Originally published in 1985 this title was an important new teaching text at the time. Alan Garnham focuses on current theories about the central cognitive aspects of language understanding, and attempts to reflect the emergence of cognitive science, an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of language and other cognitive processes. As well as describing psychological studies, the text includes ideas from linguistics, artificial intelligence, the philosophy of language and formal logic.

Acknowledgements Preface 1 Introduction - how to study language understanding 2 The contribution of linguistics 3 Recognizing words 4 Parsing - the computation of syntactic structure 5 Introduction to the concept of meaning 6 Word meaning 7 Understanding discourse and text 8 The structure of the language processor 9 Language production and its relation to comprehension 10 Overview and future directions References Name index Subject index