Amira Al Harbi
 Psycholinguistics is concerned with language and the
brain.
 To be a perfect psycholinguistist, you would need to
have a comprehensive understanding of the way the
brain operates, the processes by which we perceive and
interpret the world, and the variety of categories that
are found in human language.
 In addition, you would need to have a laboratory full
equipment suitable for both psychological and
neurological experimentation.
 Psycholinguistics is a sub-discipline of both
psychology and linguistics.
 It is likely to encounter some different viewpoints and
approaches because the slant within textbooks varies.
Book
Aitchison 1989,1994
Level
1-2
Style/Notes on Content
Quirk approach and style but reliable
Caron 1977
3
Reports experimental studies on normal adults only; useful
theme-based approach
Clark and Clark 1977
3
Breadth and depth of coverage; readable; key textbook
despite its age
Eysenck and Keane
1995, chs. 12-14
3-4
Foss and Hakes 1978
3
Out of date on theory but approachable; helpful headings
Garman 1990
4
Assumes knowledge of linguistics
Garnham 1985
3
Nothing on acquisition, pathology or other 'descriptive'
areas; focus on theories
2-3
Concise, no-nonsense guide; summaries of experiments
including procedures used
Greene and Coulson
1995
Written for psychologists ; densely packed with good
information; worth getting an overview from an easier book
first
 Most psychologists believe that human cognition is
modular. This means that it consists of a number of
independent processors.
 A model of processing consistent with this pattern
might have the comprehension of written input
mediated by an internal phonological representation
of the input, so that all written input had to be turned
into "speech" before it could be decoded.
 It should be straightforward to establish relationships
through clinical case studies for several reasons:
1)
2)
3)
4)
5)
Each process is complex and involves several stages.
Damage occurs in different place in different patients.
There is to be more than one route to processing any one
type of input, and damage may affect only one of them.
Two processes might be fundamentally independent but
tend to both get damaged in many patients.
One can gain an impression about these problems from
Eysenck, Keane, Caplan, and Harley.
 There are two level at which a project in psycholinguistics can
operate.
1)
2)
3)
Investigate the hypothesis that some types of extraneous
sound are more distracting to linguistic processing than others
by giving a difficult linguistic task to three groups of subjects.
Compare memory for objects with memory for words. Give
one group of subjects a set of household objects to memorize.
Give a second group just a list of the names of the same objects
to memorize. Hypothesis: it is easier to remember the names
of objects than it is to remember the objects them selves .
Assess the transferability of linguistic training to another task
by giving one group of subjects training in strategies for
memorizing random lists of words.
There are three theories to show us how to understand the
spoken word.
Motor theory in which the listener recreates the motor
movements associated with speaking the words
Cohort theory in which we "flag up" all the words we
know which have that sound at the beginning, creating a
word-initial cohort .
Trace theory which derives from an approach to the
modeling of psychological processing called
connectionism, and entails the dynamic connection of
nodes creating the information pathways where they are
most useful..
 There are three theories to help us understand the written word.
1)
Autonomous serial search model in which words in the brain
are likened to books on a library independently in three
different access files: orthographic, phonological, and
syntactic-semantic.
2)
Logogen model in which each word has a threshold of
activation, which, when reached, triggers it to be recognized.
3)
Interactive activation model which is based on connectionist
principles, this is similar in nature to the Trace model for
speech comprehension.
 It is believed that there are differences in the way that
we access the meaning of spoken and written words,
but that the processes by which we achieve the
comprehension of larger units such as phrases, clauses
and sentences are common to both mediums.

We should put into consideration :
1)
The relative complexity of sentence types which contains the surface
structure and the underlying structure .
2)
Lexical and structural ambiguity in much of what we hear.
Ambiguity occurs at the syntactic level .
3)
Garden-path sentences which are so called because they lead us up
the garden path by misleading us about their construction.
4)
Inferencing which includes two theories that exist in opposition:
The constructionist view and the minimalist.