An Introduction to Psycholinguistics

This book provides a comprehensive and rigorous introduction to psycholinguistics, the interdisciplinary science of how the human mind produces, understands, and acquires language. Tracing the field's history from 19th-century clinical neurology to the current era of Large Language Models, the text explores language as a finely tuned biological system shaped by evolution. It details the 'production pipeline' from preverbal intention to motor execution, the predictive nature of real-time sentence parsing, and the networked organization of the mental lexicon. The book places a significant emphasis on the biological 'blueprint,' examining the Broca-Wernicke circuit and the insights gained from linguistic breakdowns such as aphasia and dyslexia. Further chapters tackle the complexities of the bilingual brain and the controversial Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. By integrating information theory, modern neuroimaging, and computational modeling, the text offers a deep dive into the cognitive architecture that makes human communication unique. It concludes with an analysis of the 'data gap' between AI and human learning, reinforcing language as a fundamentally social and biological achievement.