1st Edition

Psycholinguistics (PLE: Psycholinguistics) Central Topics

By Alan Garnham Copyright 1985
    292 Pages
    by Psychology Press

    288 Pages
    by Psychology Press

    Originally published in 1985, this title was an important new teaching text at the time. Alan Garnham focuses on current theories about the central cognitive aspects of language understanding, and attempts to reflect the emergence of cognitive science, an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of language and other cognitive processes. As well as describing psychological studies, the text includes ideas from linguistics, artificial intelligence, the philosophy of language and formal logic.

    Some introductory remarks on the study of language understanding precede a discussion of word recognition and the computation of the syntactic structure of sentences. The central part of the book is concerned with questions about meaning, the mental representation of word meanings, and text comprehension. The final two chapters address questions of how the parts of the language processing system operate together, and how language production is related to comprehension. Rather than attempting an exhaustive discussion of empirical research on his chosen topics, the author gives the reader the flavour of linguistic arguments. In particular, Psycholinguistics attempts to indicate the problems and also the possibilities of relating experimental data to theories of language processing.

    Psycholinguistics will still be useful reading on courses in psycholinguistics, language and thought, and cognitive psychology.

    Acknowledgements  Preface  1 Introduction – how to study language understanding  2 The contribution of linguistics  3 Recognizing words  4 Parsing – the computation of syntactic structure  5 Introduction to the concept of meaning  6 Word meaning  7 Understanding discourse and text  8 The structure of the language processor  9 Language production and its relation to comprehension  10 Overview and future directions  References  Name index  Subject index

    Biography

    Authored by Garnham, Alan