The Psychology of Language

Trevor Harley carried out his PhD work at the University of Cambridge on speech errors and what they tell us about how we plan language. He has been Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee since 2003. His research interests include speech production, how we represent meaning, and the effects of ageing on language.

Preface. How to Use this Book. Section A. Introduction. 1. The Study of Language. Introduction. What is Language? The History and Methods of Psycholinguistics. Language and the Brain. Themes and Controversies in Modern Psycholinguistics. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 2. Describing Language. Introduction. How to Describe Speech Sounds. Linguistic Approaches to Syntax. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. Section B. The Biological and Developmental Bases of Language. 3. The Foundations of Language. Introduction. Where Did Language Come From? Do Animals Have Language? The Biological Basis of Language. The Cognitive Basis of Language: The Cognition Hypothesis. The Social Basis of Language. The Language Development of Visually and Hearing-impaired Children. What is the Relation Between Language and Thought? Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 4. Language Development. Introduction. The Driving Forces of Language Development. Do Children Learn Any Language in the Womb? Phonological Development. Lexical and Semantic Development. Early Syntactic Development. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 5. Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. Introduction. Bilingualism. Second Language Acquisition. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further reading. Section C. Word Recognition. 6. Recognizing Visual Words. Introduction. Basic Methods and Basic Findings. Meaning-based Facilitation of Visual Word Recognition. Morphology: Processing Complex Words. Models of Visual Word Recognition. Coping with Lexical Ambiguity. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 7. Reading. Introduction. A preliminary Model of Reading. The Processes of Normal Reading. The Neuropsychology of Adult Reading Disorders: Acquired Dyslexia. Models of Word Naming. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 8. Learning to Read and Spell. Introduction. Normal Reading Development. Developmental Dyslexia. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 9. Understanding Speech. Introduction. Recognizing Speech. Models of Speech Recognition. The Neuropsychology of Spoken Word Recognition. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. Section D. Meaning and Using Language. 10. Understanding the Structure of Sentences. Introduction. Dealing with Structural Ambiguity. Early work on Parsing. Processing Structural Ambiguity. Gaps, Traces, and Unbounded Dependencies. The Neuroscience of Parsing. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 11. Word Meaning. Introduction. Classic Approaches to Semantics. Semantic Networks. Semantic Features. Family Resemblance and Classification. Combining Concepts. Processing Figurative Language. The Neuropsychology of Semantics. Connectionist Approaches to Semantics. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 12. Comprehension. Introduction. Memory for Text and Inferences. Reference, Co-reference, and Ambiguity. Models of Text Representation and Processing. Individual Differences in Comprehension Skills. The Neuropsychology of Text and Discourse Processing. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. Section E. Production and Other Aspects of Language. 13. Language Production. Introduction. Speech Errors and What They Tell Us. Syntactic Planning. Lexicalization. Phonological Encoding. The Analysis of Hesitations. The Neuropsychology of Speech Production. Writing and Agraphia. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 14. How Do We Use Language? Introduction. Making Inferences in Conversation. The Structure of Conversation. Collaboration in Dialog. Sound and Vision. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 15. The Structure of the Language System. Introduction. What are the Modules of Language? How Many Lexicons are There? Language and Short-term Memory. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading. 16. New Directions. Introduction. Themes in Psycholinguistics Revisited. Some Growth Areas? Conclusion. Appendix: Connectionism. Interactive Activation Models. Back-propagation. Further Reading. Glossary. Example of Sentence Analysis. References. Author Index. Subject Index.