The most frequently used words in English are highly ambiguous; for example, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 94 meanings for the word "run" as a verb alone. Yet people rarely notice this ambiguity. Solving this puzzle has commanded the efforts of cognitive scientists for many years. The solution most often identified is "context": we use the context of utterance to determine the proper meanings of words and sentences. The problem then becomes specifying the nature of context and how it interacts with the rest of an understanding system. The difficulty becomes especially apparent in the attempt to write a computer program to understand natural language. Lexical ambiguity resolution (LAR), then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research. A collection of the best research on LAR available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. Part I, Computer Models, describes nine attempts to discover the processes necessary for disambiguation by implementing programs to do the job. Part II, Empirical Studies, goes into the laboratory setting to examine the nature of the human disambiguation mechanism and the structure of ambiguity itself. A primary goal of this volume is to propose a cognitive science perspective arising out of the conjunction of work and approaches from neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence--thereby encouraging a closer cooperation and collaboration among these fields. Lexical Ambiguity Resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in AI, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics.

Research concerning structure and processing in the mental lexicon has achieved central prominence within cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. Historically, however, much of the research on the lexicon focussed not on its role in language comprehension, but as a medium for studying semantic memory. This picture has changed in recent years, with much more research examining the role of lexical processes and output in language comprehension.Gathered together in this volume is the work of some of those researchers who are responsible for this shift of emphasis. Chapters deal with the role of sentence contexts in word recognition, processes involved in the activation and enhancement of lexical information, and the interaction of lexical and syntactic information in sentence processing. A wide range of theoretical and empirical issues relating to language understanding are discussed.

Our ability to speak, write, understand speech and read is critical to our ability to function in today's society. As such, psycholinguistics, or the study of how humans learn and use language, is a central topic in cognitive science. This comprehensive handbook is a collection of chapters written not by practitioners in the field, who can summarize the work going on around them, but by trailblazers from a wide array of subfields, who have been shaping the field of psycholinguistics over the last decade. Some topics discussed include how children learn language, how average adults understand and produce language, how language is represented in the brain, how brain-damaged individuals perform in terms of their language abilities and computer-based models of language and meaning. This is required reading for advanced researchers, graduate students and upper-level undergraduates who are interested in the recent developments and the future of psycholinguistics.

Now in full colour, this fully revised edition of the best-selling textbook provides an up-to-date and comprehensive introduction to the psychology of language for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers. It contains everything the student needs to know about how we acquire, understand, produce, and store language. Whilst maintaining both the structure of the previous editions and the emphasis on cognitive processing, this fourth edition has been thoroughly updated to include: the latest research, including recent results from the fast-moving field of brain imaging and studies updated coverage of key ideas and models an expanded glossary more real-life examples and illustrations. The Psychology of Language, Fourth Edition is praised for describing complex ideas in a clear and approachable style, and assumes no prior knowledge other than a grounding in the basic concepts of cognitive psychology. It will be essential reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of cognition, psycholinguistics, or the psychology of language. It will also be useful for those on speech and language therapy courses. The book is supported by a companion website featuring a range of helpful supplementary resources for both students and lecturers.

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The other volume looks at the processes of recognizing a word visually and the performance of word-based tasks. Here the focus widens, and psychologists consider such recognition as a link to semantics and concepts, cognitive individual differences, reading prose, and learning to read. Their topics include meaning-based influences on visual word recognition, eye movements and word recognition during reading, bilingual visual word recognition in sentence context, the effect of lexical quality on individual differences in skilled visual word recognition and reading, and how visual word recognition is affected by developmental dyslexia. Psychology Press is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. Annotation ©2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

This book showcases the advantages of masked priming as an alternative to more standard methods of studying language.