Product Description

A unique book integrating research in language aquisition, psycholinguistics and neuropsychology to give a comprehensive picture of the process we call 'comprehension'. The empahsis of the book is on children with specific language impairments.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #97038 in Books
• Published on: 1998-02-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From the Back Cover
A great deal has been written on how children learn to speak, but development of language comprehension has been a relatively neglected topic. This book is unique in integrating research in language acquisition, psycholinguistics and neuropsychology to give a comprehensive picture of the process we call "comprehension", right from the reception of an acoustic stimulus at the ear, up to the point where we interpret the message the speaker intended to convey by the utterance. A major theme of the book is that "comprehension" is not a unitary skill: to understand spoken language, one needs the ability to classify incoming speech sounds, to relate them to a "mental lexicon", to interpret the propositions encoded by word order and grammatical inflections, and to use information from the environmental and social context to select, from a wide range of possible interpretations, the one that was intended by the speaker. Furthermore, although neuropsychological and experimental research on adult comprehension can provide useful concepts and methods for assessing comprehension, they should be applied with caution, because a sequential, bottom-up information processing model of comprehension is ill-suited to the developmental context.
The emphasis of the book is on children with specific language impairments, but normal development is also given extensive coverage. The focus is on research and theory, rather than practical matters of assessment and intervention. Nevertheless, while this book is not intended as a clinical guide to assessment, it does aim to provide a theoretical framework that can help clinicians develop a clearer understanding of what comprehension involves, and how different types of difficulty may be pinpointed.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding range and depth.
This book should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in linguistics, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language as they could be applied to understanding language pathologies, e.g. in autistic children.

It provides a substantial antidote of practial psycholinguistic experience to the usual circuituous reasoning of these other fields. While the author's main focus is on language impairment, it is the background knowledge that is simply shackled to the task that is most striking.

No single theory is examined at length, be it phonology, morphology or grammar, but sufficent bits and pieces are available to make the book more than just a interesting blend of ideas. It is difficult to introduce a range of differing, and often conflicting models, without reducing a text to the academic equivalent of a dog's dinner. The author, to her credit, admirably and illuminatingly avoids this pitfall.

The primary audiences for the book are psychologists and speech and language therapists, but many other research groups would benefit from studying her work and by paying attention to her 'feet on the ground' accounts of language usage and problems.

I was aware that the author has a long standing interest in autism before buying the book, and it was useful to have her thoughts on autistic communication problems collected here.

Taken as a whole, the book is excellent value. Possibly not sufficiently replete with hard core formalism to charm every linguist, but very useful to anyone interested in the psychological reality of language usage and dysfunction.

Review
For anybody with a deeper or even just superficial interest in language and its development.