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.

Researchers related to the field

Virve-Anneli Vihman
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-416

Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Deputy Head of Development
Jakobi 2-416
+372 5349 6820
Virve Vihman is Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics. She investigates language acquisition and the structure of Estonian from a Usage-Based, functionalist perspective. Her research has investigated mono- and bilingual acquisition of morphosyntax in a comparative perspective and the linguistic choices made by speakers, based on corpus data and experimental approaches. She is the PI of a project compiling an Estonian teenage language corpus of spoken and texted language use. She teaches MA courses in bilingualism, language acquisition and psycholinguistics.
Virve-Anneli Vihman
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of Applied Linguistics
Associate Professor of Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-416

Faculty of Arts and Humanities
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Deputy Head of Development
Jakobi 2-416
+372 5349 6820
Pärtel Lippus
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics
Jakobi 2-408
Pärtel Lippus is Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics. His main research interest is Estonian prosody, focussing on the word-level features (the three-way quantity system and lexical stress), but also intonational aspects (prosodic marking of non-canonical questions) and socio-phonetic variability (creaky voice). He has also been involved in investigating the prosodical features of other Finno-Ugric languages. He teaches courses on phonetics, Praat, statistics and R. He is the editor of the Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics. He is one of the developers of the Phonetic Corpus of Estonian Spontaneous Speech and the Archives of Estonian Dialects and Kindred Languages.
Pärtel Lippus
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Associate Professor of Estonian Phonetics
Jakobi 2-408
Kaidi Lõo
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-405
Kaidi Lõo is a research fellow in Psycholinguistics. Her field of research is lexical processing, which deals with the production and understanding of language at the word level and it examines how words are stored in the mental lexicon. More specifically, Kaidi is interested in how word’s structure and language use affect processing. In her work, she applies experimental methods (e.g. reaction time and eyetracking experiments) and statistical modelling. At the moment, she is particularly interested in spoken language. She is also involved in different international eyetracking projects, teaches Experimental Methods seminar, and helps to organize TÜling lecture series.
Kaidi Lõo
Department of Estonian
Phonetics Lab
Research Fellow in Psycholinguistics
Jakobi 2-405
Mari Aigro
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Research Fellow in Morphosyntax
Jakobi 2-430
Mari Aigro is a Research Fellow, specializing in morphosyntax. Her PhD thesis focused on the morphosyntactic variation in verbal argument structure. It is based on quantitative corpus methods and experiments. Mari also works on two projects. The first is an international project called „Feast and famine: Confronting overabundance and defectivity in language“ (co-PI: Virve-Anneli Vihman), in which she investigates the overabundance and defectivity in Estonian inflectional morphology. Together with Mariann Proos, she also works on the project, „The abstractness and concreteness of Estonian words“ is concerned with gathering concreteness ratings for a wide range of Estonian lemmas. Mari is also involved with the organization of the TÜling lecture series and the Experimental Methods Seminar.
Mari Aigro
Institute of Estonian and General Linguistics
Department of General Linguistics
Research Fellow in Morphosyntax
Jakobi 2-430
Adele Vaks
doctoral student
Adele Vaks is a doctoral student of general linguistics. Her research interests lie mainly in the fields of multilingualism and language acquisition. For her thesis, she researches the language use of Estonian-Norwegian bilingual children, focusing on the influence of factors such as language input and cross-linguistic influence. In addition, she is a part of a project led by Virve-Anneli Vihman and Marika Padrik, working on creating language assessment tools suitable for bilingual children in Estonia.
Adele Vaks
doctoral student
Petar Kehayov

Petar Kehayov: There must be passion in doing science

Tartu Ülikooli peahoone

The 14th CIFU will take place in August 2025 at the University of Tartu

MEDAL venue

MEDAL Summer School in Experimental Linguistics will take place in Nijmegen