Psychology of Language: A Critical Introduction

‘Appealing in its attempt to approach the psychology of language from a wide range of often controversial viewpoints…Forrester’s book is a book of reflection. The work constitutes a nice addition to the alternative book library of the advanced graduate student or academic’ - Contemporary Psychology This comprehensive textbook brings together diverse themes on the psychology of language in an integrated way. Rather than covering only the formal-structural aspects of language, Forrester provides a broad view of the study of language across various perspectives, focusing throughout on interesting relationships between language and human psychological processes. The book provides a clear introduction to key topics from language structure and processing, semantics and cognitive science, to conversation analysis, reading and writing, power relations in communication and postmodern psychology. The author explores language by considering three themes: thinking - the cognitive processes of self-communication; talk - where the emphasis is on everyday conversational behaviour; and text - including the study of reading and writing.A coherent framework is developed by looking at topics which link the themes together, clearly demonstrating the relationship between language and communication processes.