Language in mind: An introduction to psycholinguistics by Julie Sedivy (review)

1. Introduction

Language in mind: An introduction to psycholinguistics, by Julie Sedivy, is intended as a general introductory textbook for undergraduate students with no prior linguistic background. As S herself puts it, she wrote this book as ‘an opening conversation that provokes curiosity, and a map for what to explore next’. In our opinion, S has overwhelmingly achieved this goal, communicating her infectious fascination with psycholinguistics through both the content and format of this visually stunning textbook and its companion website (available at http://sites.sinauer.com/languageinmind/index.html).

A fundamental strength of the textbook is its versatility. Its format allows instructors to easily assign the portions of the content that correspond to the purpose of their courses and the background of their students. The main text functions as a framework that is sufficient for an introductory survey course, and a plethora of supplemental information in both the chapters themselves and the companion website provides greater depth of coverage that complements the main text.

In this review, we take into account the dual perspectives of students and their instructors. Given our personal expertise, we primarily draw specific examples from the chapter on learning the structure of sentences to highlight the richness of the information available in Language in mind. We now turn to the features of this book that we believe make it an exceptional textbook for both students and instructors.

2. The Student’s Perspective

S wants the content to be informative, comprehensible, and relevant to a wide range of students, from a neophyte just hearing about all this for the first time to an advanced student well-versed in linguistic fundamentals who wants to dig deeper into a particular area. Most importantly, S wants to help students think intelligently and analytically about language, whatever their background. To accomplish this, she connects the theoretical content in each chapter to relevant applications such as language pedagogy, persuasive rhetoric, and the aesthetic use of language, among others (often through the ‘Language at large’ boxes in each chapter). Additionally, S utilizes several strategies to make the information both accessible and engrossing.

First, the overall tone of the text is very casual and conversational (including the occasional humorous tidbit). This is something that both of us enjoyed, though readers who prefer a more streamlined presentation may not appreciate it as much. The overall approach is Socratic and so the text is meant to be read actively, encouraging students to think about the material as they are reading it.

Second, the beautiful graphic design and vivid illustrations provide aesthetic anchor points for the text under discussion, scaffolding the organization of each chapter and clarifying its content. These illustrations include (i) diagrams (e.g. the human vocal tract in figure 4.5), (ii) photographs (e.g. categorical perception in a nonlinguistic domain in figure 4.9, examples of category members in figure 5.4), (iii) line drawings (e.g. constituent structure in music in figure 6.1), (iv) original abstract art (e.g. the opening of every chapter), (v) cartoon depictions of experimental design (e.g. the head-turn preference paradigm in figure 4.1, stimuli for the habituation and test phases of a word-recognition task in figure 5.1A, stimuli for a syntactic bootstrapping experiment in figure 5.5), and (vi) graphs of experimental results (e.g. categorical-perception behavioral results in chinchillas in figure 4.11, newborn ERP results depicting statistical learning in figure 4.4, infant word-recognition behavioral results in figure 5.1B, child vocabulary exposure over time in figure 5.2, infant grammatical-categorization behavioral results in figure 6.3). This makes the information seem very user-friendly and digestible, despite its breadth and depth.

To further draw the reader in, each chapter opens with a ‘teaser’ designed to capture attention via intriguing facts related to the chapter’s content. S then offers interesting questions or observations that lead to theoretical...