Psycholinguistics
Introduction and Applications
By
Plural Publishing Inc.
For students in speech-language pathology, language education, psychology, linguistics, and for working language professionals, this text provides a clear and attractive introduction to current thinking on how our brains process language in speaking, understanding and reading.
It presents a completely integrated, self-contained account of psycholinguistics and its clinical and pedagogical applications, within a unifying framework of the constant interplay of bottom-up and top-down processing across all language uses and modalities.
References to applications throughout the foundational chapters keep the reader connected to real-world, clinical, and language-teaching applications; this is especially valuable for working professionals who are using the book for self-study and for students in applied fields who need to master and use key concepts from linguistics and psychology.
After it establishes the basics of language description and normal language processing, the text and its accompanying CD present classical and recent research on first-language development, the differences between learning first and second languages, and the effects of brain damage on the use of language.
The author writes vividly and directly, drawing on her experience as a classroom teacher, interdisciplinary researcher, author and international lecturer. Technical terms are clearly explained in context and also in a large reference glossary.
The book opens with a substantial chapter on the aspects of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics that will be used to describe and understand the errors made by normal speakers, first and second-language learners and by people with acquired language disorders.
The exposition is firmly grounded in examples, including many from languages other than English, and the CD provides additional sound files and links to help with learning the International Phonetic Alphabet. The second chapter introduces the brain as a ceaselessly active, wide-ranging information processor with automatically spreading activation, constantly integrating both bottom-up (sensory) information and top-down (stored) information; the concepts introduced here are used throughout the remainder of the book to explain phenomena as diverse as oral apraxia, overgeneralization, semantic category priming, perseveration, garden-path sentences, proofreader’s errors and failure to generalize training.
The third and fourth chapters develop a classic (Garrett/Levelt/Bock) multi-level speech production model, using normal speech error data to motivate each level, from concept activation to phonetics. The fifth chapter introduces the basics of experimental design in the context of a carefully selected set of classic and modern psycholinguistic experiments, providing an understanding of sentence memory, priming, the word superiority effect in letter recognition, and the integration of lexical retrieval with sentence production as indicated by eye-tracking. (For readers who do not need an introduction to basic experimental design, a more compact alternative version of the introductory part of this chapter is presented on the CD.)
These five core chapters form the foundation for chapters on each of four research areas of applied psycholinguistics: aphasia, first language development, reading and second-language learning. The final chapter demonstrates how linguistics and psycholinguistics can and should inform classroom and clinical practice in test design and error analysis, while also explaining the care that must be taken in translating theoreticallybased ideas into such real-world applications. For all of these topics, the CD provides links to recent publications and relevant web sites for readers to explore on their own.