Psycholinguistics

Acquisition, Comprehension, Production

Three broad domains organise much of psycholinguistic research: language acquisition, language comprehension, and language production. Together, they distinguish how linguistic knowledge develops, how incoming language is interpreted, and how speakers or writers formulate an intended message.

Across all three domains, psycholinguists ask how linguistic knowledge is represented and how those representations are used in real-time language comprehension, production, and interaction. Representation and language use are therefore complementary concerns rather than separate accounts of language.

From Sounds and Words to Sentences and Discourse

Psycholinguistic research examines how language is represented and processed across multiple levels, including phonetics and phonology, morphology, the mental lexicon, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. Each level contributes different kinds of information, but fluent language use requires their rapid coordination.

During comprehension, listeners and readers map acoustic or visual input onto words, construct grammatical relations, integrate meanings, and use context to develop an interpretation. During production, speakers and writers select words and grammatical structures, plan spoken or written forms, and monitor the resulting output.

At the discourse level, research examines how people maintain coherence across sentences, texts, and conversational turns during both comprehension and production. It also investigates how speakers and writers organise extended messages for their audience, and how listeners and readers resolve references to people and events, draw inferences, and understand meanings that are implied rather than stated directly.

Language across Populations and the Lifespan

Psycholinguistics examines language across children and adults, monolingual and multilingual speakers, first- and second-language users, younger and older adults, and people with developmental or acquired communication disorders. This breadth allows researchers to distinguish general properties of the language system from variation associated with development, experience, proficiency, ageing, and neurological change.

Comparisons across populations are theoretically informative. Child language shows how representations and processes emerge, multilingualism reveals how multiple language systems interact, ageing can identify which aspects of comprehension and production remain stable or become more demanding, and developmental or acquired communication difficulties can show which components of language are partly separable.

Why Thai?

Thai remains substantially under-represented in experimental psycholinguistics. This limits what is known about Thai language processing and narrows the range of evidence used to test claims about general principles of language and cognition.

Thai provides an informative research context. Lexical tone contributes to spoken word identity and raises questions about speech perception, lexical access, and production. The writing system represents complex relationships among consonants, vowels, and tone, while written Thai does not normally mark every word boundary with a space. These properties raise further questions about reading, segmentation, and phonological activation.

Thai is also a comparatively analytic language, with little inflection. Grammatical relationships and meanings are often conveyed through word order, particles, aspect markers and context rather than changes to the forms of words. Subjects or objects may also remain unexpressed when they can be recovered from context. These characteristics create opportunities to investigate sentence processing, discourse, language comprehension and production, and the ways in which context contributes to successful communication.

Thai-specific evidence is also necessary because language experience, familiarity, naming patterns, conceptual organisation, and reading practices can vary across linguistic and cultural settings. Research with Thai speakers can therefore address locally important questions while strengthening cross-linguistic theories of language processing, development, and use more broadly.

Psycholinguistics in Thailand

Psycholinguistics has a small but established presence in Thailand, often within wider programmes in linguistics, language education, and psychology. There is substantial scope to develop Thai-specific datasets, reproducible behavioural methods, research training, and collaboration across institutions and disciplines.

Questions involving Thai, multilingualism, and second-language use can contribute both to psycholinguistic theory and to locally relevant research. My own work forms one part of this developing community through Thai psycholinguistic norms, experimental resources, and language-processing studies.

My Teaching and Research Connection

I have taught psycholinguistics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels at Thammasat University since 2018. As a subject, this provides the clearest connection between my teaching, experimental research, and the CLP Lab.

My research examines selected parts of this wider field, including lexical and conceptual processing, L1 and L2 reading, sentence processing, semantic categorisation, word and picture recognition and production, and cross-linguistic semantic priming. Developing work extends this programme to L2 speech processing and word retrieval across adulthood. The CLP Lab supports and extends this work through Thai-language resources, behavioural methods, graduate supervision, and collaboration.