The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics

Description

Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.

Michael J. Spivey was on the faculty of Cornell University for twelve years before moving to the Cognitive and Information Sciences unit at the University of California, Merced in 2008. His research uses dense-sampling methods (such as eye tracking and reach tracking) to explore the real-time interaction between language and vision. He has published in a variety of top-tier journals, including Science, Cognitive Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Psychological Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Spivey is the recipient of Sigma Xi's William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement and multiple teaching awards from Cornell University. The dynamical cognition framework that guides his research is described in his book The Continuity of Mind (2007). Ken McRae has been at the University of Western Ontario since 1993, where he has been studying language and concepts. He has published articles regarding sentence processing and semantic memory from numerous perspectives, including modality-specific representations, the roles of statistical correlations and causal relations in object concepts, category-specific semantic deficits and the integration of meaning and structure in sentence comprehension. He has also published a number of computational models of these important human abilities. McRae has published in journals such as Cognition, the Journal of Memory and Language, the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Science and Neuropsychologia. Marc F. Joanisse has been at the University of Western Ontario since 2000, studying the cognitive and brain bases of spoken and written language. Work in his laboratory emphasizes the importance of studying multiple aspects of language ability, in a variety of populations, using a range of techniques. His research spans a range of topics encompassing speech perception, spoken word recognition and reading and grammar abilities in adults and children, using everything from traditional behavioral techniques to eye tracking, event-related potentials and fMRI. In addition, he has published articles in the field of connectionist modeling of language processing, aphasia following brain injury and language disorders in children. He has published in a wide range of journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Cerebral Cortex, NeuroImage, the Journal of Memory and Language and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition.

"...Broad in scope and densely packed, the book covers all areas of psycholinguistic research.... The contributions share clarity and a solid grounding in theory old and new, thus providing readers with a quick way to connect what they already know to what perspective changes the more recent research and analysis provide. Given the increase in imaging research in the last two decades, this handbook stands as a needed update to The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics, ed. by Gareth Gaskell (2007).... Recommended..." -- J. F. Heberle, Albright College, CHOICE