Psixolingvistika

Psixolingvistika, or psycholinguistics, is the interdisciplinary study of how humans acquire, comprehend, produce, and represent language. It aims to describe the mental processes and knowledge that support linguistic behavior, drawing on psychology, linguistics, cognitive science, and neuroscience. Core questions address how linguistic representations are stored in memory, how they are retrieved during real-time processing, and how language develops across the lifespan and in different contexts.

The field covers language comprehension, production, and acquisition, as well as processing in bilingual and multilingual speakers and the neural bases of language. It investigates lexical access, syntactic parsing, phonological encoding, and the interfaces between language and other cognitive systems such as memory and attention. Cross-linguistic variation and language disorders are also important areas of study.

Researchers employ behavioral experiments (reaction time, lexical decision, priming), eye-tracking during reading or listening, and neuroimaging techniques such as ERP, EEG, MEG, and fMRI. Computational modeling and corpus analysis complement experimental work, enabling formal theories of processing and representation to be tested against data.

Psycholinguistics emerged from the mid-20th century at the intersection of experimental psychology and linguistics and has been advanced by developments in neuroimaging and computer modeling. The field seeks to explain how language phenomena arise from general cognitive mechanisms rather than from language-specific rules alone.

Findings have applications in language education, diagnosis and treatment of language disorders (such as aphasia and dyslexia), second-language acquisition, and human–computer interaction, including voice interfaces and natural language processing.