Includes bibliographical references (p. 427-528) and indexes.

Preface. How to use this book. SECTION A: INTRODUCTION. 1. The study of language. Introduction. What is language and how did it originate? The history and methods of psycholinguistics. Themes and controversies in modern psycholinguistics. Summary. Some questions to think about. Further reading. 2. Describing language. Introduction. Linguistic approaches to syntax. Summary. Some questions to think about. Further reading. SECTION B: THE BIOLOGICAL AND DEVELOPMENTAL BASES OF LANGUAGE. 3. The foundations of language. Introduction. Do animals have language? The biological basis of language. The cognitive basis of language: The cognition hypothesis. The social basis of language. 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. Phonological development. 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. SECTION C: WORD RECOGNITION. 6. Recognizing visual words. Introduction. Methods and findings. Meaning-based facilitation of visual word recognition. Morphology: Processing complex words. Models of visual word recognition. 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. Learning to read and spell. Summary. Some questions to think about. Further reading. 8. Understanding speech. Introduction. Recognizing speech. Models of speech recognition. TRACE. The neuropsychology of spoken word recognition. Summary. Some questions to think about. SECTION D: MEANING AND BEYOND. 9. Understanding the structure of sentences. Introduction. Coping with structural ambiguity. Early work on parsing. Processing structural ambiguity. Gaps, traces, and unbounded dependencies. The neuropsychology of parsing. Summary. Some questions to think about. 10. 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. 11. Comprehension. Introduction. Memory for text and inferences. Reference, coreference, and ambiguity. Models of text representation and processing. Individual differences in comprehension skills. Pragmatics. The structure of conversation. The neuropsychology of text and discourse processing. Summary. Some questions to think about. Further reading. SECTION E: PRODUCTION AND OTHER ASPECTS OF LANGUAGE. 12. Language production. Introduction. Speech errors. 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. 13. 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. 14. New directions. Introduction. Themes in psycholinguistics revisited. Some growth areas? Conclusion. Further reading. Appendix: Connectionism. Interactive activation models. Back-propagation. Further reading. Glossary. Example of analysis of a sentence. References. Author index. Subject index.