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.

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.