LOGIKA & KEBENARAN

BOOK REVIEW

“ FUNDAMENTALS OF PSYCHOLINGUISTICS”

Written by Eva M. Fernandez & Helen Smith Cairns. 2011

By

Casimirus Andy Fenanlampir

12706251052

Applied Linguistics of Educational English Group A

“Fundamentals of Psycho-linguistics” is one of introductory textbooks in the  'Fundamentals of Linguistics' series written by Eva M. Fernandez and Helen Smith Cairns; printed and published in United Kingdom by Wiley-Blackwell publishing and it consists of 316 pages. The book provides updated content in the past decade including an introduction to the  linguistic theory underlying the study of psycho-linguistics, the different  aspects of language processing and series of empirical development methods for  researching psycho-linguistics  A number of anonymous reviewers are also provided.

The goal of this book is to introduce  and to provide the psycho-linguistics to the newbies with  the base knowledge to conduct research on psycho-linguistics  The content of the book is appropriate for students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels who interested in psychology of language  but have no experiences before in the field. Teachers, lecturers, and practitioners will find it  useful both as a  course reader resource and as a reference.

The book consists of eight chapters and broadly grouped into two parts, the first part associated with notions of psycho-linguistics’ competence that provides the reader with the nature of psycho-linguistics  explanation of what language is, where language comes from and how language is stored. While the second part mainly associated with notions of psycho-linguistic performance which explores the psycho-linguistic processes of producing and comprehending speech (words, sentences and discourse) in the brain.

A.     THE BOOK CONTENTS

The first chapter of the book, entitled “Beginning Concepts”, introduces the reader to basic concepts and characteristics of language, including: the difference between language, speech and communication, the idea that language can be described as having different structural components (syntax, phonology, morphology), the contrasting notions of competence and performance. It ends with  a brief history of the emergence of psycho-linguistics as a sub-discipline of linguistics and cognitive psychology.

The second chapter, 'The Nature of Linguistic Competence,' provides deep introduction to the sub-components of linguistic knowledge that underlie language processing: the different of grammatical and lexical units by which language is organized. Starting with the speech signal, the chapter explains the phonetic system used to describe speech sounds and continue to discuss the phonological component of language. Then, both derivational and inflectional morphology are discussed, followed by an introduction to the syntactic component of language, which discusses hierarchical phrase structure and complex structures. The chapter is ended with a discussion of the stored information of lexical component.

Chapter three, 'The Biological Basis of Language,' discusses about language as an aspect of human biology related to Lenneberg (1964) language criteria that are required to classify a system as biological: the species’ (human and animals) specific nature of language and the fact that the system is spontaneously and universally acquired through exposure to the environment. The chapter then describes physiological and anatomical aspects of language, exploring the methodologies (neurolinguistic science and the study of aphasia) that have improved our understanding of brain areas involved in language processing. 

Chapter four, 'The Acquisition of Language,' first introduces the idea of an innate human tendency to acquire language, discussing the features and arguments of the nativist approach to language acquisition. It then examines how input and child-adult interactions form the environmental learning for language acquisition outlining both monolingual and bilingual language development from early learning such as complex sentence and discourse processing.

Chapter five, 'The Speaker: Producing Speech,' examines the various aspects of language production, from speech planning at the conceptual (idea), lexical selection, Syntactic representation (grammatical level), and phonological representation of an idea and finally, sounded by articulatory systems of vowels and consonants. A variety of phenomena are discussed, including bilingual language production and code-switching, lexical retrieval and tip-of-the-tongue phenomena, syntactic priming, speech errors, acoustic characteristics of sounds and co-articulation. 

Chapter six, 'The Hearer: Speech Perception and Lexical Access,' lays out the pre-syntactic stages of speech processing, speech perception and lexical access and how they interact. First explains how speech is perceived by a listener starting with properties of phonological processing such as categorical perception and voice onset time. The constructive nature of phonological processing is also explained and the role of suprasegmental information (e.g. stress) in speech perception and lexical access. It then examines the process of lexical access in language comprehension, discussing how words are identified and how this informs our understanding of the way they are stored. The chapter examines isolated lexical access and also the role of lexical access in sentence comprehension. The concepts of bottom-up and top-down information and processing are introduced. Chapter six highlights the first level of language comprehension and heads up to the syntactic level of language processing, which is later becomes the subject of chapter seven.

Chapter seven, 'The Hearer: Structural Processing,' describes and discusses syntactic parsing. First, it explains the process of creating syntactic structures in language comprehension. Second, presents notion of the psychological reality of syntax such as minimal attachment, that is used to predict and build upcoming structures. In addition, the role of extra-syntactic information, such as lexical and prosodic information and real-world knowledge, in sentence processing is also explored.

The final, 'Remembering Sentences, Processing Discourse and Having Conversations,' looks at the wider context of language processing, contrasting the processing of sentences in isolated contexts with the use of language in discourse. It first defines the notion of discourse and its features (e.g. topic, context) and then introduces the concept of working memory and long-term memory and their contrasting functions in sentence and discourse processing.

B.      REVIEW

In my opinion, 'Fundamentals of Psycho-linguistics,' succeed in providing an accessible and overall introduction to the field of psycho-linguistics theory and research. Each chapter is briefly discussed. Readers should get this book since it provides a strongly linguistic approach to psycho-linguistics  Moreover, the authors provide further questions at the end of each chapter which will guide the reader to its key ideas and points. 

 In addition to presenting the 'what' and 'how' of various aspects of language processing, the book also presents variety examples of research methods and reviews on how experimental evidence informs the theories. 

The important feature of the book is that, the authors also invite the reader to consider sign language and bilingual language processing and also provide introduction to particular language processing. Since the book does not have an in-depth explanation of sign language, the authors take care to remind the reader how sign language processing is being compared to spoken language processing, in contrast to the reading and writing processes.

Another key feature of the book is that it also presents discourse processing where researches in psycho-linguistics has investigated words and sentences production. Moreover  with the addition of this part, the book provides a balanced and more complete view of language processing. 

Finally, another contribution of this book is that presents varieties of experimental work to illustrate various aspects of psycho-linguistics. It covers developmental and neurolinguistic research methods and findings in addition to a wide range of production and comprehension studies, as evidenced by an extensive reference section. The book does contain a comprehensive reference list and each chapter does introduce a variety of research papers through which the reader can follow up on a given topic.

 However, the book does not provide a completely balanced introduction to the current field of psycho-linguistics such as  theories of language development and processing.

A minor criticism of the book is that the chapters do not provide suggestions for further reading on each given topic, which might have been a useful addition for the newbies. At last but not least, I found out that it is to be an interesting and informative book that was well-written.