AUTHORS: Eva M. Fernández; Helen Smith Cairns TITLE: Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics PUBLISHER: Wiley-Blackwell YEAR: 2010
Katherine Messenger, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
SUMMARY
'Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics' is the latest introductory textbook in the 'Fundamentals of Linguistics' series. It provides an introduction to the linguistic theory underpinning the study of psycholinguistics, the different aspects of language processing and a range of empirical methods for investigating psycholinguistics. The aim of this book is to introduce non-specialists to the field of psycholinguistics and to furnish the reader with the background knowledge to carry out psycholinguistic research. In tone and content it is suitable for students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels and researchers new to the field, who have an interest in the psychology of language but not necessarily any previous training in linguistics or psychology. Those who teach courses on psycholinguistics will find it a useful resource as a course reader and as a source of references and study questions.
The book comprises eight chapters (outlined below), which first provide the reader with the theoretical background of psycholinguistics, explaining what language is, where it comes from and how it is stored. Later chapters explore the psycholinguistic processes of producing and comprehending speech in isolated sentences and in discourse. Thus the chapters can be broadly grouped into two halves: the first half of the book largely deals with notions of psycholinguistic competence whilst the second half largely deals with notions of psycholinguistic performance. Each chapter begins with a within-chapter contents list and finishes with suggested study questions and a list of the new concepts introduced in the chapter. The end materials of the book consist of an appendix, in which the authors describe experimental designs in psycholinguistics, a references list, and indexes by author names and subjects.
The first chapter of the book, 'Beginning Concepts,' introduces the reader to some fundamental concepts and characteristics of language, including: the difference between language, speech and communication, the idea that language can be described as having different structural components (syntax, phonology, morphology), the contrasting notions of competence and performance. It ends with a brief history of the emergence of psycholinguistics as a sub-discipline of linguistics and cognitive psychology.
The second chapter, 'The Nature of Linguistic Competence,' provides an in-depth introduction to the sub-components of linguistic knowledge that underlie language processing: the different grammatical and lexical units by which language is organized. Starting with the speech signal, the chapter explains the phonetic system used to describe speech sounds and moves on to discuss the phonological component of language. Subsequently, both derivational and inflectional morphology are explained, followed by an introduction to the syntactic component of language, which discusses the idea of hierarchical phrase structure, complex structures and movement. The chapter finishes with a discussion of the information stored in the lexical component of linguistic knowledge, the lexicon.
In chapter three, 'The Biological Basis of Language,' the idea of language as an aspect of human biology is explored. First, the chapter discusses how language meets the criteria, laid out by Lenneberg (1964), that are required to classify a system as biological: the species specific nature of language and the fact that the system is spontaneously and universally acquired through exposure to the environment. The chapter then describes physiological and anatomical aspects of language, exploring the methodologies (neurolinguistic science and the study of aphasia) that have enhanced our understanding of the areas of the brain that are involved in language processing. Finally the chapter contrasts the biological system of language with the non-biological linguistic systems of reading and writing.
Chapter four, 'The Acquisition of Language,' first introduces the idea of an innate human predisposition to acquire language, discussing the features and arguments of the nativist approach to language acquisition. It then examines how input and child-adult interactions form the learning environment for language acquisition. Much of the chapter is dedicated to outlining the time-course of both monolingual and bilingual language development from early learning of the sound system of language through to word learning and syntactic development. Later acquired language skills, such as complex sentence and discourse processing are also discussed. Finally, the task of second language learning at a later stage is contrasted with first language acquisition.
With the notions of linguistic competence established, in terms of what language is and how it is acquired and stored, the book moves on to examine linguistic performance, in terms of producing and comprehending language. Chapter five, 'The Speaker: Producing Speech,' examines the various aspects of language production, from speech planning at the conceptual and lexical level through to grammatical and phonological encoding of a message through to articulation of vowels and consonants. A variety of phenomena are discussed, including bilingual language production and code-switching, lexical retrieval and tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, syntactic priming, speech errors, acoustic characteristics of sounds and co-articulation.
The following two chapters are dedicated to language comprehension: Chapter six, 'The Hearer: Speech Perception and Lexical Access,' lays out the pre-syntactic stages of speech processing, speech perception and lexical access and how they interact, and chapter seven, 'The Hearer: Structural Processing,' explores syntactic parsing. Chapter six first explains how speech is perceived by a listener starting with properties of phonological processing such as categorical perception and voice onset time. The constructive nature of phonological processing is also explained and the role of suprasegmental information (e.g. stress) in speech perception and lexical access is discussed. Chapter six then examines the process of lexical access in language comprehension, discussing how words are identified and how this informs our understanding of the way they are stored. The chapter examines isolated lexical access and also the role of lexical access in sentence comprehension. The concepts of bottom-up and top-down information and processing are introduced.
Chapter six highlights the first stages of language comprehension and leads up to the syntactic stage of language processing, which is the subject of chapter seven. This chapter explains the process of creating syntactic structures in language comprehension. The notion of the psychological reality of syntax is discussed as are the processes and strategies, such as minimal attachment, that the parser uses to predict and build upcoming structures. These are illustrated with evidence from how the parser copes with ambiguous sentence processing. The role of extra-syntactic information, such as lexical and prosodic information and real-world knowledge, in sentence processing is also explored.
The final chapter, chapter eight, 'Remembering Sentences, Processing Discourse and Having Conversations,' looks at the wider context of language processing, contrasting the processing of sentences in isolated contexts with the use of language in discourse. The chapter first defines the notion of discourse and its features (e.g. topic, context) and then introduces the concept of working memory and long-term memory and their contrasting functions in sentence and discourse processing. The rest of the chapter examines features of discourse processing (anaphor and reference) and conversation (pragmatic competence, shared knowledge, turn-taking).
The chapters are followed by a short appendix, in which the authors provide an overview of psycholinguistic experimental design and methods. This appendix introduces the reader to the features (e.g. materials, fillers, trials) and terminology (e.g. variables, counter-balancing) of experiments and explains the difference between off-line and on-line tasks and measures; a variety of on-line procedures are described. Lastly, the authors explain the analysis aspect of experimentation.
EVALUATION
In my opinion, 'Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics,' meets its aim of providing an accessible and relatively thorough introduction to the field of psycholinguistics theory and research. Each chapter is densely packed: the authors assume no prior linguistic or psycholinguistic knowledge, yet introduce and explain a broad range of subjects and research findings in an accessible manner; readers should note that this book provides a strongly linguistic approach to psycholinguistics. In tone, style and content level the book is therefore suitable for students and researchers with an interest in the field but no background knowledge. The text is clearly written and highly readable, though it naturally contains increasingly technological terminology as the book and subject matter progress. In addition, the authors provide study questions at the end of each chapter which guide the reader to its key ideas and points and thus support learning and focused reading.
The contents of the book follow a logical and informative progression that first provides the reader with the background theory of linguistic competence then puts this theory into practice by explaining how language is processed by speakers and hearers. In addition to presenting the 'what' and 'how' of various aspects of language processing, the book also presents a wide variety of research methods and reviews how experimental evidence informs the theories.
An important feature of the book is that, in addition to providing an introduction to 'typical' language processing (monolingual, spoken language), the authors also invite the reader to consider sign language and bilingual language processing. Whilst the book does not have the scope to cover an in-depth explanation of sign language, the authors take care to remind the reader how sign language processing is comparable to spoken language processing, in contrast to the reading and writing processes. The book does however often explore bilingual language processing alongside monolingual language processing, discussing bilingual language acquisition, language production, speech perception and sentence processing and features of bilingual discourse processing.
Another key feature of the book is the chapter on discourse processing. Much research in psycholinguistics has examined isolated word and sentence production or processing, and whilst this work is highly informative about how language is acquired, stored and processed, the fact remains that natural language rarely occurs in isolation but is in fact a means for human interaction and communication. Thus, with the inclusion of this chapter, the book provides a balanced and more complete view of language processing.
Finally, another contribution of this book is that presents a vast range of experimental work to illustrate various aspects of psycholinguistics. It covers developmental and neurolinguistic research methods and findings in addition to a wide range of production and comprehension studies, as evidenced by an extensive reference section. The appendix that explains psycholinguistic experimentation complements this by distilling this work into its key features, aims, and methods. Thus the reader is not just informed about psycholinguistics, but also about how to study it.
One potential limitation of the book is that it only provides a nativist approach to language acquisition and as such, a Universal Grammar approach to psycholinguistics generally. Other theories of language development and processing are not considered and as such this is the one way in which the book does not provide a completely balanced introduction to the current field of psycholinguistics.
A minor criticism of the book is that a couple of features typical of introductory textbooks, which in my opinion may have also been useful here, are omitted: The chapters do not provide suggestions for further reading on a given topic, which might have been a useful inclusion for the novice reader. The book does contain a comprehensive reference list and each chapter does introduce a variety of research papers through which the reader can follow up on a given topic but, given the introductory nature of the book, some guidance for further reading could be reasonably expected. Furthermore, in my opinion, a glossary of terminology would have been a helpful inclusion. Whilst the authors clearly and concisely explain all new terminology as it is introduced, and new terms used within the text are highlighted in bold text (with corresponding bold-highlighted page references in the subject index for the pages where words are explained), having a glossary that readers can refer to when terminology is re-encountered would have been a useful feature. I did not find the lists of new concepts included at the end of each chapter to be as useful.
Nonetheless, I found this to be a thoroughly interesting and informative book that was well-written and accessible. It provides a wide-ranging, clearly written and organised introduction to many aspects of the field of psycholinguistics. It also encourages the reader to consider partaking in experimental psycholinguistics as much as theoretical study.
REFERENCES
Lenneberg, E.H. (1964). A biological perspective of language. In E.H. Lennenberg (ed.), New Directions in the Study of Language, 65-88. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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