The Psychology of Language: From Data to Theory

My lecturer recommended this book for my cognitive psychology class. I'm not familiar with other books on the subject, but it covers a lot of material that is not found in more general cognitive textbooks. Unfortunately there are a lot of distracting mistakes and/or vague language, and some actually change the meaning of what Harley is saying. This is bad enough in a novel, but when you are trying to understand new or difficult concepts, it's especially confusing. For example, p. 183 'all words should be treated in respect of the regularity of their spelling-to-sound correspondences...' I may be wrong, but I think he meant irrespective of, since the dual route model predicts that all words can be accessed by the direct route regardless of regularity. Either way it's confusing and Harley could do with being a lot clearer. I hear a new edition is coming out, so hopefully some of the problems will be fixed. I can't imagine how difficult it is to write a textbook, but I've worked in publishing long enough to know when an editor hasn't been doing their job.