Trevor Harley

Trevor Harley is a psychologist specializing in the psychology of language. He is currently Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee, Scotland, where he hold the Chair of Cognitive Psychology. He is author of "The Psychology of Language", currently in its third edition, published by Psychology Press.

Biography

Career

Trevor Harley was born in London and grew up near Southampton. His undergraduate degree was in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge, where he stayed on for his PhD under the supervision of Brian Butterworth. His PhD was on slips of the tongue and what they tell us about speech production.

For his PhD and later research he collected a corpus of several thousand naturally occurring speech errors, and focussed on one word substitutes for another (e.g. saying "pass the pepper" instead of "pass the salt"). He concluded that speech production is an interactive, parallel process, leading him to an interest in connectionist modeling.

After his PhD he took a temporary lectureship at the University of Dundee. He then moved to the University of Warwick, where he stayed until 1996, then moving to a Senior Lectureship at Dundee. He was awarded a personal chair in 2003, and became Head of Department in the same year.

Research Interests

His main research interest is still in how we produce language, although he now studies this in the wider context of how we represent meaning, how language is affected by brain damage, and by normal and pathological ageing (e.g. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases). Underlying his research is a belief that the mind is a parallel, interactive computer, best studied by experimentation and computational modeling.

Selected publications

• Harley, T. A. (2008). The Psychology of Language: From data to theory (3rd. ed.) Hove: Psychology Press. (Earlier editions 2001, 1995.)
• Harley, T. (2006). Speech errors: Psycholinguistic approach. K. Brown (Ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd. Ed., Vol. 11: pp. 739-744), Oxford: Elsevier.
• Harley, T. A. (2003). Nice weather for the time of year: The British obsession with the weather. In S. Strauss & B. Orlove (Eds.), Weather, climate, culture (pp. 103-118). Oxford: Berg Publishers.
• Harley, T.A., Jessiman, L.J., MacAndrew, S.B.G., & Astell, A.J. (2008). I don't know what I know: Evidence of preserved semantic knowledge but impaired metalinguistic knowledge in adults with probable Alzheimer's disease. Aphasiology, 22, 321-335.
• Harley, T. A., & O'Mara, D. A. (2006). Hyphenation can improve reading in acquired phonological dyslexia. Aphasiology, 20, 744-761.
• Harley, T. A., & Grant, F. (2004). The role of functional and perceptual attributes: Evidence from picture naming in dementia. Brain and Language, 91, 223-234.
• Harley, T. A. (2004). Does cognitive neuropsychology have a future? Lead article in a special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 3-16.
• Astell, A. J. & Harley, T. A. (2002). Accessing semantic knowledge in dementia: Evidence from a word definition task. Brain and Language, 82, 312-326.
• Harley, T. A., & MacAndrew, S. B. G. (2001). Constraints upon word substitution speech errors. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30, 395-418.
• Vousden, J., Brown, G. D. A., & Harley, T. A. (2000). Oscillator-based control of the serial ordering of phonology in speech production. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 101-175.
• Harley, T. A., & Bown, H. (1998). What causes tip-of-the-tongue states? British Journal of Psychology, 89, 151-174.
• Astell, A. J., & Harley, T. A. (1998). Naming problems in dementia: Semantic or lexical? Aphasiology, 12, 357-374.
• Harley, T. A. (1993). Phonological activation of semantic competitors during lexical access in speech production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 291-309.
• Harley, T. A. (1990). Environmental contamination of normal speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 11, 45-72.
• Harley, T. A. (1984). A critique of top-down independent levels models of speech production: Evidence from non-plan-internal speech errors. Cognitive Science, 8, 191-219.

External links

• Academic Homepage at the School of Psychology, University of Dundee, retrieved July 15, 2008
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/scotland/tayside_and_central/7521264.stm for information on research into memory loss in Alzheimer's disease.