Overview

Plain Language: A Psycholinguistic Approach employs principles from the field of psycholinguistics to explore factors that make a sentence or text easy or difficult to process by the cognitive mechanisms that support language processing, and describes how levels of difficulty might function within bureaucratic power structures. Drawing from experimental data on readability, the author employs a metaphor of three ""ghost"" readers in the mind that exist and interact with each other: the syntactic reader (the one searching for the structure), the statistical reader (the one driven by previous experiences), and finally the pragmatic reader (the one searching for meaning). The penultimate chapter concerns a novel psycholinguistic experiment showing that complexly written texts may prevent adult citizens with average literacy skills from accessing important information related to their health, work, and right to representation, thereby drawing a line between the psycholinguistics of language comprehension and the maintenance of existing power structures. Written in plain language itself, this book is designed to be easily understandable from an undergraduate level and makes for fascinating reading for all students and researchers in linguistics and psycholinguistics, as well as supplementary reading for students of sociolinguistics and related modules. Students, researchers, and interested general readers will develop an understanding that knowing how the mind reads and understands language can help stakeholders to ensure equal access to information and democratic processes.

Full Product Details

Author:   Stefano Rastelli
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
ISBN:  

9781032794914

ISBN 10:   1032794917
Pages:   208
Publication Date:   29 November 2024
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Tertiary & Higher Education ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Table of Contents

Introduction Chapter 1: Basic Notions Chapter 2: A Closer Look at Plain Language: Motivations, Name, Origins and Rules Chapter 3: Plain Language Myths Chapter 4: Meaning of ‘Plain’ in Language Research Chapter 5: A Little Difficult is Better Chapter 6: Language Usability Chapter 7: Psycholinguistics and Plain Language, Part One: Language Processing Chapter 8: Psycholinguistics and Plain Language, Part Two: The Data Chapter 9: Psycholinguistics and Plain Language, Part Three: A Reader’s Memory Chapter 10: The Syntactic Reader Chapter 11: The Statistical Reader Chapter 12: The Pragmatic Reader Chapter 13: Making Spoken Language Plain. A Timed Crossmodal Forced-Choice Experiment Chapter 14: Conclusion. Fifteen Points of Attention References Index

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Author Information

Stefano Rastelli teaches Psycholinguistics at the University of Pavia (Italy) where he directs the Laboratorio di Linguistica e Glottodidattica Sperimentale (LLEGS). He regularly publishes experimental research on syntax, second language acquisition, language usability and statistical learning.

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