Kess, J. F. (1992). Psycholinguistics: Psychology, linguistics, and the study of natural language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

By: Soliman Ismail

• Overview

This introductory book to psycholinguistics is intended as a survey of the theoretical and research endeavors in the three areas of psycholinguistic inquiry, that is comprehension, production, and acquisition. In addition to a chapter on the history of psycholinguistic theory and research, the book investigates how phonology, morphology, syntax, discourse, and semantics are mentally represented. The last three chapters of the book cover topics like language and thought, language and the brain, and first language acquisition. The book is a recommended reading for those making their entry into the field, for it explains the basic terms and concepts related to the discussed topics before it investigates these topics.

• Ch. 1: Introduction

This chapter introduces psycholinguistics as a discipline that aims at providing a theory of how language is comprehended, produced, and acquired. The study of language comprehension is the investigation of how humans understand, store, and memorize the speech they listen to. The study of language production seeks to explain how and why people say what they say. The study of language acquisition examines how young children acquire their native language. This latter branch of psycholinguistic inquiry requires knowledge of how adults process and produce language.

• Ch. 2: A History of Psycholinguistics

This chapter provides a historical outline of the discipline in terms of four major periods of development: The formative period, the linguistic period, the cognitive period, and the current cognitive science period.

• Ch. 3: Speech Perception and Production

Chapter Three deals with the stages of speech perception and speech production. Speech perception follows four interdependent stages: The auditory stage, the phonetic stage, the phonological stage, and the lexical, syntactic and semantic stage. The regularity of speech errors, pauses, hesitations, and slips of the tongue suggests that humans access two levels of production: The syntactic or functional level and the phonological or positional level. This chapter also includes a discussion of whether perception and production share certain mechanisms for processing information about the acoustic features of speech, a highly controversial topic in psycholinguistics. The chapter concludes with an interesting section on studies of sound symbolism.

• Ch. 4: Morphology and the Mental Lexicon

This excellent chapter reviews research investigating how humans store and retrieve words. Some of this research has utilized the study of morphology and word formation processes in an effort to explain how the mental lexicon is organized and accessed. Some research findings suggest that word roots are stored separately from inflectional and derivational morphemes. This in turn entails the existence of a morphological parser that breaks words into roots and corresponding morphemes. This view has been supported by evidence from tip-of-the-tongue studies and studies of spontaneous malapropisms. Other researchers maintain that words are stored in the mental lexicon as whole words.

• Ch. 5: Syntax

This chapter reviews both structuralist and transformationalist approaches. Kess also discusses the contributions of other syntactic models such as generative semantics, case grammar, lexical functional grammar, generalized phrase structure grammar, and relational grammar. The rest of the chapter is devoted to the discussion of the derivational theory of complexity.

• Ch. 6: Discourse

This chapter outlines the various facets of psycholinguistic inquiry of discourse. Kess argues that the processing of discourse involves knowledge of implicit rules and conventions of conversation, use of contextual clues, and reliance on thematic structures, schemata, and story grammar. Kess also discusses theories of how discourse is mentally represented.  

• Ch. 7: Semantics

This chapter examines psycholinguistic views of the nature of the representation of meaning in the mind, and how semantic information is stored, organized, and retrieved from memory. Models of semantic representation discussed in this chapter include the referential, denotative, connotative, associative, prototypical, and categorical theories of meaning. 

This chapter examines the relationship between language and thought by discussing the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) and outlining empirical research that provides evidence for the weak form of this hypothesis. The chapter also includes a discussion of linguistic universals and folk taxonomies as well as a brief, but informative, exposition of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s take on the issue of language and thought. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the issue of modularity in cognition.

This chapter discusses the evolution of language in the larger context of the theory of human evolution. Kess also discusses how certain parts of the brain are responsible for the processing and production of language driving evidence from neurolinguistic research. Kess also comments on the debate over the critical period hypothesis citing studies on feral children, Genie, and deaf children.

• Ch. 10: First Language Acquisition

This chapter synthesizes findings of research on child language acquisition. Kess elaborates on how children acquire the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of their first language through a set of stages. Kess maintains that though the rate of language development might differ from one child to another, most children follow the same the route of acquisition.

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