Introducing Psycholinguistics
This book explores key topics related to the production and comprehension of spoken and written language. It focuses on how adult native speakers perform the intricate tasks of transforming ideas into utterances and deriving meaning from sentences. Drawing on data from observations, experiments, and more recently, brain imaging, the field of psycholinguistics has greatly advanced our understanding of the uniquely human capacity for language communication. Introducing Psycholinguistics highlights important findings in the field, including the fascinating study of spontaneous speech errors and controlled experiments that detail how we produce and understand language.
Written by a linguist for students of linguistics, this book assumes no prior knowledge of psychology. While a basic understanding of linguistic concepts is helpful, key terminology is explained throughout. As such, this book also serves as an excellent introduction for psychology students interested in language processing.
The content is divided into two main clusters of chapters. Chapters 2 to 5 focus on language production, starting from the speaker’s (or writer’s) intention and progressing through sentence planning, word selection, and word construction. The final chapter in this cluster examines how speakers monitor and repair their speech output. Chapters 7 to 12 cover language perception and comprehension, beginning with perceptual skills essential for language processing, then exploring word recognition, sentence analysis, and discourse processing. Chapter 6 bridges these two clusters by examining how gesture studies illuminate both production and comprehension. Chapter 13 integrates topics from earlier chapters, discussing how spoken and written language production and comprehension fit together.
The book’s structure allows flexibility for teaching psycholinguistics. Instructors can follow the presented chapter sequence or begin with language perception and comprehension (Chapters 7 to 12) before addressing production (Chapters 2 to 5), depending on course objectives and assessment needs.
Notably, this book does not extensively cover language acquisition or breakdown. Instead, it focuses on normal adult language processing, which is informed by research on language development in infants and impaired language use, both of which are vast fields on their own.
Each chapter follows a consistent structure. It begins with a preview summarizing the learning objectives, followed by a list of key terms introduced in the chapter. These terms, highlighted in bold blue text, are defined in a glossary at the book’s end and in a more comprehensive glossary on the accompanying website. The main text includes an introduction, various sections on the chapter’s topic, a summary, exercises to reinforce learning, and suggestions for further reading.
The chapters include numerous examples, figures, and sidebars that provide additional detail. Blue-shaded sidebars introduce technical terms or notation, while grey-shaded sidebars offer interesting background information.
The book’s website features an online glossary with definitions and examples of key terms, interactive tools for testing understanding, audio and video illustrations of concepts, solutions to selected exercises, and demonstrations of key experimental techniques in psycholinguistics. The site also includes links to additional resources, with updates over time. Symbols in the margins indicate the availability of online resources corresponding to specific topics in the book.
Format: PDF
Size: 5 MB
Date: 11 Oct. 2012
Series: Cambridge Introductions to Language and Linguistics
DOWNLOAD
Introducing Psycholinguistics
Related Posts
