Persian Psycholinguistics

Psycholinguistics, which embeds psychology and linguistics, is interested in how we process language. Its tenet is how word meaning, sentence meaning and discourse meaning are computed and represented in the mind. The whole process is, however, an automatic unconscious one.
Psycholinguistics, as its name suggests, encompasses psychology of the language as well as the linguistic psychology. Although they might sound similar, they are actually distinct. The first one is a branch of linguistics, while the latter is a subdivision of psychology.
In psychology of the language, the means are the research tools adopted from psychology and the end is the study of the language. However, in the linguistic psychology, the means are the data driven from linguistic studies and the end is psychology.
What I will focus on in this paper is the first one; that is, psychology of the language. The goal of this paper is to give a state of the art perspective on the small but growing body of research using psycholinguistic tools to study Persian with a focus on two areas: a) presenting long standing debates about the mental lexicon, language impairments and language processing, and b) introducing a source of data for linguistic analysis of Persian. In this paper, I will present the definition of the mental lexicon and then the methods used in psycholinguistic research. Later, I will include the few existing studies on psycholinguistics in Persian, as this subdivision of linguistics is quite understudied in less studied languages, such as Persian.