The study of psycholinguistics examines how we develop, perceive, and produce language. Psycholinguistics is a study that combines the fields of linguistics and psychology. Directly translated, psycholinguistics means 'language psychology.' If you were a psycholinguist, you could choose to work in various subfields, including language acquisition, use, comprehension, and the production of language in the mind. For example, a psycholinguist might choose to focus on how a baby develops their specific language to the exclusion of all others. If you were to study psycholinguistics, you might study the process of language acquisition, or how the human mind develops, perceives, and produces both spoken and written communication. Therefore, in this lesson you will discover the field of psycholinguistics and the most popular psycholinguistic theories.