Psycholinguistics Introduction and Applications

Additional Book Details

Psycholinguistics: Introduction and Applications, Second Edition,is the first textbook in psycholinguistics created for working language professionals and students in speech-language pathology and language education, as well as for students in psychology and linguistics. It provides a clear, lively introduction to research and ideas about how human brains process language in speaking, understanding, and reading. Within a unifying framework of the constant interplay of bottom-up (sensory) and top-down (knowledge-based) processing across all language uses and modalities, it is an integrated, self-contained, fully updated account of psycholinguistics and its clinical and pedagogical applications. In this second edition, author Lise Menn is joined by leading brain researcher and aphasiologist, Nina Dronkers. The significantly revised brain chapter contains current findings on brain structure and function, including the roles of newly delineated fiber tracts and language areas outside BrocaS and WernickeS areas. Fully-explained examples are taken from Spanish and other languages as well as English.

Five core chapters (language description; brain structure and function; pragmatic and semantic stages of speech production; syntactic, morphological, phonological, and phonetic stages of speech production; and experimental psycholinguistics) form the foundation for chapters, presenting classic and recent research on aphasia, first language development, reading, and second language learning. A final chapter demonstrates how linguistics and psycholinguistics can and should inform classroom and clinical practice in test design and error analysis, while also explaining the care that must be taken in translating theoretically based ideas into such real-world applications. Concepts from linguistics, neurology, and experimental psychology are kept vivid by illustrations of their uses in the real world, the clinic, and language teaching. Technical terms are clearly explained in context and also in a large reference glossary.

Additionally, the text is now accompanied by a PluralPlus companion website that includes a Web-based Student Workbook as well as an InstructorS Manual--both flexibly organized for instructors and students of varying backgrounds.

Instructors, why adopt this text?

Clear, vivid, straightforward writing style by experienced professors with varying student needs and instructor backgrounds (speech pathology, linguistics, psychology) in mind.
Practical and open-minded: treats language innateness and the value of formal versus functional approaches to language description as unsettled questions.
Builds awareness of specific issues for clinic clients and English learners from Chinese, Japanese, and Spanish backgrounds.
Explicit, attractive presentation of clinical and pedagogical applications of psycholinguistics and linguistics.
Teaches basics of laboratory, clinical, and second-language classroom experimental design while presenting key experiments underlying current thinking about brain and behavior.
Review of a range of phenomena from normal, partially-learned, and impaired language, such as dialect variation, semantic category priming and garden-path sentences; alteration of the brain by prenatal and early language experience; overgeneralization and failure to generalize; reading problems, aphasia, oral apraxia, perseveration.
Complete glossary of technical terms that are also clearly explained throughout the text.