Psycholinguist

A psycholinguist is a social scientist who studies Psycholinguistics, which connects psychology and Linguistics. Psycholinguistics is interdisciplinary in nature and is studied by people in a variety of fields, such as, psychology, Cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience and many more. The main aim of psycholinguistics is to outline and describe the process of producing and comprehending communication.

More specifically, a psycholinguist studies language, speech production, and comprehension using behavioral and neurological methods traditionally developed in the field of psychology, though other methods such as corpus analysis are also widely used. Psycholinguists typically receive undergraduate degrees in linguistics or psychology and then seek a higher degree. Psycholinguistics is not usually a degree of its own; graduate degrees range from scientific studies to criminal justice. The majority of students that become psycholinguists receive a master's degree or a Ph.D.; however, there are some opportunities available for those who choose not to attend graduate school as well.

Psycholinguists currently represent a widely diverse field. Many psycholinguists are also considered to be neurolinguists, cognitive linguists, neurocognitive linguists, or are associated with those who are. There are subtle differences between the titles, though they are all attempting to use different facets of similar issues. Psycholinguists are sometimes categorized into separate groups by the models and theories in which they believe. The two main groups, either interactive or autonomous, are based on ideas of language processing. Psycholinguists who support the interactive side, believe that our levels of processing for language work side-by-side and share information as words are received. The other argument is the autonomous side, which believes that the levels of processing for language occur independent of one another.

When conducting research, psycholinguists use a variety of techniques that can involve qualitative and/or quantitative data. Typical methods of research include: observation (language recording), experimentation (issuing language tests), and self-reports (participants report what they are experiencing). The research tends to result in either theoretical evidence or a realistic application.

There are many associations that include professionals in the psycholinguist field. A few of the largest organizations world-wide are listed below:

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