Traxler M., Gernsbacher M.A. (ed.) Handbook of Psycholinguistics

Second Edition. — Elsevier, 2006. — 1184 p.Cognitive psychology in general, and psycholinguistics in particular, have experienced tremendous growth and change during this time (an overview sketch appears in Chapter 1 by Garnham, Garrod, & Sanford). One of our goals in amassing the second edition was to document and survey the most important of these theoretical and empirical developments. To this end we recruited approximately 50 of the very best researchers and theoreticians in the field.
We have organized this edition into three sections plus Garnham, Garrod, and Sanford’s historical review and future directions chapter. The first section comprises four chapters on language production. The chapter by Griffin and V. Ferreira focuses on the production of words, while F. Ferreira and Englehardt’s chapter focuses primarily on production of phrases and sentences. Weismer admirably reviews speech disorders. Zeffiro and Frymiare complete the section with an explanation of how to exploit fMRI techniques to study language production, an area that we are likely to see more of in the next decade.
The second and largest section reviews issues in language comprehension. Without listing each chapter individually, we note that this section is organized in a roughly bottom-up way, starting with the lower-level processes involved in speech processing (e.g., Kluender & Kiefte), leading to comprehension of individual words (e.g., Balota, Yap, & Cortese), proceeding to phrase- and sentence-level issues (e.g., Speer & Blodgett), and moving upward to discourse processing and interaction in dialogue (e.g., Barr & Keysar).
Along the way, these authors review a number of methodological issues. This section culminates with a trio of chapters that review language comprehension in specific populations (i.e., aphasic patients, Caplan, & Waters; bilingual speakers, Schwartz & Kroll; and deaf signers, Corina).
The final section reviews language development, beginning with a chapter on language development in infancy by Fernald and Marchman, followed by Crain and Thornton’s review of syntactic development in early childhood.
Wagner, Piasta, and Torgesen then provide concrete advice on how to teach children to read in their chapter.
We conclude with a chapter by Leonard and Deevy on specific language impairment.