Speaking and Thinking

This book is based on an in-depth filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Victor Ferreira, Professor of Psychology and Principal Investigator at the Language Production Lab at the University of California at San Diego. This extensive conversation explores Victor Ferreira's research, which is focused on language production and communication, especially with regard to grammar, lexical structure and speaker-hearer interaction, and his interests to incorporate computational and quantitative modelling of cognitive processing.

Topics under discussion include key experimental results that change our view of what is actually going on when two people talk to each other, giving us new insight into the structure of language and also how many aspects of linguistics are related to our current understanding of how the brain and mind function.

This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, The Tip of the Tongue, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter:

I. Linguistic Beginnings- In search of relevance
II. Minimizing Ambiguity- Finding a linguistic drosophila
III. Retrieval- Towards objective measurements
IV. The Division of Labor- Examining message formulation
V. Disambiguating Ambiguity- Linguistic vs. conceptual
VI. Probing with Pronouns- A future experiment
VII. Grammar- Examining its function
VIII. Monitoring- Speaking carefully
IX. In the Brain- Brain imaging and language
X. Philosophical Divertimento- Brain vs. Mind
XI. Language and Thought- The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
XII. Future Investigations- Environmental impacts and big data
XIII. Mind-Brain Redux- The debate continues...