Psycholinguistics is the study of language and the psychological processes that underlie language. It is an interdisciplinary field with roots primarily in cognitive psychology and linguistics. It focuses on creating models of language and experimentally testing them. Areas of study within psycholinguistics include speech perception, lexical (word) access, semantic organization, sentence processing, and understanding figurative language, discourse, and memory. Neurolinguistics, the study of language and the brain, is closely related with psycholinguistics and often uses the same experimental principles to examine language activity in the brain.

Psycholinguistics intersects with intercultural communication, particularly with respect to the study of individuals who speak more than one language. Given that bilinguals can usually successfully control which of their languages they are speaking, psycholinguistics seeks to address how such control ...