Developing writing proficiency in Uzbek as a foreign language (UFL) presents unique cognitive challenges due to the language’s complex agglutinative morphology. This study investigates the psycholinguistic factors shaping written production among beginner-level (A1/A2) adult learners, specifically medical students in Tashkent. Utilizing a qualitative framework grounded in 2024–2025 classroom observations, the analysis explores the interaction between working memory, transcription automatization, and affective variables. The analysis indicates that the simultaneous processing of root lexical selection and multi-layered suffixation creates a significant cognitive bottleneck, often leading to orthographic avoidance and simplified syntactic structures. The study identifies writing anxiety as a primary mediator of fluency and highlights associative learning through visual suffix-mapping as a critical facilitator of morphological retrieval. The article concludes by proposing a differentiated instructional model that aligns cognitive load management with professional learner motivations to enhance early UFL writing proficiency.

Uzbek as a foreign language (UFL), psycholinguistics, cognitive load theory

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