ABSTRACT
Psycholinguistics is the cognitive science that studies the production and comprehension of language. This chapter illustrates the potential and challenges of the application of insights from this experimental discipline to the study of the classical languages and the interpretation of classical texts. In the absence of native speakers, evidence for native language comprehension processes can be drawn from the ancient rhetorical literature. At the same time, ancient rhetorical texts may reflect specific cognitive effects of language that have not yet been addressed experimentally. The interpretation of such materials in the light of the conceptual and methodological framework of modern psycholinguistics can both contribute to the reconstruction of ancient native language comprehension and inform the research agenda of experimental research on human language production and processing.
