Psycholinguistics or
psychology of language is the study of the
psychological and
neurobiological factors that enable
humans to acquire, use, comprehend and produce
language. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were largely philosophical or educational schools of thought, due mainly to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of
biology,
neuroscience,
cognitive science,
linguistics, and
information science to study how the brain processes language, and less so the known processes of
social sciences,
human development, communication theories and
infant development, among others. There are a number of subdisciplines with non-invasive techniques for studying the neurological workings of the brain; for example,
neurolinguistics has become a field in its own right.