Jean Aitchison was Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford from 1993 to 2003, and is now an Emeritus Professorial Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford. She is the author of numerous books on language and gave the 1996 BBC Reith lectures on the topic of ‘The Language Web’.

• Foreword to the Routledge Classics Edition  Preface to the first edition.  Preface to the fifth edition.  Introduction  1.The great automatic grammatizator  2.Animals that try to talk  3.Grandmama’s teeth  4.Predestinate grooves  5.A blueprint in the brain?  6.Chattering children  7.Puzzling it out  8.Celestial unintelligibility  9.The white elephant problem  10.The case of the missing fingerprint  11.The Cheshire Cat’s grin  12.Banker’s clerk or hippopotamus?  Suggestions for further reading  ReferencesIndex

‘An excellent and very welcome guide to psycholinguistics…highly recommended.’The Washington Post‘The reader’s curiosity about the complexities of the mother tongue is kept right to the end.’The Times Educational Supplement‘This is an excellent text which would give the undergraduate student as fine an introduction to the field of psycholinguistics as is available today.’Choice