Psycholinguistics: A Resource Book for Students (review)

As part of the Routledge English Language Introductions series, this psycholinguistics textbook is geared toward undergraduates with no previous exposure to the field. The author and the series editors are to be congratulated for its clear exposition and organization.

The book is divided into four sections: Introduction: Key Concepts (42 pages), Development: Data (39 pages), Exploration: Analysis and Reflection (43 pages), and Extension: Psycholinguistic Readings (62 pages). The book uses a spiral approach, with successive development of the same topics in different chapters. One of its best features is the large number of thought-provoking exercises and discussion topics; however, readers should note that the numerous page references to the experimental materials beginning on page 208 are incorrect.

Unlike many popular psycholinguistics texts, Field's focuses on normal adult language processing, leaving most aspects of acquisition and disorders for other texts and courses. This is an idea whose time has come, because the chances are slim that a single book will be appropriate for three different courses. Since students are unhappy about using only part of an expensive book, the flexibility of shorter, cheaper, more focused textbooks is welcome.

On the other hand, in choosing to write a book with only 134 pages of text (plus the readings), Field has had to make some hard choices. The most significant limitation has to do with the fact that the series is restricted to English linguistics, so there is no reference to the copious psycholinguistic research on French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, to name just a few of the languages that are prominent in the literature.

Field notes that his perspective is more psychological than linguistic, and this accounts for the omission of several central topics that are generally found in such books. For example, speech perception is given short shrift, presumably because deeper coverage requires a better understanding of acoustic phonetics than is possible in a non-technical textbook.

What I find more troubling is the lack of sentence-processing research, a core area of psycholinguistics (consider the importance to the field of psycholinguistics of the annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing). Field briefly describes some of the research methods, such as eye-tracking, but does not show how these methods are used to test sentence-processing models. For example, he explains what a garden path sentence is, but not how to identify a garden path effect in an experimental setting, or how to interpret it in terms of incremental versus serial models. It seems that this topic was excluded because it would require an in-depth discussion of parsing strategies such as late closure, which would in turn require a basic understanding of syntax. Rather than provide a simplified section on syntactic principles, as other texts do, Field skips the aspects of psycholingistics that depend on them, leaving the reader with little sense of the kinds of work that many psycholinguists do.

Similarly, the discussion of prosody is limited to demonstrations of prosodic disambiguation of ambiguous structures, but it ignores any explanation of how this is really accomplished in terms of the fundamentals of prosodic phonology. It also omits all mention of the cross-linguistic differences in prosodic systems that have so much explanatory value in the recent sentence processing literature.

The sections on language production are only slightly more technical; Levelt's (1989) model is illustrated, and students are guided through it with a series of simple questions, but here, too, the linguistic details are few, and the reader gets little sense of how the model has been tested experimentally.

Lexical issues receive much better coverage, including lexical representation and access, phonological decoding versus whole-word effects in reading, serial search and activation models (including the cohort theory), and the roles of working memory, monitoring ability, and context. On the other hand, the sections on discourse processing are limited to schema theory and script theory, omitting even the story grammar approaches, which can be understood without an...