Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics

Citation

Sedivy, J. (2019). Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press (Sinauer).

Chapter Summary

The second edition is a large-format, full-colour textbook of about 670 pages in thirteen chapters, up from twelve in the first edition (2014). It moves from foundations (what a science of language is, where language came from, how the brain supports it) through acquisition (sounds, words, sentences) to adult processing (perception, recognition, comprehension, production), and ends with discourse, the social side of language, and linguistic diversity. The publisher describes the approach as research-based, emphasizing not just what psycholinguists know but how they came to know it. Recurring features support this: "Researchers at Work" boxes, new in this edition, walk through how an experiment is run; "Digging Deeper" sections examine primary literature and debates; boxes and "Questions to Contemplate" connect findings to everyday phenomena; and online "Web Activities" and "Language at Large" modules extend the chapters.

Chapter 1: Science, Language, and the Science of Language

The opening chapter defines psycholinguistics as the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors in the perception, production and acquisition of language, and sets out the book's emphasis on scientific reasoning. Gwyneth Sutherlin's review of the first edition (LSE Review of Books, 2015) notes that it challenges common "armchair" claims about language and asks readers to examine how they know what they know.

Chapters 2–3: Origins of Human Language; Language and the Brain

Chapter 2 takes up the debate over whether humans have a specifically linguistic biological endowment or whether language emerges from more general cognitive abilities; Sutherlin describes it as setting the tone of the book by showing real disagreement in the field. Chapter 3 introduces the neural basis of language.

Chapters 4–6: Learning Sound Patterns; Learning Words; Learning the Structure of Sentences

Three acquisition chapters follow the child's task in the order of linguistic levels: discovering the sound patterns of a language, learning words, and acquiring sentence structure.

Chapters 7–9: Speech Perception; Word Recognition; Understanding Sentence Structure and Meaning

The comprehension sequence mirrors the acquisition one: perceiving speech, recognizing words, and building the structure and meaning of sentences in real time.

Chapter 10: Speaking: From Planning to Articulation

Language production, from planning a message to articulating it. Sutherlin lists misutterances among the topics the book's boxes use to engage readers.

Chapter 11: Discourse and Inference

Beyond the sentence: according to Sutherlin's description of the corresponding first-edition chapter, it covers mental models, the ambiguity of pronouns, event memory and conceptualization, and uses real-world exchanges (for example between a pilot and an air traffic controller) to show how listeners resolve ambiguity.

Chapter 12: The Social Side of Language

A chapter on language as a social activity. It has no counterpart among the chapter titles cited for the first edition and appears to be part of the expansion to thirteen chapters.

Chapter 13: Language Diversity

The closing chapter asks how the world's languages differ and whether those differences matter for thought, for example whether words reflect culturally important concepts. Sutherlin notes that the book draws mainly on English examples, a point the author acknowledges here, but includes several non-European languages, with examples such as evidential marking in Turkish and classifiers in Japanese.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3: Foundations

• Psycholinguistics: the study of the mental and neural processes behind understanding, producing and learning language.
• Origins of language: the debate between a language-specific biological capacity and language as a product of general cognition.
• Language and the brain: the neural organization that supports linguistic processing.

Chapters 4–6: Acquisition

• Learning sound patterns: how infants discover the sounds and sound combinations of their language.
• Word learning: how children connect word forms to meanings.
• Learning sentence structure: how children acquire the rules that combine words into sentences.

Chapters 7–10: Processing and production

• Speech perception: mapping a variable acoustic signal onto linguistic units.
• Word recognition: identifying words rapidly from speech or print.
• Sentence comprehension: building structure and meaning incrementally as a sentence unfolds.
• Speech production: the stages from planning a message to articulation.

Chapters 11–13: Beyond the sentence

• Mental models and inference: the representations listeners build of a discourse, and the inferences that fill gaps.
• Social side of language: language use as social behaviour.
• Language diversity: variation among the world's languages and its possible effects on thought.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Method as content. The book's distinctive aim is to teach how psycholinguistic knowledge is produced. Sutherlin singles out this "framework of criticality" as its most attractive aspect: readers are asked to evaluate methods, design their own tests of hypotheses and see the limits of experiments. The second edition reinforces this with the "Researchers at Work" feature.
• Accessible for beginners. Sutherlin describes the first edition as an undergraduate textbook that approaches difficult brain and communication research in a clear and interactive way. Endorsements quoted for the second edition, from Adele Goldberg and Zenzi Griffin among others, praise its clarity, and the four-colour illustration programme supports difficult material.
• Balanced coverage of acquisition and processing. Three chapters on learning sit alongside four on adult processing and production, so the book serves a course that combines acquisition with psycholinguistics, as this course does.
• Engaging extensions. Boxes on topics such as deaf communities, poetry, jokes, speech errors and Alzheimer's disease (cited by Sutherlin for the first edition) connect the research to everyday experience.

Limitations

• English-centred examples. Sutherlin notes the reliance on English examples, which the author acknowledges, even though the book includes more non-European languages than most texts at its level.
• Limited multimedia in the online material. The same review found little audio or video in the first edition's web resources; whether this changed for the second edition is not documented in the publisher's description.
• Length. At around 670 pages, it is more than a single semester can cover in full.
• An introductory survey. For detailed models and current controversies at research level, students will need more advanced treatments.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is a central textbook for an undergraduate course in psycholinguistics and language acquisition. Paul Warren's Introducing Psycholinguistics and William O'Grady's How Children Learn Language are shorter and gentler: Warren for a first look at language processing, O'Grady for an accessible account of acquisition. Matthew Traxler's Introduction to Psycholinguistics covers similar ground at a similar level and is a useful second explanation, especially for the comprehension chapters.

For deeper study, Trevor Harley's The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory is a more detailed treatment of processing models and the evidence for them, and Eve Clark's First Language Acquisition is a substantial account of how children acquire language, extending Chapters 4–6 of Sedivy.

How to Use This Book

The book suits second-year undergraduates in linguistics, psychology or cognitive science; no prior linguistics is assumed, but a first course in either linguistics or cognitive psychology makes the processing chapters easier.

• Core sequence: Chapters 1, 3, 4–6 and 7–10 form the core of an acquisition-and-processing course. Chapter 2 is a good opening debate for discussion.
• Optional or later: Chapters 11–13 suit the end of the course or a seminar, and pair well with student projects.
• Working method: read each "Researchers at Work" box closely and restate the hypothesis, method and result in your own words; use "Digging Deeper" sections as starting points for reading primary papers; answer the "Questions to Contemplate" before seminars.
• Alongside it: try the online web activities, and for each chapter find one recent experimental paper on the same question to practise the critical evaluation that the book models.