Psycholinguistics

Lise Menn, Professor Emerita, University of Colorado, has taught courses in linguistics, language development, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics at the University of Colorado, Boulder and other schools since 1977. She has carried out collaborative research on aphasia with colleagues in many countries and has presented lectures, workshops, and short courses on the practical value of thinking psycholinguistically about language learning and language disorders in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, China and Taiwan, Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Introduction: how psycholinguistics can help us understand the kinds of problems people can have with language 0.1 Everyday language problems 0.2 What is the difference between linguistics and psycholinguistics? 0.3 What's an example of a psycholinguistic explanation of a language problem? 0.4 The plan of this book 0.5 In defense of my writing style/Apologia pro stilo sua Chapter 1 Introduction, phonetics, and phonology 1.0 Terminology: Strategy for learning about language 1.1 Divide and (more-or-less) conquer: Levels of spoken language 1.2 The level of speech sounds: The sounds of spoken words 1.3 Syllables and how to count them Larger units, from morphemes to languages 1.4 Morphemes: the meaningful units of speech 1.5 Words 1.6 Utterances: Phrases, clauses, and sentences in speech 1.7. Basic syntactic and semantic roles: The jobs that words do in clauses 1.8 Pragmatics 1.9 The gap between what people know and what they do: Kinds of linguistic knowledge 1.10 Language families and language types Chapter 2 How brains work 2.1 Thinking about the brain: a quick history 2.2 What does it mean to say that the brain processes information? 2.3 How can a bunch of cells learn or know something? 2.4 Activation and its spread 2.5 Top-down and bottom-up processing 2.6 Using our knowledge of language patterns in conversation 2.7 Language areas in the brain 2.8 Summary Chapter 3 Normal speech errors and how they happen I: From idea to word 3.1 What is normal? (And why don't we say 'abnormal')? 3.2 Language production: Describing the basic processes 3.3 Choosing what to put into words and what to focus on: The Message Level 3.4. The Functional Level, Part I - Lemmas 3.5 The Functional Level, Part II - Semantic Functions 3.6 Summary of language production so far 3.7. Applying our model to an aphasic speech production problem Chapter 4 Normal speech errors and how they happen II: Words and phrases in the brain 4.0 High-speed grammar: making phrases and sentences in a few tenths of a second 4.1 Getting words into the right (and wrong) order 4.2 Errors in word-making: Word-assembly crashes 4.3 Errors in word sounds: A herrible mess at the level of phonological encoding or a foul-up in articulation? 4.4 Double whammies and worse: Multiple-source errors vs. self-monitoring Chapter 5 Experimental studies of normal language production and comprehension: introduction to experimental psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics 5.0 The plan for this chapter 5.1 Introduction to psycholinguistic experiments: Why do people do them and how people come up with the ideas for them? 5.2 Memory experiments 5.3 Production experiments I: Finding needed words - or not 5.4 Production experiments II: Planning sentences 5.5 Comprehension experiments I: Discriminating between similar speech sounds and recognizing words 5.6 Comprehension experiments II: How understanding unfolds in time 5.7 What brain imaging adds to psycholinguistic studies: A first look at neurolinguistics 5.8 Summary Chapter 6 Studying aphasic speech and communication: the psycholinguistics of adult language disorders 6.0 The high cost of being slow and sounding weird: Who do they think I am? 6.1 Introduction to aphasia 6.2 Aphasic language is not like child language 6.3 Aphasic speech production 6.4 Figuring out the psycholinguistics behind aphasic speech errors 6.5 Psycholinguistic experiments on aphasic comprehension 6.6 Classifying aphasias: The classical syndromes and some reasons why there are controversies about them 6.7 Aphasia in native bilingual and second-language speakers 6.8 Trying to predict communicative success: Interaction, gesture, and communication 6.9 Brain plasticity and new hopes for therapy Chapter 7 Developmental psycholinguistics: studies of first language acquisition 7.0 A wealth of studies, a rich topic 7.1 Output, input, intake, imitation: How do we find out what toddlers know about language? 7.2 Building a grammar: What toddlers say 7.3 Do toddlers have grammar in the first year of speaking? 7.4. Language from the third trimester to the beginning of speech: First the sounds, then their meanings 7.5 Phonological development in toddlers 7.6 Learning more about word meanings 7.7 Summary and conclusion Chapter 8 The psycholinguistics of reading and learning to read 8.0 Introduction: why teaching reading is controversial 8.1 Reading as a psycholinguistic process 8.2 Reading for meaning: What happens after a word is activated? 8.3 Psycholinguistics and the phonics vs. whole word teaching controversy 8.4 Where reading errors come from: Activation and competition in reading 8.5 When sounding out words won't work for you and your students: Orthographic dazzle, dialect awareness, speech rate, and hyperdistinct speech 8.6 Morphology and reading 8.7 Reading Chinese, Japanese, and Korean 8.8 Reading, dyslexia and language disorders 8.9 Summary Chapter 9 First and second language acquisition: A psycholinguistic approach to their similarities and differences 9.0 Why is learning a first language different from learning a second language? 9.1 How does learning your first language change your brain? 9.2 What happens when a new data set meets an experienced brain? 9.3 What else is different about the older learner? 9.4 What first-language learners and second-language learners have in common 9.5 Language processing in bilingual speakers 9.6 Accent reduction: Psycholinguistics meets the sociolinguistics of identity, politics and prejudice 9.7 Psycholinguistics and learning to read and write in a second language 9.8 Summary Chapter 10 Using psycholinguistics in testing, teaching, and therapy: Understanding what we do, thinking of ways to do it better, and checking whether new ideas are working 10.0 Introduction 10.1 What does it mean to look 'psycholinguistically' at language tasks? 10.2 Aphasia testing: Clinical testing and its problems 10.3 'Translating' language tests and some problems with bilingual aphasia testing 10.4 The long road from a psycholinguistic idea to a teaching or remediation method 10.5 Summary/Conclusion Afterword: Other important areas for applying psycholinguistics in the clinic and the classroom First language under stress Politics, ethics, and the diagnosis of first language problems in multilingual/multilectal/multicultural settings The validity of developmental tests The impact of sensory impairments: children who are hard-of-hearing, deaf, or blind The puzzles of Specific Language Impairment and dyslexia Language, aging, and hearing loss Glossary Index