Margaret Harris is Emeritus Professor of Psychology in the School of Psychology, Social Work and Public Health, Oxford Brookes University, UK. Her main interests are in the development of written and spoken language, and she has published widely in this area. Much of her research in the past two decades has focused on the language development of deaf children, especially the dynamics of deaf and hearing mothers’ communication with their deaf children and literacy attainment in deaf school children and young people.Max Colheart is Emeritus Professor in the School of Psychological Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the British Academy. He is currently working on the cognitive neuropsychology and computational psychology of reading and on several topics in cognitive neuropsychiatry, especially delusional belief.

• Part 1 1. Introduction Part 2: Language processing in children 2. Learning to talk: the earliest stages 3. Learning to talk: later developments 4. Learning to read 5. Developmental disorders of language Part 3: Language processing in adults 6. Understanding language: recognising words 7. Understanding language: interpreting sentences 8. Producing language 9. Acquired disorders of language

Review of the first publication:‘…a very useful introductory text to the general area of language processing.’— Applied Psycholinguistics, Volume 10, Issue 1