Psycholinguistics and first language acquisition

Psycholinguistics is concerned with how speakers comprehend and produce language in real time and how language is stored, represented and accessed in memory and the mind. Research in psycholinguistics focuses on language acquisition, language usage, comprehension and production. In our Institute, we investigate how language learners understand their input and how they learn to produce new word forms and sentences on the basis of the knowledge they have at any point. For example, we research how children and later learners of L2 Estonian perceive phonetic quantity, and how they grapple with the Estonian case system and its inherent polysemy, syncretism and complexity. We use both corpus linguistic and experimental methods, measuring participants’ reaction times, eye movements, and neural activity while they speak, listen to and read Estonian. We devise playful activities for children to engage in, in order to elicit words and sentences which give us access to their linguistic knowledge.