:

# [[language acquisition]]: how do children acquire language?
# [[language comprehension]]: how do people comprehend language?
# [[language production]]: how do people produce language?
# [[second language acquisition]]: how do people who already know one language acquire another one?

A researcher interested in language comprehension may study [[word]] recognition during [[reading (activity)|reading]], to examine the processes involved in the extraction of [[orthography|orthographic]], [[morphology (linguistics)|morphological]], [[phonological]], and [[semantic]] information from patterns in printed text. A researcher interested in language production might study how words are prepared to be spoken starting from the conceptual or semantic level (this concerns connotation, and possibly can be examined through the conceptual framework concerned with the [[semantic differential]]). [[Developmental linguistics|Developmental psycholinguists]] study infants' and children's ability to learn and process language.<ref>{{cite journal|vauthors=Houston DM, Jusczyk PW|year=2000|title=The Role of Talker-Specific Information in Word Segmentation by Infants|url=http://www.iupui.edu/~babytalk/pdfs/Houston_2011.pdf|journal=Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance|volume=26|issue=5|pages=1570–1582|doi=10.1037/0096-1523.26.5.1570|pmid=11039485|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131005004725/http://www.iupui.edu/~babytalk/pdfs/Houston_2011.pdf|archive-date=5 October 2013|access-date=1 March 2012}}</ref>

Psycholinguistics further divide their studies according to the different components that make up human [[language]].

Linguistics-related areas include:
* [[Phonetics]] and [[phonology]] are the study of speech sounds. Within psycholinguistics, research focuses on how the brain processes and understands these sounds.
* [[Morphology (linguistics)|Morphology]] is the study of word structures, especially between related words (such as ''dog'' and ''dogs'') and the formation of words based on rules (such as plural formation).
* [[Syntax]] is the study of how words are combined to form sentences.
* [[Semantics]] deals with the [[meaning (linguistic)|meaning]] of words and sentences. Where syntax is concerned with the formal structure of sentences, semantics deals with the actual meaning of sentences.
* [[Pragmatics]] is concerned with the role of [[context (language use)|context]] in the interpretation of meaning.
* [[Linguistic relativity]] is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language influences its speakers' worldview or cognition, and thus individuals' languages determine or shape their perceptions of the world.