Do high-speed, complicated arithmetic in your head using the Trachtenberg Speed System. Ever find yourself struggling to check a bill or a payslip? With The Trachtenberg Speed System you can. Described as the 'shorthand of mathematics', the Trachtenberg system only requires the ability to count from one to eleven. Using a series of simplified keys it allows anyone to master calculations, giving greater speed, ease in handling numbers and increased accuracy. Jakow Trachtenberg believed that everyone is born with phenomenal abilities to calculate. He devised a set of rules that allows every child to make multiplication, division, addition, subtraction and square-root calculations with unerring accuracy and at remarkable speed. It is the perfect way to gain confidence with numbers.

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field, and hence relationships are at its heart. First and foremost is the relationship between its two parent disciplines, psychology and linguistics, a relationship which has changed and advanced over the half century of the field's independent existence. At the beginning of the 21st Century, psycholinguistics forms part of the rapidly developing enterprise known as cognitive neuroscience, in which the relationship between biology and behavior plays a central role. Psycholinguistics is about language in communication, so that the relationship between language production and comprehension has always been important, and as psycholinguistics is an experimental discipline, it is likewise essential to find the right relationship between model and experiment. This book focuses in turn on each of these four cornerstone relationships: Psychology and Linguistics, Biology and Behavior, Production and Comprehension, and Model and Experiment. The authors are from different disciplinary backgrounds, but share a commitment to clarify the ways that their research illuminates the essential nature of the psycholinguistic enterprise.

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field, and hence relationships are at its heart. First and foremost is the relationship between its two parent disciplines, psychology and linguistics, a relationship which has changed and advanced over the half century of the field's independent existence. At the beginning of the 21st Century, psycholinguistics forms part of the rapidly developing enterprise known as cognitive neuroscience, in which the relationship between biology and behavior plays a central role. Psycholinguistics is about language in communication, so that the relationship between language production and comprehension has always been important, and as psycholinguistics is an experimental discipline, it is likewise essential to find the right relationship between model and experiment.
This book focuses in turn on each of these four cornerstone relationships: Psychology and Linguistics, Biology and Behavior, Production and Comprehension, and Model and Experiment. The authors are from different disciplinary backgrounds, but share a commitment to clarify the ways that their research illuminates the essential nature of the psycholinguistic enterprise.

Spoken word access processes are the mental processes which underlie our ability to recognise spoken words. They are the perceptual processes which take the sequence of buzzes, bursts and chirps that make up the raw speech signal and convert them into a sequence of words. This edited volume contains articles and short reports which examine these processes. These papers are based on presentations at the workshop Spoken Word Access Processes (SWAP), held in Nijmegen in May 2000. They cover the major issues that the field is now concerned with, and thus provide a snapshot of the current state of the SWAP art. Core representational issues about spoken words are addressed: the form of the representations which are used to access the mental lexicon; how phonological information is coded in the lexicon; and how morphological and semantic information about each word is stored. The main components of the lexical access process are also discussed: competition between candidate words; computation of goodness-of-fit between the signal and stored lexical knowledge; segmentation of continuous speech into words; whether there is feedback from the lexicon to earlier stages of processing; and the relationship of form-based processes to the processes responsible for deriving interpretations of utterances. This collection should be essential reading for those working in this or related areas of psycholinguistics. An introductory article is included which makes this research more accessible to students in cognitive psychology and phonetics, and to specialists in other fields of psychology and linguistics.

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Spoken word access processes are the mental processes which underlie our ability to recognise spoken words. They are the perceptual processes which take the sequence of buzzes, bursts and chirps that make up the raw speech signal and convert them into a sequence of words. This edited volume contains articles and short reports which examine these processes. These papers are based on presentations at the workshop Spoken Word Access Processes (SWAP), held in Nijmegen in May 2000. They cover the major issues that the field is now concerned with, and thus provide a snapshot of the current state of the SWAP art. Core representational issues about spoken words are addressed: the form of the representations which are used to access the mental lexicon; how phonological information is coded in the lexicon; and how morphological and semantic information about each word is stored. The main components of the lexical access process are also discussed: competition between candidate words; computation of goodness-of-fit between the signal and stored lexical knowledge; segmentation of continuous speech into words; whether there is feedback from the lexicon to earlier stages of processing; and the relationship of form-based processes to the processes responsible for deriving interpretations of utterances. This collection should be essential reading for those working in this or related areas of psycholinguistics. An introductory article is included which makes this research more accessible to students in cognitive psychology and phonetics, and to specialists in other fields of psychology and linguistics.

An argument that the way we listen to speech is shaped by our experience with our native language. Understanding speech in our native tongue seems natural and effortless; listening to speech in a nonnative language is a different experience. In this book, Anne Cutler argues that listening to speech is a process of native listening because so much of it is exquisitely tailored to the requirements of the native language. Her cross-linguistic study (drawing on experimental work in languages that range from English and Dutch to Chinese and Japanese) documents what is universal and what is language specific in the way we listen to spoken language. Cutler describes the formidable range of mental tasks we carry out, all at once, with astonishing speed and accuracy, when we listen. These include evaluating probabilities arising from the structure of the native vocabulary, tracking information to locate the boundaries between words, paying attention to the way the words are pronounced, and assessing not only the sounds of speech but prosodic information that spans sequences of sounds. She describes infant speech perception, the consequences of language-specific specialization for listening to other languages, the flexibility and adaptability of listening (to our native languages), and how language-specificity and universality fit together in our language processing system. Drawing on her four decades of work as a psycholinguist, Cutler documents the recent growth in our knowledge about how spoken-word recognition works and the role of language structure in this process. Her book is a significant contribution to a vibrant and rapidly developing field.