Psycholinguistics is the study of how language is stored and processed by mind and brain. This is no easy puzzle to solve, and has produced truly interdisciplinary research between a number of fields - psycholinguistics research sits at a cross-roads between not just psychology and linguistics, but also computer science, neuroscience, and cognitive science. By understanding the processes that underlie language ability, we can help develop more effective ways to teach people to read and make the books they read easier to understand. Language also offers a window onto human cognition more generally - research into signed languages has shed light on how the brain processes and represents information.
This book introduces the reader to the basic issues in psycholinguistic research, including its history and the methodologies typically employed in research. Key topics discussed include information flow, language representation, language in the real world, and sign language. These topics have recently come to center stage as the field matures and innovative research techniques allow promising research in these areas. --- from the publisher About the Author: H. Wind Cowles received her doctorate in Cognitive Science and Linguistics in 2003 at one of the premier centers of psycholinguistic research, the University of California, San Diego, and was a research fellow at the University of Sussex with Professor Alan Garnham. Her training and experience in psychology, linguistics, cognitive science and neuroscience makes her part of a new wave of researchers approaching psycholinguistic research from multiple perspectives and methods. Her main research focus is on the roles that discourse and information structures play in the written comprehension and spoken production of sentences. Her research applies multiple research techniques, including eye-tracking and event-related brain potentials, to questions about the ways in which people make reference and build structure in language.
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