Section A. Introduction : The study of language : Why study language and why is it so difficult ; What is language? ; How has language changed over time? ; What is language for? ; The history and methods of psycholinguistics ; Models in psycholinguistics ; Language and the brain ; Themes and controversies -- Describing language : How to describe speech sounds ; Consonants ; Vowels ; Syllables ; Linguistic approaches to syntax -- Section B. The biological and developmental bases of language : The foundation of language : Where did language come from? ; Do animals have language? ; The biological basis of language ; Is there a critical period for language development? ; The cognitive basis of language ; The social basis of language ; The language development of visually and hearing-impaired children ; What is the relation between language and thought?-- Language development : What drives language development? ; The language acquisition device ; How children develop language ; Phonological development ; Lexical and semantic development ; Syntactic development -- Bilingualism and second language acquisition : Bilingualism ; Second language acquisition ; Evaluation of work on bilingualism and second language acquisition -- Section C. Word recognition : Recognizing visual words : Basic methods and findings ; What makes word recognition easier (or harder)? ; Attentional processes in visual word recognition ; Do different tasks give consistent results? ; Is there a dedicated visual word recognition system? ; Meaning-based facilitation of visual word recognition ; Processing morphologically complex words ; Models of visual word recognition ; Coping with lexical ambiguity-- Reading : The writing system : A preliminary model of reading ; The processes of normal reading ; The neuroscience of adult reading disorders ; Models of word naming ; Connectionist models of dyslexia ; Comparison of models -- Learning to read and spell : Normal reading development ; Phonological awareness ; How should reading be taught? ; Learning to spell ; Developmental dyslexia -- Understanding speech : Recognizing speech ; Models of speech recognition ; The neuroscience of spoken word recognition -- Section D. Meaning and using language : Understanding the structure of sentences ; Dealing with structural ambiguity ; Early work in parsing ; Processing structural ambiguity ; Gaps, traces, and unbounded dependencies ; The neuroscience of parsing -- Word meaning : Classic approaches to semantics ; Semantic networks ; Semantic features ; Family resemblance models ; Combining concepts ; Figurative language ; The neuroscience of semantics ; Connectionist approaches to semantics-- Comprehension : Memory of text and inferences ; Reference and ambiguity ; Models of text processing ; Individual differences in comprehension skills ; The neuroscience of text processing -- Section E. Production and other aspects of language : Language production : Slips of the tongue ; Syntactic planning ; Lexicalization ; Phonological encoding ; The analysis of hesitations ; The neuroscience of speech productions ; Writing and agraphia -- How do we use language? : Making inferences in conversation ; The structure of conversation ; Collaboration in dialog -- The structure of language system : What are the modules of language? ; How many lexicons are there? ; Language and short-term memory -- New directions : Themes in psycholinguistics revisited ; Some growth areas? -- Appendix : Connectionism : Interactive activation models ; Back-propagation -- Glossary : Example of sentence analysis.