'An excellent and very welcome guide to psycholinguistics...highly recommended.' The Washington Post 'The reader's curiosity about the complexities of the mother tongue is kept right to the end.' The times Educational supplement 'This is an excellent text which would give the undergraduate student as fine an introduction to the field of psycholinguistics as is available today.' Choice This concise and readable introduction to psycholinguistics requires on prior knowledge of the subject. Jean aitchison addresses key questions such as: Is language restricted to humans? Is there biologica evidence for innate language capacity? How do children learn language? How do we understand and produce speech? This widley used and highly successful book has been extensively revised. In this 4th edition, Jean Aitchison covers new work on 'talking animals', on language and the brain, on child language, and speech understanding. She also discusses the pros and cons of Chomsky's recent ideas. As a result, several chapters of the book have been largely rewritten, and new references have been added throughout. 作者简介： Jean Aitchison is the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and communication at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow at Worcester College. Her other publications include Words in the Mind (2nd edn 1994)and The Seeds of speech(1996). She gave the 1996 BBC Reith lectures on 'the language web', also now published as a book(1997).