Fundamentals of psycholinguistics. By Eva M. Fernández and Helen Smith Cairns. (Fundamentals of linguistics.) Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Pp. xiv, 316. ISBN 9781405191470. $39.95.

Reviewed by Engin Arik, Isik University

This volume is an informative and concise introduction to psycholinguistics that can easily serve as a textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. Each of the eight chapters starts with an outline and ends with a list of new concepts and about a dozen thorough study questions.

In Ch. 1, ‘Beginning concepts’ (1–24), the authors introduce key concepts used in the field of psycholinguistics: the creativity and universality of human language, the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, linguistic competence and performance, the acquisition of language, linguistic sounds and meaning, and linguistic perception. This chapter also discusses the origins of psycholinguistics and presents the organization of the rest of the book.

In Ch. 2, ‘The nature of linguistic competence’ (25–69), the authors introduce the speech signal by focusing on the human vocal tract, then move on to the phonological, morphological, and syntactic components of the linguistic system. Especially notable is a very good summary of the concept of the lexicon in relation to mental representations of linguistic structures.

Ch. 3, ‘The biological basis of language’ (70–96), starts with the universality of human language discussing human-specificity of language, child language acquisition, and innateness and learnability, followed by an introduction to the physiology of human language. The authors end the chapter explaining reading and writing as cultural artifacts.

Ch. 4, ‘The acquisition of language’ (97–133), provides a detailed introduction to first language acquisition from the prenatal period to later ages with respect to discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness, followed by a concise overview of second language acquisition.

The following chapters focus on language production and comprehension. Ch. 5, ‘The speaker: Producing speech’ (134–68), concerns the planning and production of speech by the speaker, whereas Ch. 6, ‘The hearer: Speech perception and lexical access’ (169–203), discusses speech perception and how hearers comprehend sentences. Ch. 7, ‘The hearer: Structural processing’ (204–34), focuses on the parsing of speech, from the psychological reality of syntactic structures to lexical, prosodic, and non-linguistic information.

The next chapter, Ch. 8, ‘Remembering sentences, processing discourse, and having conversations’ (235–66), focuses on the relationship between working memory and sentence processing, anaphoric reference and making inferences, the structure of conversations, and language use in communication.

In addition to the main text, the ‘Appendix: Experimental designs in psycholinguistics’ (268–75) provides a short introduction to experimental methodology in psycholinguistics, including materials, analysis, and procedure. The remaining end matter includes an epilogue (267), a list of references (276–98), and indexes of names (299–304) and subjects (305–16).