Language Processing (review)

This volume provides a state-of-the-art summary of research in language processing. The chapters are written by leading researchers in the field, and the resulting collection is excellent. While each chapter contains reviews of the literature and tutorial-style overviews, the individual authors do not hide their own theoretical commitments.

The introduction by the editors (‘Issues in language processing’) presents some of the fundamental questions that motivate research in language processing and provides an easy-to-read roadmap of the whole book. The remainder of the volume is divided into five parts that include two to three chapters each: Part 1: ‘Lexical processing’ (‘Attentional control of lexical processing pathways during word recognition and reading’ by David A. Balota, Stephen T. Paul, and Daniel H. Spieler; ‘Lexical semantic processing during speech’ by Helen E. Moss and M. Gareth Gaskell; and ‘Abstractedness and combination: The morphemic lexicon’ by William Marslen-Wilson); Part 2: ‘Syntactic processing’ (‘Sentence comprehension’ by Martin J. Pickering and ‘Prosody and language processing’ by Paul Warren); Part 3: ‘Computational issues in language processing’ (‘Mechanisms for sentence processing’ by Matthew Crocker and ‘Connectionism and language processing’ by Nick Chater and Morten H. Christiansen); Part 4: ‘Semantic and discourse processing’ (‘Models of discourse processing’ by Morton Ann Gernsbacher and Julie A. Foertsch, ‘Word meaning and discourse processing: Atutorial review’ by Anthony J. Sanford, and ‘Reference and anaphora’ by Alan Garnham); Part 5: ‘Language production and dialogue processing’ (‘Phenomena of language production’ by Kathryn Bock and John Huitema, and ‘The challenge of dialogue for theories of language processing’ by Simon Garrod).

The information in this text goes far beyond what is standardly found in introductions to psycholinguistics. Indeed, the volume does not attempt to be yet another introduction to psycholinguistics—neither speech perception, nor language acquisition, language pathology, or neurolinguistics is included. All of the chapters are useful, and many of them are excellent. This book is an exciting introduction to the field that will also serve as an invaluable reference tool for novices and established researchers alike.