Talking Mammals: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics

Author: Jean Aitchison
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-05-10
Features: 'An excellent and very welcome guide to psycholinguistics... highly recommended.' The Washington Post
'The reader's curiosity about the complexities of the mother tongue is kept right to the end.' The Times Educational Supplement
'This is an excellent text which would give the undergraduate student as fine an introduction to the field of psycholinguistics as is available today.' Choice
This concise and readable introduction to psycholinguistics requires no prior knowledge of the subject. Jean Aitchison addresses key questions such as: Is language restricted to humans? Is there biological evidence for innate language capacity? How do children learn language? How do we understand and produce speech? This widely used and highly successful book has been extensively revised. In this 4th edition, Jean Aitchison covers new work on 'talking animals', on language and the brain, on child language, and speech understanding. She also discusses the pros and cons of Chomsky's recent ideas. As a result, several chapters of the book have been largely rewritten, and new references have been added throughout.