memoir

I recently finished reading The Articulate Mammal by Jean Aitchison, which is an introduction to psycholinguistics; and I liked it a lot. It deals with the three basic questions of psycholinguistics:

1. “Do humans acquire language because they are born equipped with some special linguistic ability? Or are they able to learn language because they are highly intelligent animals who are skilled at solving problems of various types? Or could it be a mixture of these two possibilities?”
2. “How … does usage link up with knowledge?”
3. “What actually happens when a person produces or comprehends a chunk of speech?”

And it does so in a very accessible style. Although it is not a popular science book, I believe it can be read by non-linguists or non-psychologists without a lot of difficulty.

Its only weakness is that it focuses mainly on Chomsky's theories; other ideas are only mentioned as far as they criticise Chomsky, and are not laid out in as much detail. It does give a good overview, though, and there are suggestions for further reading for every chapter, which, together, makes it a great introduction.

I especially recommend it to beginning students of linguistics. When I took an “Introduction to Linguistics” class we had to learn X-Bar syntax without anyone telling us why one would think of syntactic structures as trees, we only learned how to construct those trees. Or the idea of the mental lexicon: it just came up at some point, but again, no one ever explained why it was thought of in that way. I think some basic psycholinguistics should even be mandatory – or integrated into linguistics introductions. So if you are a student of linguistics and didnt't get the chance to visit a psycholinguistics course, I urge you to at least read this book.