Why read A History of Psycholinguistics?

Book cover of A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era

Book description

How do we manage to speak and understand language? How do children acquire these skills and how does the brain support them? These psycholinguistic issues have been studied for more than two centuries. Though many Psycholinguists tend to consider their history as beginning with the Chomskyan "cognitive revolution" of the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked A History of Psycholinguistics as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Eve V. Clark

Author

Levelt offers a wonderfully informative history of the sources of many current ideas in psycholinguistics. Levelt also shares major questions about language processing (how we understand and produce language).

He takes up ideas raised long ago, ideas that couldn’t be studied at the time without a phonetic alphabet. For example, without audio and video-recording methods or the sophisticated equipment for studying how language is stored in the brain, all available today.

I find it salutary to recognize how much of what we think is new in today’s research was actually recognized and discussed at least a century ago or more.

From Eve's list on The best books to nourish curiosity about language.