Book Review “Psychology of Language (David w. carroll)”

Book Review “Psychology of Language (David w. carroll)”

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.

Psycholinguistics is the study of how individuals comprehend, produce, and acquire language. The study of psycholinguistics is part of the field of cognitive science. Cognitive science reflects the insights of psychology, linguistics, and, to a lesser extent, fields such as artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and philosophy. Psycholinguistics stresses the knowledge of language and the cognitive pro- cesses involved in ordinary language use. Psycholinguists are also interested in the social rules involved in language use and the brain mechanisms associated with language. Contemporary interest in psycholinguistics began in the 1950s, although important precursors existed earlier in the 20th century.

The history of psycholinguistics can be divided into two periods of interdisciplin- ary activity separated by several decades of behaviorism. The first period was dominated by Wundt, who presented a cognitive view of language. The behav- iorist position later held that verbal behavior can be explained in terms of envi- ronmental contingencies of reinforcement and punishment. This view was criticized by Chomsky, leading to a second wave of psycholinguistic activity. This period was characterized by an effort to incorporate linguistic theory in psy- chological research as well as by the view that innate linguistic mechanisms are necessary to explain child language acquisition. Psycholinguistics is presently a more diverse field of study that draws insights and methodologies not only from psychology and linguistics but also from adjacent fields of study.

2. Describing Language. Introduction. How to Describe Speech Sounds. Linguistic Approaches to Syntax. Summary. Some Questions to Think About. Further Reading.

Four broad areas of language knowledge may be distinguished. Semantics deals with the meanings of sentences and words. Syntax involves the grammatical arrangement of words within the sentence. Phonology concerns the system of sounds in a language. Pragmatics entails the social rules involved in language use. It is not ordinarily productive to ask people explicitly what they know about these aspects of language. We infer linguistic knowledge from observable behavior.

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.

Linguists have attempted to identify those grammatical features that appear in all languages. Four pervasive properties are duality of patterning, mor- phology, phrase structure, and linguistic productivity. American Sign Language shares these linguistic properties with spoken languages. Sign language differs from spoken language in its iconicity and simultaneous structure. A language consists of an infinite set of sentences. A person who knows a language knows its grammar, which consists of a finite set of rules. Transformational grammar distinguishes between two levels of sentence structure: deep structure and surface structure. Phrase-structure rules generate deep structures, and transformational rules operate on deep struc- tures to produce surface structures. Several controversies exist within grammatical theory, including whether grammatical rules are psychologically real, the role of syntax in grammar, and whether knowledge of language is innate.

Four basic grammatical concepts are duality of patterning, morphology, phrase structure, and linguistic productivity. Words are composed of phonemes, which, in turn, have distinctive features. In each instance, the smaller units are combined in a rule-governed manner to produce the larger units. Words consist of one or more units of meaning, or morphemes. The system of grammatical morphemes in a language provides speakers with a way of signaling subtle differences in meaning. Phrase-structure rules codify our intuitions about the groupings of words in a sentence. Some sentences are ambiguous and may be grouped in more than one way. Linguistic productivity refers to the fact that there is no limit to the number of sentences in a language. One type of phrase-structure rule, that of recursion, is responsible for some of this productivity.

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.

The acts of comprehending and producing language are performed within the constraints of our information-processing system. This system consists of working memory and long-term memory. Long-term memory comprises episodic and semantic memory.  A number of issues regarding language processing have been raised. These include whether we primarily use serial or parallel processes, whether we tend to use top-down or bottom-up processes, whether language processes are primarily automatic or controlled, and the extent to which language processing displays modularity.  Children appear to process information very differently than adults, but studies of the development of the processing system suggest that most of the system is developmentally invariant.

The general strategies by which the human mind encodes, stores, and retrieves information can be described independently of language. Working memory pro- vides a temporary repository of information that is relevant for ongoing cognitive tasks. It is divided into three components: the central executive, the phonological loop, and the visuospatial sketchpad.

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.

This section raises a number of issues regarding language processing. These include the distinctions between serial and parallel processing, top-down and bottom-up processing, and automatic and controlled processes, as well as modularity. It should be clear that we have a number of ways of processing linguistic information. That is, language processing is determined not just by linguistic structure but jointly by that structure and by processing considerations that are independent of language. The manner in which our cognitive processing system interacts with linguistic structures is a central concern of much psycholinguistic research.

It appears children make significant advances in working memory, semantic memory, and episodic memory during the preschool period. Semantic memory appears within the first 2 years. Episodic memory appears to take form between ages two and four. Working memory appears to be functional by age four. All of these developments assist the acquisition of language, but these rela- tionships are most clearly articulated for working memory. Children with better scores on working memory tasks have larger vocabularies.

 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.

The study of speech sounds is called phonetics. Articulatory phonetics refers to the study of how speech sounds are produced. Acoustic phonetics refers to the study of the resulting speech sounds. n Speech exhibits characteristics not found in other forms of auditory perception. n The phenomenon of categorical perception suggests that speech is a special mode of perception. n Perception of speech is influenced by the contexts in which it appears. We use top-down processing to identify some sounds in context. n Visual perception of language is achieved through a succession of processing levels. Perception of letters in a word context is superior to perception of isolated or unrelated letters. n Recent models of the perception of language assume that we process information at multiple levels in an interactive way. These models can account for several findings in speech perception and visual word perception.

Speech may be described in terms of the articulatory movements needed to produce a speech sound and the acoustic properties of the sound. Vowels differ from conso- nants in that the airflow from the lungs is not obstructed during production; conso- nants differ from one another in terms of the manner and place of the obstruction, as well as the presence or absence of vocal cord vibration during articulation. The acoustic structure of speech sounds is revealed by spectrographic analyses of formants, their steady states, and formant transitions. The spectrographic pat- tern associated with a consonant is influenced by its vowel context and is induced by the coarticulated manner in which syllables are produced. Moreover, prosodic factors such as stress, intonation, and speech rate also contribute to the variability inherent in the speech signal.

Speech may be processed at the auditory, phonetic, or phonological levels of processing. The auditory level is characteristic of the way all sounds are perceived, whereas the phonetic level is assumed to be specific to speech, and the phonolog- ical level specific to a particular language. Various investigators have argued that speech is perceived through a special mode of perception. Part of the argument rests on the failure to find invariant relationships between acoustic properties and perceptual experiences, and part is supported by the empirical phenomena of categorical perception, duplex per- ception, and phonetic trading relations. The motor theory of speech perception claims that we perceive speech sounds by identifying the intended phonetic gestures that may produce the sounds. Although the status of the concept of phonetic gestures is somewhat con- troversial, the theory has been supported by studies of visual processing during speech perception. In addition, the theory has implications for neurolinguistics and language acquisition in children.

The Psychology of Language is a thorough revision and update of the popular last edition. It contains everything the student needs to know about the psychology of language, including how we acquire, understand, produce, and store language. This 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 covers 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.

The Psychology of Language assumes no prior knowledge other than a grounding in the basic concepts of cognitive psychology. This edition of this 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.