Extract from the preface

The following papers are concerned with topics from three major areas of the psychology of language, viz. the structure, the acquisition, and the use of the knowledge underlying linguistic behavior.
Chapter 1 briefly indicates how these three aspects are organized, interrelated and connected to other mental capacities. Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the structure of knowledge, focussing on the representation of meaning and its relation to syntactic form on the one hand and to extra-linguistic knowledge on the other hand. Chapter 4 explores a number of conditions involved in one of the major areas of language acquisition, viz. that of lexical knowledge – or rather its semantic aspect.
The remaining two chapters are devoted to problems of language use. Chapter 5 discusses certain basic assumptions relating to language understanding, coping with the fact that understanding linguistic expressions reconciles non-linear aspects of their structure with the basically left-to-right and largely on-line nature of processing. Chapter 6 finally deals with mechanisms of language production, using spontaneous errors as evidence for the nature of these mechanisms and their dependence on linguistic structure.