Word recognition is the component of reading which involves the identification of individual words. Together the two volumes of Visual Word Recognition offer a state-of-the-art overview of contemporary research from leading figures in the field. This first volume outlines established theory, new models and key experimental evidence used to investigate visual word recognition: lexical decision and word naming. It also considers methodological concerns: new developments in large databases, and how these have been applied to theoretical questions; and control considerations when dealing with words as stimuli. Finally, the book considers the visual-orthographic input to the word recognition system: from the left and right-hand sides of vision, through the processing of letters and their proximity, to the similarity and confusability of words, and the contribution of the spoken-phonological form of the word. The two volumes serve as a state-of-the-art, comprehensive overview of the field. They are essential reading for researchers of visual word recognition, as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students of cognition and cognitive psychology, specifically the psychology of language and reading. They will also be of use to those working in education and speech-language therapy.

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.

Writing is one of humankind's greatest inventions, and modern societies could not function if their citizens could not read and write. How do skilled readers pick up meaning from markings on a page so quickly, and how do children learn to do so? The chapters in the Oxford Handbook of Reading synthesize research on these topics from fields ranging from vision science to cognitive psychology and education, focusing on how studies using a cognitive approach can shed light on how the reading process works. To set the stage, the opening chapters present information about writing systems and methods of studying reading, including those that examine speeded responses to individual words as well as those that use eye movement technology to determine how sentences and short passages of text are processed. The following section discusses the identification of single words by skilled readers, as well as insights from studies of adults with reading disabilities due to brain damage. Another section considers how skilled readers read a text silently, addressing such issues as the role of sound in silent reading and how readers' eyes move through texts. Detailed quantitative models of the reading process are proposed throughout. The final sections deal with how children learn to read and spell, and how they should be taught to do so. These chapters review research with learners of different languages and those who speak different dialects of a language; discuss children who develop typically as well as those who exhibit specific disabilities in reading; and address questions about how reading should be taught with populations ranging from preschoolers to adolescents, and how research findings have influenced education. The Oxford Handbook of Reading will benefit researchers and graduate students in the fields of cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, education, and related fields (e.g., speech and language pathology) who are interested in reading, reading instruction, or reading disorders.

Word recognition is the component of reading which involves the identification of individual words. Together the two volumes of Visual Word Recognition offer a state-of-the-art overview of contemporary research from leading figures in the field. This second volume examines how research on word recognition has been linked to the study of concepts and meaning, such as how morphemes affect word recognition, how the meaning of words affects their processing and the effect of priming on the processing of words. The book also discusses eye-movement research, the reading of whole sentences and passages, how bilinguals recognize words in different languages, individual differences in visual word recognition, and the development of visual word recognition difficulties in developmental dyslexia. The two volumes serve as a state-of-the-art, comprehensive overview of the field. They are essential reading for researchers of visual word recognition, and students on undergraduate and postgraduate courses in cognition and cognitive psychology, specifically the psychology of language and reading. They will also be of use to those working in education and speech-language therapy.

In the study of bilingualism, the lexical level of language is of prime importance because, in practical terms, vocabulary acquisition is an essential prerequisite for the development of skill in language use; from a theoretical point of view, the mental lexicon, as a bridge between form and meaning, plays a crucial role in any model of language processing. A central issue in this volume is at which level of the bilingual speaker's lexicon languages share representations and how language-specific representations may be linked. The contributors favor a dynamic, developmental perspective on bilingualism, which takes account of the change of the mental lexicon over time and pays considerable attention to the acquisition phase. Several papers deal with the level of proficiency and its consequences for bilingual lexical processing, as well as the effects of practice. This discussion raises numerous questions about the notion of (lexical) proficiency and how this can be established by objective standards, an area of study that invites collaboration between researchers working from a theoretical and from a practical background.

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).