Publisher's Synopsis
This new series aims to provide interest in all aspects of language and keep abreast of developments throughout the discipline. A distinguishing feature will be the high proportion of contributions by active young researchers. The series reflects present day interest in the psychology of language which stems from the 1960s when psycholinguists sought to evaluate the "psychological reality" of Chomsky's transformational grammar. From those early, circumscribed beginnings the subject has both grown and diversified.
Psycholinguistics now draws upon, and feeds into, such related disciplines as cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, neuro psychology and linguistics. One consequence of this diversification is that individual researchers become specialists in one small area and have difficulty in keeping in touch with developments in cognate areas. When this happens there is a corresponding danger of duplication of research effort and failure of key insights to be disseminated from one area to another.
The Progress in the Psychology of Language series aims to rectify this, and contributors are encouraged to produce integrative review chapters which are perhaps more relaxed, more wide ranging, and more speculative than traditional journal articles. Topics covered in volumes 1 and 2, published simultaneously to inaugurate the series, include speech production, reading, memory for linguistic material, the psychological reality of linguistic units, language awareness, and the neuropsychology of language. Topics scheduled for future volumes, which will appear annually, include speech perception, language comprehension, computational models of language processes, neurolinguistics and language development.
