Psycholinguisticsq

Nan Bernstein Ratner, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, United States
Jean Berko Gleason, Boston University, Boston, MA, United States
Ó 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Historical Background 1
The Structure of Language and Its Mental Representation 2
Phonology 2
The Lexicon 3
Morphology, or Word Formation 3
Syntax 4
Pragmatics and Discourse 4
Major Themes in Psycholinguistic Research 5
How Individuals Understand Spoken and Written Language 5
How Individuals Produce Language: Speech Production 5
How Language Is Acquired 5
Further Reading 6

Historical Background

The work of the German philosopher and scientist Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) laid the foundation for psycholinguistics,
although Wundt did not have the benefit of the linguistic insights or advances in technology that give the modern field its power.
At his laboratory in Leipzig, he developed an early theory of speech production, and used reaction time and other experimental
measures that are still basic to much of psycholinguistic research. The premise that underlies the measurement of reaction time
is that the time taken to respond to an experimental task reflects the degree of mental complexity involved in processing it. As
one example, in some contemporary studies, the participants are asked to respond as quickly as possible as to whether a string
of letters flashed in front of them comprise a real word; these tasks are called lexical decision tasks. Typically, it takes much longer
to respond to letters representing rare words than it does to those representing common ones. Thus, it takes much longer to reach
a lexical decision about the string of letters “a w r y” compared to a decision about the string “w a r y.” This difference in reaction
time presumably mirrors the greater amount of cognitive activity required to search through the mental lexicon to find the rarer
word, match it to the stimulus, and decide that the string of letters is, indeed, a word. Studies of this nature have consistently shown
that there is a direct relation between the usage frequency of a word and the latency of response to it: the more common the word,
the more rapidly it can be accessed. More recent advances in brain imaging confirm that indeed retrieval of rarer words or other
words that typically delay reaction time is accompanied by greater cortical activity [as measured by indices such as fMRI or
Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)].
Until the 1950s most psychologists studying language followed learning theories that emphasized serial patterning in
behavior. Psychologists working within the framework of behaviorism, such as Hull, Watson, and Skinner, differed in their
specific accounts, but they all viewed language as the product of various forms of learning. For instance, classical conditioning
could be invoked to explain the acquisition of meaning. According to this model, an infant learns the meaning of a word such
as “bottle” through repeatedly hearing adults say the word while presenting the actual bottle. Ultimately, the word alone evokes
a response in the infant that is very similar to the response to the bottle itself. That response (pleasure, anticipatory eating
actions, etc.) can be thought of as the meaning of the word. Instrumental learning occurs if parents train infants to speak
through shaping and reinforcement of their early vocalizations until the infants’ successive approximations of language become
closer and closer to actual language. Finally, social learning occurs if children acquire language through imitation of the speech
of others. The belief that children acquire language through imitation is widespread, even though psycholinguistic research has
consistently challenged this view. Behaviorist accounts of sentence production based on transitional probabilities (or the statis-
tical likelihood that one word is likely to follow another) were advanced by some researchers in the 1960s and have had a recent
resurgence in studies that show statistical learning of linguistic sequences by very young infants as well as adults (see “How
language is acquired,” later in this article). In his 1957 book Verbal Behavior, Skinner presented a behavioral model of language
functioning that became particularly controversial as the revolution in cognitive science began. Within 2 years (in 1959),
Chomsky forcefully argued that conditioned stimulus–response associations could not adequately explain the infinite produc-
tivity of language, its rapid acquisition by children, and the lack of one-to-one correspondence between the meanings of

q
Change History: March 2016. NB Ratner and JB Gleason made some changes to the text and updated the Further Reading section.

Reference Module in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Psychology http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.22185-8 1

2 Psycholinguistics

utterances and their grammatical structure. His work spurred the development of numerous accounts specifying the domain-
specific mental representation and acquisition of linguistic rules, including proposals that the mechanisms that enable language
development and use were distinct from those used in general learning, and innately enabled by principles of universal
grammar. Psycholinguistic experimentation seeking to explore the functional reality of evolving linguistic theories dominated
the field until the mid-1980s when an alternative framework, connectionism, emerged to compete with linguistic accounts of
language acquisition and use. Connectionism views language knowledge as the product of generalized, rather than domain-
specific, patterns of neural network activity that establish and then rely on spreading activation patterns distributed across
the network.

The Structure of Language and Its Mental Representation

Every human language is hierarchically organized and can be described in terms of its component subsystems. These systems
include phonology, the lexicon, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics and discourse.

Phonology
The study of phonology includes the significant sounds of the language and the rules for their combination. The words of
a language are divisible into sound sequences, and part of language knowledge is an understanding of the particular sounds
used in a language, and the rules for how they can be combined and ordered. There are many speech sounds available to
the world’s languages. Any single language employs a subset of these sounds, typically about 23 consonants and 9 vowels.
There is, however, substantial diversity in the world’s languages, with numbers of consonants in a given language ranging
between 6 and 95, and numbers of vowels ranging between 3 and 46. The distinctive sounds used by a language are its
phonemes. Phonemes are contrastive; a change from one to another within a word produces either a change in meaning or
a non-word. For example, the /p/ in pit serves to contrast pit from other English words, such as bit, sit, and kit, which are similar
in all respects except that they begin with other English phonemes. Psycholinguistic research has shown why speakers often
have difficulty trying to learn a second language that has a different phonemic inventory. For example, the initial sound of
the English word this is rare in the world’s languages, and poses particular difficulties for those learning English as a second
language, whereas English speakers have difficulty learning sounds not in English, such as the initial sound of the French
word rue. Research studies using innovative techniques, such as nonnutritive sucking and conditioned head turn responses
to stimuli, have shown that human infants can initially discriminate among the sounds of all languages, but around their first
birthdays, as they acquire their native language, they begin to lose the ability to make fine distinctions among the phonemes of
other languages. This loss sheds light on the difficulties that adults have in second language acquisition, when they try to learn
the sound systems of other languages.
The importance of knowing the rules for the combination of sounds within one’s language (phonotactics) becomes apparent in
ordinary conversation, because the identity of individual speech sounds is often unclear. Experimental research shows that listeners
are often confronted with an auditory puzzle: They hear some sounds, but not all, and must “fill in the blanks.” The effortless and
accurate solution of such puzzles is mediated by adult listeners’ knowledge of their phonemic inventory, phonotactic constraints,
and lexicon, and also by inferences that can be drawn from the context. In addition, spoken language is characterized by a great deal
of acoustic variability in their presentation of phonemes, both within and across speakers. Research suggests that speech sound pro-
cessing is characterized by categorical perception, in which acoustically varying tokens are forced into binary percepts. Infants’ abil-
ities to use such skills in segmenting and decoding the ambient speech signal to induce the lexicon and grammar of their language is
obviously less apparent, leading to large numbers of current studies and models that seek to understand how they “bootstrap” and
expand early linguistic discoveries.
The phonological system of a language also includes rules for the interpretation of prosody, or intonation and stress patterns.
In English, prosodic cues can distinguish between grammatical contrasts, such as the difference between statements and ques-
tions (You’re going. vs. You’re going?). Prosody can also convey emphasis and emotion in language. The status of prosody as a sepa-
rate system is upheld by the finding that some patients with right hemisphere brain damage lose the ability to distinguish
between happy and sad productions of the same sentence. Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder also have difficulty
with this aspect of language. Spoken word recognition is thus enabled by a number of perceptual biases that operate from
the bottom up in analyzing the input signal, combined with the use of top-down knowledge of language-specific phonological
and prosodic rules, vocabulary, and syntax, along with generalized use of context to derive an appropriate interpretation. Such
rapid and complex integration of cues to meaning poses a continuing challenge to the development of computerized spoken
word recognition systems that can successfully mimic human speech perception and production. Both automatic speech recog-
nition (ASR) and text-to-speech synthesis have become increasingly realistic, as evidenced by machines that can understand
increasingly larger amounts of what we say to them, and voices that provide guidance on our mobile devices. However, most
gains in both domains have come from the increasing storage and retrieval capacities of computer technology to identify and
recombine stored acoustic patterns (often pre-programmed to recognize and generate a specialized vocabulary), rather than
implementation of linguistic rules that allow even the youngest of human speaker/listeners to tolerate differences in articulation
from person to person.
 Psycholinguistics 3

The Lexicon
A capable user of a language possesses a vast and complicated mental lexicon, or dictionary, the nature of which is of great interest to
psycholinguists. Most adults know the meanings of 60,000–80,000 words in their language, and can readily comprehend or access
them for communicative purposes. Psycholinguists investigate both how these words are represented in the mental lexicon as well
as how they are rapidly accessed during language production and comprehension.
It is not easy to explain exactly what a word “means.” How is it that one identifies certain objects as chairs, no matter how they
may vary in construction? When does an object deserve the label cup, rather than glass? The difficult problem of explaining how
people categorize and name concrete concepts has been the subject of much research. Proposals that the association of names
with objects is constrained by innate biases in child language acquisition have been an object of continuous psycholinguistic
research. There is also clear evidence, through studies in which lexical access is speeded by priming the listener with semantically
related items, that meaning is used in the word recognition process. Researchers also contrast the knowledge of concrete words such
as cup or chair with abstract notions such as friendship or patriotism, and relative words such as good or short. There is evidence that
factors such as abstractness and relativity of meaning increase task difficulty and influence the order in which children acquire the
meanings of various classes of words. Some types of Freudian slips, in which the speaker retrieves the opposite of the intended
lexical target, also suggest an underlying organization of the mental lexicon along semantic dimensions.
Some words in the language do not easily lend themselves to definition: In the sentence John is frustrated by calculus, what does
by mean? In John wants to sleep, what does to mean? Linguists categorize words such as John, frustrated, and calculus differently from
words like is, by, and to. Words in the first group are content words and those in the second group are function words. Content
words have external referential meaning; function words serve particular functions within the sentence by making the relations
between the content words clearer. The distinction between content and function words is psychologically meaningful. It is,
among other things, possible for psycholinguists to distinguish between the processes used to retrieve these two types of words
in both comprehension and production, using brain imaging techniques. The distinction between content and function words in
mental representation is further upheld by studies of the language of patients who have had damage to the language areas of the
brain (aphasia). Patients with lesions in Broca’s area frequently exhibit agrammatism, a type of aphasia in which content words
are easily produced, whereas function words and other grammatical markers, such as plural endings, may be difficult or impos-
sible to produce.
Normal conversational phenomena also provide insight in to the possible nature of the mental dictionary. In a “tip of the tongue
state,” when we cannot recall a word, why do we often know what its beginning sound is? Speech production errors (slips and
Spoonerisms), such as saying “slickery” rather than “slippery,” or the Reverend Spooner’s, “You have hissed all my mystery lectures.
You have tasted the whole worm,” are of potential value in psycholinguistic modeling. Such performance errors provide evidence
for possible stages in and models of the way we use our mental lexicon in constructing messages, that can be elucidated by brain
imaging techniques as well. They suggest, among other things, that words may not be stored as wholes, and that to access some
words, speakers must retrieve and assemble their components. Some errors suggest that the meanings of words and their
phonological representations are stored separately. Moreover, the fact that the vast majority of speech errors result in real, albeit
inappropriate, words of the language suggests a prearticulatory stage in speech production in which output is scrutinized for lexical
well-formedness, with revision of ill-formed plans as necessary, somewhat like a mental “spellchecker.”.

Morphology, or Word Formation

In English and other languages, one can readily identify meaningful items that are separable parts of words. In a word like cats we
recognize that the final -s signifies the notion of plurality; it can thus be appended to other words we wish to pluralize. Other similar
word endings in English are -ing, as in jumping, -s as in boy’s, and -ed, as in dropped. These suffixes are grammatical morphemes. A
morpheme is the smallest unit of a language that carries definable meaning or grammatical function.
In English, some words consist of only one morpheme. One cannot divide table or the into smaller units that have meaning.
Words like cats, however, comprise two separable but unequal notions. Cat can stand by itself in a sentence; “-s” cannot. A free
morpheme is one that can stand by itself, whereas a bound morpheme, or affix, cannot stand alone. Affixes serve two distinct func-
tions. Some affixes change a word into a new word with a different meaning or grammatical function; these are called derivational
morphemes because they are used to derive a new word. For instance, the affix “-ness” may be added to the adjective kind to derive
the noun kindness.
A second type of bound morpheme provides additional information about a word without changing its part of speech or
meaning. These are inflectional morphemes; in English they mark number in nouns (cat vs. cats), possession (John vs. John’s),
verb tense (eat/eating; study/studied), and subject–verb agreement (I/you/we/they understand vs. he/she/it understands).
The distinctions between content and function words and between free and bound morphemes appear psychologically
significant when one examines language understanding and production. There is both behavioral and brain imaging evidence
that morphologically complex items are decomposed into their constituent units during the process of lexical access. In addition,
slips of the tongue show that these different classes of morphemes are retrieved at different stages of the sentence formulation
process during the process of speaking. After exchanging position, pronunciation is adjusted to the new environments in the errored
output (e.g., he run outs, in which the transposed inflection assumes the allophonic realization of /s/ rather than /z/ appropriate to its
intended position at the end of the word run).
4 Psycholinguistics

Morphological rule learning is also an intense topic of scrutiny in connectionist accounts of language learning, because connec-
tionist models have been relatively successful in replicating children’s patterns of learning and over-regularization errors (e.g., the
transient and quite normal use of “holded” for “held”).

Syntax
Syntax includes rules for combining words into meaningful propositions. Phonological, lexical, and morphological systems are
only part of the competent language user’s armamentarium. It is important to know how to combine words into sentences that
convey meaning, and to be able to interpret the grammar of the language heard.
Young children soon learn the differences signaled by syntax, even before they start combining words themselves. For example,
the sentences “John loves Mary” and “Mary loves John” have very different meanings, although the words are the same in the two
utterances. Their order differs, and in English these different orders signal major differences in meaning. In English, word order is
extremely important: In parsing or processing utterances, we expect the first noun in a sentence to be the subject, and the next to be
its object. We also expect subject nouns to be followed closely by verbs. For these reasons, English is called an S–V–O (subject–verb–
object) language. Approximately 75% of the world’s languages are either S–V–O languages or S–O–V (subject–object–verb)
languages.
Word order in English aids in the interpretation of the relationships among words in a sentence. However, not all sentences of
English are arranged in S–V–O order. For example, the sentences “Mary is loved by John” (a passive construction), “Mary showed
John the old man,” (a dative construction) and “The man who lives next to my sister collects antique cars,” (a center-embedded
relative clause) all violate the typical ordering of subject–verb–object in English. The expectation that words follow a conventional
order in English is a processing heuristic that helps a listener arrive at a rapid and accurate interpretation of many sentences. We all
use typical word order patterns as a comprehension strategy in English. But if word order deviates from the norm, problems in
interpretation can arise; for example, the sentence “The invasion surprised many people” is easier to process than its synonymous
passive “Many people were surprised by the invasion.” Experimental research with children has also shown that initially children
learning English employ an S–V–O word order strategy that leads them to misinterpret passive sentences: Preschoolers, when asked
to select from an array of pictures the one called “The mommy is kissed by the daddy” typically point to a picture showing a woman
kissing a man. In adults, such sentences generate brain activity showing that they violate expectations that listeners have developed
(heuristics) for quickly interpreting sentences while listening or reading.
Sentence processing heuristics vary among languages according to their specific word order typologies. Moreover, the lack of
explicit parsing cues such as the relative clause header “that” in an English sentence, such as “The man felt the dog was poorly
trained,” may cause readers expecting subjects, verbs, and objects to follow each other to initially assume that the man (subject)
was touching his pet. It also appears that the mental lexicon assists the language user by setting up syntactic expectations that accom-
pany word meaning in each language. It is likely that the mental lexical entry for a verb such as “greet,” for example, includes infor-
mation about what greet “means,” and also specifies the requirement that it be followed by a noun phrase in a sentence. Such
a model predicts the psycholinguistic finding that sentences having verbs with a variety of potential arguments appear to be
more difficult to process, compared to those with more limited options.
Sentence ambiguity is another focus of psycholinguistic research. A sentence such as “Visiting relatives can be a nuisance” has
more than one meaning; a complex interaction of parsing preferences and context appears to aid listeners or readers in selecting
the appropriate interpretation. Recent research using functional brain imaging demonstrates that complex and atypical construc-
tions elicit greater cortical activity; additional techniques such as eye-tracking and event-related potentials permit psycholinguists
to track the parsing strategies used in comprehension and the time course for resolving difficult structures.
It is clear that language processing is affected by interactions between linguistic systems and the situational context. Work that
examines the role of context in interpreting ambiguous speech signals and in making logical assumptions in understanding senten-
ces suggests that many kinds of information contribute to the process of language comprehension. Not all of these sources of
information are adequately described by linguistic theory alone and are a challenge for machine speech recognition and translation.

Pragmatics and Discourse

Language users must evaluate what they hear or read within a context. If we are told by a police officer, for instance, “This is
a no-parking zone,” the message is typically taken as more than a simple comment. It may be a warning or a threat. Language
has many uses: It can, among other things, inform, promise, request, query, blame, and even lie. The way language is used in
social contexts is the domain of pragmatics. Pragmatics influences our choice of wording and our interpretation of language
within the social context. Just as there are rules for creating grammatical sentences, there are also linguistic conventions for
the appropriate use of language in various situations.
The situational setting or context of spoken messages is often crucial to their successful interpretation. A woman who says to her
friend standing near the window, “It’s hot in here,” is probably asking her friend to open the window. This indirect statement
contrasts with the more direct utterance, “Open the window.” Although it may appear to complicate conversation, indirect phrasing
is often used to make requests of others, because it is more deferential or polite. Politeness, like grammar, is a complex and rule-
governed linguistic system. However, use and comprehension of such indirect language may pose particular problems for children
and adults with language disorders.
 Psycholinguistics 5

Spoken discourse or text comprehension demands more than successful identification and parsing of words and phrases. Every
speaker of a language must understand connected discourse and the conventions that relate sentences to one another. Much of our
language use involves verbal or written interactions that are longer than a single utterance. Conversation and written text are gov-
erned by discourse conventions that dictate the appropriateness of content, structure, and turn-taking. For example, determining the
reference for a pronoun (anaphoric reference) may require successful processing and retention of large quantities of prior linguistic
information. Conversely, use of a pronoun implies that its antecedent has been previously established. In English, a noun must be
specified before a pronoun can be used. Thus, “I found it!” is a poor opening gambit in conversation with a stranger on a bus, but it
makes perfectly good sense if you have just told her that you have lost your ticket. This skill may be difficult for children to master
and may result in frustrating conversational gambits for parents (e.g., “He hit me!” “Who hit you?”).
There is ample evidence that memory for exact verbal material is rather fleeting; the specific words and sentence structures heard
or read decay rather rapidly, leaving only propositional and more general semantic content. Recall of text usually results in substi-
tution of lexical and syntactic paraphrases for the original material. Additionally, much of what we take to be the meaning of text or
discourse is inferred rather than explicitly stated (as in mistakenly responding that the phrase “John used a hammer” was seen in
a series of sentences that included the phrase, “John nailed the boards together”).
Successful use of language in social settings also requires appropriate modifications when addressing different types of listeners.
Speech styles can vary according to the subject being discussed, the characteristics of the addressee, or the characteristics of the
speaker, as well as according to the medium of discourse (written or spoken, telephoned, or face-to-face, etc.). These specially
marked ways of speaking are called “registers.” The way we talk to babies, the language of a sportscaster, and the speech of a minister
are examples of different registers. Some registers typify casual interaction, whereas others are more appropriate to formal events.
Recent research has shown that the pragmatic system may be less developed than other parts of the language in children with certain
types of developmental disabilities, particularly children on the autism spectrum. Studies of children and adults with autism are
increasingly used to try to identify the cortical bases of pragmatic function in typical speaker-hearers.

Major Themes in Psycholinguistic Research

Rather than characterizing psycholinguistic inquiry according to the structural properties of language, we can also identify major
themes that require integration of linguistic and paralinguistic information across levels of language structure.

How Individuals Understand Spoken and Written Language

The broad area of investigation of understanding language involves scrutiny of the comprehension process at many levels, including
investigation of how speech signals are interpreted by listeners (speech perception), how the meanings of words are found (lexical
access), how the grammatical structure of sentences is analyzed to obtain larger units of meaning (sentence processing), and how
longer conversations or text are appropriately evaluated (discourse). Concerns specifically related to how written language is pro-
cessed are also in this domain. Psycholinguistics also explores language processing in a wide variety of atypical populations,
including individuals with aphasia, acquired reading disorders and dyslexia/alexia, split-brain functioning, deafness, autism, intel-
lectual disability, stuttering, and Williams syndrome. In particular, study of language use following brain damage, and in children
with developmental disorders, has the potential to greatly inform and constrain theories and models of typical language
functioning.

How Individuals Produce Language: Speech Production

It is easier to evaluate the comprehension process than the production process. We can analyze patterns of accuracy and error,
response time, and other behaviors to arrive at a rough estimate of how language stimuli are comprehended by listeners. However,
it is more difficult to gain insight into how ideas are put into linguistic form; the process is largely hidden from observation, and
speakers’ verbal expressions, even in response to controlled eliciting stimuli, vary considerably. Researchers continue to develop
complex models of the production process. Typical models of language production contain multiple stages, beginning with the
meaning that speakers wish to convey; they then proceed to the selection of syntactic structures and intonation contours, the spec-
ification of words from the lexicon, and, finally, phonological rules and commands to the motor system for speech. Major sources of
information about the probable nature of the speech production process can be found in speakers’ speech errors or false starts and in
hesitations and pauses that break the rhythm of ongoing speech, as well as in the time course of language production in brain
imaging experiments.

How Language Is Acquired

The major focus in the domain of language acquisition has been on developmental psycholinguistics, or the acquisition of a first
language by children. Early findings in developmental psycholinguistics countered behaviorist claims about imitation as a basis for
language learning. They showed that young children’s language often contains utterances that do not replicate anything the child
has heard from adults (e.g., “I falled down and hurted myself”); in the earliest stages of language development children also do not
6 Psycholinguistics

use articles such as “a” and “the,” even though these are the most frequent words in English. In an early study (1958) of children’s
acquisition of the English morphological system, Berko showed that preschool-aged children can correctly form the plurals and past
tenses of nonsense words they have never before heard: When shown a picture of a creature called a “wug,” even very young children
could say that two such creatures were “wugs.” This was strong evidence that children were acquiring a rule-governed internal repre-
sentation of the language, and not simply imitating the adults around them.
There has been active and enduring controversy over the respective roles of the environment and innate (or inborn) abilities in
helping the child master language. Do adults teach language to children by using special kinds of language with them, and
providing them with feedback when they have used the language well or poorly? Or do children come into the world with a special,
uniquely human talent that enables them to extrapolate the grammar of a language without overt instruction or correction? Even the
growing body of data on infants’ impressive statistical learning skills does not easily answer these questions.
Chomsky noted two problems that have spurred enduring controversy in the field of child language development, primarily
focused on the problem of acquiring adult-like syntactic skill in a language. The first is what has become known as the degeneracy
problem: the assumption that the language overheard by young children contains many incomplete and ungrammatical sentences,
and that it does not contain the full range of structures used by the language. Thus, there may not be sufficient positive evidence
available to the child to allow adequate, competent development of the syntax of a given language. The second problem relates
to negative evidence. This argument holds that children are not taught that some structures are not permissible in the language,
either through parental correction of their errors or through literal instruction (e.g., “You can say X in English, but you can’t say
Y”). Both the validity and interpretation of such claims are a matter of spirited inquiry and debate within the field of child language
acquisition.
Many child language researchers have proposed that environmental influences play a substantive role in the acquisition of
language by children. It is now clear that vocabulary is primarily determined by the child’s experience with language, a fact that
has spurred early intervention programs aimed at averting educational disadvantage by training and counseling parents. Increas-
ingly, we are finding that infants begin to acquire information about their native language and its processing heuristics early in
development, well before they begin to speak themselves. The study of language development in children has become a formidably
large discipline, with a wide array of journals, texts, and monographs specifically devoted to developmental psycholinguistics.

Further Reading

Altmann, G., 2001. The language machine: psycholinguistics in review. Br. J. Psychol. 92, 129–170.
Anusuya, M., Katti, S., 2011. Front end analysis of speech recognition: a review. Int. J. Speech Technol. 14 (2), 99–145. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10772-010-9088-7.
Aslin, R.N., Newport, E.L., 2014. Distributional Language learning: mechanisms and models of category formation. Lang. Learn. 64, 86–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/
lang.12074.
Berko, J., 1958. The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14, 150–177.
Berko Gleason, J., Ratner, N.B., 1998. Psycholinguistics, second ed. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York.
Berko Gleason, J., Ratner, N.B., 2016. The Development of Language, ninth ed. Pearson, Boston.
Chomsky, N., 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin and Use. Praeger, New York.
Cristia, A., Seidl, A., Junge, C., Soderstrom, M., Hagoort, P., 2014. Predicting individual variation in language from infant speech perception measures. Child. Dev. 85 (4), 1330–
1345. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12193.
Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., et al., 1996. Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Fernald, A., Weisleder, A., 2015. Twenty years after ‘Meaningful Differences,’ it’s time to reframe the ‘deficit’ debate about the importance of children’s early language experience.
Hum. Dev. 58 (1), 1–4.
Kemmerer, D., 2015. Cognitive Neuroscience of Language. Psychology Press, New York, NY.
Levelt, W., 1989. Speaking: From Intention to Articulation. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Levelt, W., 2014. A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyian Era. Oxford University Press, Oxford, GB.
MacWhinney, B., Bates, E., 1989. The Cross-Linguistic Study of Sentence Processing. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Newport, E.L., 2010. Plus or minus 30 years in the language sciences. Top. Cogn. Sci. 2 (3), 367–373. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-8765.2010.01102.x.
Roy, D. The Birth of a Word www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html.
Sedivy, J., 2014. Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Sinauer, Sunderland, MA.
Traxler, M., Gernsbacher, M.A., 2006. Handbook of Psycholinguistics, second ed. Elsevier, NY.
Werker, J.K., 2015. Critical periods in speech perception: new directions. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 66 (1), 173–196.
Xuedong, H., Baker, J., Reddy, R., 2014. A historical perspective of speech recognition. Commun. ACM 57 (1), 94–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2500887.