skip navigation

Not in the United States?
change your preferences.

The Psychology of Language

From Data to Theory

• No Author/Editor data available

Normal Price: $45.00

Our Web Price: $40.50add to cart

This title is available at our discretion as an Inspection Copy to qualified adopters:

request inspection copy

• Price: $45.00 $40.50
• Binding: Paperback
• Pages: 624
• Published by: Psychology Press
• Publication Date: 3rd December 2007
• ISBN: 978-1-84169-382-8

About the Book

The Psychology of Language, 3^rd Edition is a thorough revision and update of the popular second edition. It contains everything the student needs to know about the psychology of language including how we acquire, understand, produce, and store language. The new edition contains new chapters on how children learn to read, and how language is used in everyday settings. It also describes recent research on the impact of new techniques of brain imaging.

The text is comprehensive and written in a lively and accessible style. It covers all the main topics in this complex field, focusing on reading, writing, speaking, and listening in both adult and child language. There is an emphasis on language processing as well as language production and coverage of the social basis of language. The text includes recent connectionist models of language, describing complex ideas in a clear and approachable manner. Following a strong developmental theme, the text describes how children acquire language (sometimes more than one), and also how they learn to read. The Psychology of Language also demonstrates how language is related to the brain and to other aspects of cognition.

For the first time a CD-ROM of supplementary materials will be available to accompany the textbook, which will include:

• chapter-by-chapter lecture slides
• ainteractive chapter-by-chapter multiple-choice question test bank
• multiple-choice questions in paper and pen format.

The Psychology of Language assumes no prior knowledge other than a grounding in the basic concepts of cognitive psychology. This third edition of this best-selling textbook will be essential reading for any student of cognition, psycholinguistics or the psychology of language. It will also be useful for those on speech and language therapy courses.

Reviews

"I want this book for me, not just for my students. For the student, it's an exceptionally thorough, but lively, introduction to language use in a wider context. For me, it's a valuable reminder of psycholinguistics's evolution from its concerns with the psychological reality of grammar, to its current spot at the center of modern cognitive neuroscience." Gary S. Dell, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,USA

"Trevor Harley provides a systematic and lucid introduction to the scientific study of human language use. He traverses a complex range of topics from foundational theory and experiment to practical matters of pedagogy and pathology. It's a winning combination delivered with wit, balanced accuracy, and admirable directness of style." – Professor Merrill Garrett, Psychology Department, University of Arizona, USA

"Harley’s book offers an excellent means of enhancing our understanding of language. It provides a clear, comprehensive and thorough review of the current state of play in psycholinguistics, making it an ideal choice for advanced undergraduate and graduate students." - Annukka Lindell, University of Wales, Bangor, UK

"Harley has thoroughly revised his very successful textbook on psycholinguistics in light of new research. The coverage of this work is quite remarkable and it constitutes the ideal resource for advanced undergraduate students, postgraduate students and researchers interested in the field." - Martin Pickering, University of Edinburgh, UK

"I have been using Harley's text in my 3^rd year undergraduate "Psychology of Language" course since the first edition came out because I believe its coverage of the important issues is comprehensive and scholarly while being highly accessible and intellectually stimulating. My students have always found it to be a very useful resource in helping them understand language processing." - Marcus Taft, University of New South Wales, Australia

Table of Contents

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.

About the Author(s)

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.

Customers who bought The Psychology of Language also bought: