For centuries, scientists have pondered how humans translate thought into language and where language processes occur in the brain. This chapter focuses on modern advances in both psycholinguistics (the field focused on specifying the psychological processes that mediate language behaviors) and neurolinguistics (the field focused on determining the neural correlates of linguistic skills), with a heavier emphasis on the latter, due to the recent tendency to combine psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic aspects into a single model. Given that both psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics have roots in work started by aphasiologists in the mid 19th century, the chapter begins with a historical overview of the neurobiology of language and aphasia before turning to developments in these fields within the last 20 years. The review centers on contemporary neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic models of semantics, phonology, and syntax and the corresponding evidence for these models drawn primarily from studies of neurologically healthy adults and individuals with aphasia.

Chapter 3 focuses on agreement attraction, one of the most well-studied phenomena in psycholinguistics. Linguistic dependencies, particularly subject–verb number agreement, are disrupted by attractors – intervening elements that have the correct information in the wrong position. Attractors lead to the formation of illicit grammatical dependencies, creating the illusion that ungrammatical sentences are acceptable or that well-formed sentences are not. Focusing primarily on subject–verb number agreement, the chapter introduces readers to experimental paradigms used to study attraction effects in sentence production and comprehension. It discusses key factors that modulate attraction, including number morphology, sentence complexity, and the syntactic properties of attractors. A major theme is how attraction-based interference reveals underlying principles of memory encoding and retrieval and real-time language processing. The chapter also introduces methodological tools, such as factorial designs, and experimental techniques like self-paced reading and eye-tracking, which have been critical in uncovering how agreement attraction operates in moment-to-moment language comprehension.

This chapter examines the essential role of research in the field of applied linguistics, outlining its nature, scope, and significance in addressing real-world language-related challenges. It begins by defining applied linguistics, providing a foundation for understanding its multifaceted applications in areas such as language teaching, learning, communication, and language use. The chapter also traces the historical development of applied linguistics as an independent research discipline, emphasizing the theoretical and practical relevance of research in advancing the field. You will explore key domains of applied linguistics research, identifying their importance and interconnections, as well as the central research questions that drive inquiry. By examining the benefits and values of applied linguistics research, you will gain an understanding of how research informs and enhances practices within the field. By the end of this chapter, you will comprehend the nature and scope of applied linguistics as a discipline and recognize the contributions of research to your understanding of language-related issues.

This chapter provides an overview of empirical support for Construction Grammar in the form of behavioral evidence, that is, information derived from the behavior of language users on certain tasks, typically through controlled experiments. Three types of evidence are discussed in particular: (i) evidence from language comprehension tasks that syntactic patternsconvey meaning independently of individual lexical items, (ii) evidence that constructions prime each other both in form and in meaning, and (iii) evidence that grammar consists of a network of related constructions of varying degrees of generality. Many of the cited studies come from the psycholinguistic literature, and even though they were originally not necessarily framed in terms of constructions, their findings are largely in line with the constructional approach. Throughout the discussion, it will be shown how these findings provide evidence for some of the core tenets of Construction Grammar.

“Writing Is a System” debunks the popular view that writing is an art, best learned by reading selections of good writing and practicing composing. Instead, writing is a system that involves understanding what factors make sentences seem easy to read and paragraphs well organized. This chapter also examines the relevance of readability scores in assessing writing.

Mutual engagement between psycholinguistic and variationist sociolinguistic research is important: work to date shows quite different outcomes from these approaches. This chapter illustrates that, in general, heritage speakers maintain the grammatical structures and vocabulary of homeland varieties, in contradiction to widely held beliefs that language quickly “degrades” or is “bastardized” in immigrant communities, and in contradiction to many published studies about heritage languages. However, both approaches converge on finding change in one phonetic pattern in some of the languages analyzed. In this chapter, the potential sources of this apparent contradiction are explored, considering differences related to population, sample, methods of data collection, analysis, and predictors. This allows us to better understand whether, for example, reported “deficits” among heritage language speakers might be partly due to a deficit in test-taking and experience with formal contexts in the heritage language. It closes with a proposal for more coordinated work across methods.

The introduction to this volume describes its content. It also provides the rationale for including selected topics and provides comments on the manner of presentation adopted in this volume.

Computational psycholinguistics seeks to develop computational theories and implemented models of the cognitive systems that map an unfolding linguistic signal onto a mental representation of its meaning. Focusing primarily on language comprehension, this chapter begins with early theories of sentence processing, before reviewing several prominent implemented computational models. These accounts are largely informed by reading-time studies that seek to establish the strategies and constraints that determine how people resolve ambiguity. This review concludes with a more in-depth discussion of rational probabilistic accounts, for which there has been considerable consensus in recent years, and surprisal theory, which formally links these models with measures of human comprehension effort, such as reading times and brain potentials. Finally, an implemented neurobehavioral model of language comprehension is presented in greater detail, illustrating the benefit of linking computational models with several behavioral and neurophysiological indices of human comprehension, as well as the importance of looking beyond syntactic processing alone to the modeling of semantic comprehension and the role of world knowledge.