The Articulate Mammal

An established bestseller, The Articulate Mammal is a concise and highly readable introduction to the main topics in psycholinguistics. This fifth edition brings the book up-to-date with recent theories, including new material on:

• the possibility of a ‘language gene’
• post-Chomskyan ideas
• language within an evolutionary framework
• spatial cognition and how this affects language
• how children become acclimatized to speech rhythms before birth
• the acquisition of verbs
• construction and cognitive grammar
• aphasia and dementia.

Requiring no prior knowledge of the subject, chapter by chapter, The Articulate Mammal tackles the basic questions central to the study of psycholinguistics. Jean Aitchison investigates these issues with regard to animal communication, child language and the language of adults, and includes in the text full references and helpful suggestions for further reading.

The accompanying website to this book can be found at: routledge.com/textbooks/9780415420228.

Jean Aitchison was Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford from 1993 to 2003, and is now an Emeritus Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. She is the author of numerous books on language and gave the 1996 BBC Reith lectures on the topic of ‘The Language Web’.