Neurolinguistics
An Introduction to Spoken Language Processing and its Disorders

A comprehensive textbook examining how both 'normal' and brain-damaged speakers process language in the brain.

John C. L. Ingram (Author)

9780521796408, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 18 October 2007

444 pages, 60 b/w illus. 37 tables
24.5 x 17.6 x 2.6 cm, 0.89 kg

'… a thorough and in-depth introduction to the field. … Ingram accomplishes a remarkable feat in bringing together the different fields and surveying past and current research in neurolinguistics.' www.roterdorn.de

What biological factors make human communication possible? How do we process and understand language? How does brain damage affect these mechanisms, and what can this tell us about how language is organized in the brain? The field of neurolinguistics seeks to answer these questions, which are crucial to linguistics, psychology and speech pathology alike. This textbook, first published in 2007, introduces the central topics in neurolinguistics: speech recognition, word and sentence structure, meaning, and discourse - in both 'normal' speakers and those with language disorders. It moves on to provide a balanced discussion of key areas of debate such as modularity and the 'language areas' of the brain, 'connectionist' versus 'symbolic' modelling of language processing, and the nature of linguistic and mental representations. Making accessible over half a century of scientific and linguistic research, and containing extensive study questions, it will be welcomed by all those interested in the relationship between language and the brain.

Part I. Foundational Concepts and Issues: 1. Introduction and overview
2. Aspects of language competence
3. The neuroanatomy of language
4. On modularity and method
Part II. Speech Perception and Auditory Processing: 5. The problem of speech recognition
6. Speech perception: paradigms and findings
7. The speech recognition lexicon
8. Disorders of auditory processing and word recognition
Part III. Lexical Semantics: 9. Morphology and the mental lexicon
10. Semantic features and word meaning
11. Lexical semantic disorders in aphasia
Part IV. Sentence Comprehension: 12. Sentence comprehension and syntactic parsing
13. On-line processing, working memory and modularity
14. Agrammatism and sentence comprehension in aphasia
Part V. Discourse: Language Comprehension in Context: 15. Discourse processing
16. Breakdown of discourse (reference and coherence)
17. Summary and prospectus.

Subject Areas: Neurology & clinical neurophysiology [MJN], Phonetics, phonology [CFH], Linguistics [CF]