Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain: i.e., the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, comprehend, produce and use language.

Psycholinguistics began with attempts to test the empirical validity of various formal linguistic concepts.

2006, Nobuhiro Furuyama, 44: Language and gesture as a single communicative system, Mineharu Nakayama, Reiko Mazuka, Yasuhiro Shirai, Ping Li (editors), The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics, Volume 2: Japanese, Cambridge University Press, page 333, Speech-gesture research is one of the emerging fields in psycholinguistics that, by referring to speech-accompanying gestures, attempts to elucidate the underlying process in which qualitatively different types of thinking, e.g. imagistic thinking and linguistic thinking, become coordinated with one another.

The seeds for work on processing have their roots in early L2 research, but the psycholinguistics of SLA didn't really take off until the 1990s.