The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory

Citation

Harley, T. A. (2014). The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory (4th ed.). Psychology Press.

Chapter Summary

The fourth edition runs to 624 pages in sixteen chapters grouped into five sections, with an appendix on connectionism, a glossary and indexes. The publisher says it keeps the structure of earlier editions and their emphasis on cognitive processing, is now in full colour with 172 illustrations, and adds recent results, including brain imaging, updated models, an expanded glossary and more real-life examples. It assumes no prior knowledge beyond the basic concepts of cognitive psychology.

Section A, Introduction: Chapters 1–2

Chapter 1, The Study of Language, and Chapter 2, Describing Language, open the book with the basic questions and with the vocabulary needed to describe language before processing is considered.

Section B, The Biological and Developmental Bases of Language: Chapters 3–5

Chapter 3, The Foundations of Language, deals with the biological side. Chapter 4, Language Development, covers how children acquire language, and Chapter 5, Bilingualism and Second Language, extends this to learning and using more than one language.

Section C, Word Recognition: Chapters 6–9

Chapter 6, Recognizing Visual Words, and Chapter 7, Reading, treat how written words are recognised and read. Chapter 8, Learning to Read and Spell, moves to development in literacy, and Chapter 9, Understanding Speech, treats the spoken word.

Section D, Meaning and Using Language: Chapters 10–12

Chapter 10, Understanding the Structure of Sentences, is about sentence processing. Chapter 11, Word Meaning, deals with meaning at the word level, and Chapter 12, Comprehension, with the understanding of larger units of text and discourse.

Section E, Production and Other Aspects of Language: Chapters 13–16

Chapter 13, Language Production, covers language production, the area of the author's own research on slips of the tongue and speech production. Chapter 14, How Do We Use Language?, looks at language in use. Chapter 15, The Structure of the Language System, takes up the structure of the language system as a whole, and Chapter 16, New Directions, closes the book. An appendix on connectionism follows.

Key Concepts

Sections A–B: Introduction and bases

• Describing language: the descriptive framework introduced in Chapter 2 and used throughout.
• Language development and bilingualism: the acquisition of a first and a second language.

Section C: Word recognition

• Visual word recognition and reading: the processes and models that underlie reading.
• Learning to read and spell: the development of literacy.
• Understanding speech: recognising spoken words.

Sections D–E: Meaning, comprehension and production

• Sentence structure processing: how listeners and readers work out the structure of sentences.
• Word meaning and comprehension: meaning at the level of words and of texts.
• Language production: planning and producing speech.
• Connectionism: the modelling approach covered in the appendix.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Breadth. Sixteen chapters cover development, reading, speech, sentences, meaning, production and use, and reviewers quoted by the publisher describe the coverage as comprehensive and remarkable.
• A data-to-theory orientation. The title promises movement "from data to theory", and the publisher's description stresses competing models and recent results, including brain imaging.
• Clear presentation. The publisher and several quoted academics, including Marcus Taft, Ken Ramshøj Christensen and Merrill Garrett, describe it as clear, comprehensible and accessible, with a cautious treatment of neuroimaging.
• Reference aids. The glossary, now expanded, the appendix and a companion website support use as a reference as well as a course text.

Limitations

• Long. At 624 pages in a single volume, it is more than one course can cover, and selection is necessary.
• Cognitive-psychology perspective. The emphasis is on cognitive processing; readers wanting a linguistic-theory or acquisition-centred treatment will find acquisition spread over only a few of the sixteen chapters (3 to 5 and 8).
• Prior knowledge. The book assumes a grounding in basic cognitive psychology, which a student without that background will need to supply.
• Date. A 2014 text cannot include later work, which matters most in the fast-moving neuroimaging literature the publisher highlights.

Where It Fits in the Course

Warren's Introducing Psycholinguistics is a short first course with summaries and exercises. Traxler's Introduction to Psycholinguistics and Sedivy's Language in Mind are research-based introductions of comparable scope, so Harley is an alternative to them for a full course. Clark's First Language Acquisition and O'Grady's How Children Learn Language are devoted to acquisition, which is only one part of Harley's book.

Use Harley as the main reference when the course covers all of psycholinguistics, and the acquisition books to go deeper on development. Its sections also map onto separate course units: word recognition and reading (Section C), sentence and discourse comprehension (Section D) and production (Section E), so a course can assign them in blocks and draw on the shorter introductions for any block that needs a gentler start.

How to Use This Book

The book suits advanced undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers, and also students on speech and language therapy courses, as the publisher notes. A grounding in basic cognitive psychology is expected.

A reading plan:

• Core: Chapters 1 and 2, then the word-recognition and sentence chapters (6 to 12), which form the centre of the adult-processing material.
• Production: Chapter 13 and Chapter 14 for speaking and use.
• Development: Chapters 3 to 5 for acquisition and bilingualism, with a specialist text for depth.
• Optional: Chapters 15 and 16 as a synthesis, the appendix on connectionism before the models that use it, and the glossary throughout.

Use the companion website and the glossary alongside each chapter, and read the original studies cited for topics you choose to pursue. Readers new to the field can begin with a shorter introduction and return to Harley chapter by chapter, so that the data and the competing models of each area can be compared at a pace suited to a single course.