The Articulate Mammal: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics

It was a gift for my sister who is getting her degree in English. The book seems to be very interesting and I would be interested in reading it myself if I didn't have to ship it overseas, where my sister lives....

Aitchison does a fine job of surveying the field of psycholinguistics and providing an introduction to the field. As always, she is concise, witty, and apropos. The strength of this book lies in the author's ability to summarise the various theories and evaluate them. I particularly enjoyed her evaluation of Chomsky through the introduction of his grammar to "Jupiter's stick insects." Jean Aitchison is quickly becoming my favourite linguistics writer for her ability to explain complex linguistics points with ease. Some mammals tend to be more articulate than others; indeed some tend to obfuscate rather than articulate. Aitchison is clearly more articulate than most.

This book is an accessible and delightful introduction to the field of linguistics. Some of its strong points:* Good coverage both of the arguments for standard Chomskyan theory, and the experimental evidence that fails to support it * Excellent coverage of child language acquisition * Explanations of important experiments--how they worked, what they showed, and why they mean what they meanI've used this book successfully in 3 introductory psycholinguistics courses, and have sent a chapter from it to my grandmother to explain what linguistics is. Can't get more accessible than that! At the same time, though, it's useful for anyone who wants to get a handle on the field; it's where I go when I want a refresher.