Psycholinguistics in Applied Linguistics: Trends and Perspectives

This article addresses the relationship between two major terms, psycho-linguistics and applied linguistics, and in the process, explores key issues in multilingual processing. A straightforward definition of psycholinguistics is provided by Kess (1991:1): ‘The field of study concerned with psychological aspects of language studies.’ In the last decade, the definition has become more restricted, leaving out more social-psychological aspects like the study of attitudes in language use. Here, psycholinguistics will be further restricted to the study of processes of language production and perception (as opposed to acquisition and attrition).