Psycholinguistics has two main research directions: behaviorism and cognitive psychology. In 1950s, psycholinguistics was mainly influenced by behavioral psychology and descriptive linguistics. Psycholinguists at that time used behaviorism to explain psycholinguistic phenomena. They believe that speech acts, like all other human behaviors, are also responses to stimuli, the formation, realization and change of associations, and they are obtained through reinforcement. In this way, the theory of psycholinguistics is basically the concrete expression of behaviorism learning theory in speech activities. The representative of this research direction is osgood. Although he didn't exclude meaning from language phenomenon like Skinner, but quoted intermediary process to explain the meaning of language, he still insisted that behaviorism learning theory could explain speech acts. Psycholinguistics is deeply influenced by modern linguistic theories. Especially after Chomsky's generative transformational grammar came into being and prevailed, psychologists attacked behaviorism language learning theory more and more, arguing that behaviorism could not explain many phenomena in speech activities.
Psychologists, represented by Miller, apply generative transformational grammar to the study of psychological language, believing that people are not mastering individual components of language, such as phonemes, words and sentences, but a set of rules. Therefore, speech activity is not a response to stimulation, but a behavior generated and controlled by rules, which is creative. They also believe that the focus of psycholinguistic research is not the different structures of human languages, but the universal rules that exist at the bottom of various languages and how these universal rules are transformed into a special language.
The problems studied in psycholinguistics include speech perception and understanding, speech production, language acquisition, neurophysiological mechanism of speech, various speech defects, the relationship between speech and thinking, speech and emotion, personality and so on. The solution of these problems will play a great role in the study of learning theory, thinking theory and children's psychological development theory. It also has application value in the research of artificial intelligence, such as engineering psychology, language teaching, diagnosis and treatment of speech defects, language recognition of electronic computers and so on.
Psycholinguistic research is widely carried out in the United States. The Soviet Union, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and other European countries also have psychologists engaged in this work, which is characterized by trying to combine the research of psycholinguistics with their own psychological traditions.
Psycholinguistic research has also been carried out in China, mainly in children's language acquisition. Because Chinese is very different from other languages, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to carry out research in this field in China.