Harley, Trevor

Career

Trevor Harley was born in 1958 in London and grew up near the city of Southampton . He studied at the royal high school in Farkham. He holds a degree in science from St. John's College, University of Cambridge . He remained in Cambridge to study further under the guidance of Brian Butterworth and received a Ph.D. in the subject “Reservations and what they tell us about speech activity” ^[2] . To work for this degree, as well as for further research, he assembled a corpus of several thousand speech errors and concentrated on one word that replaced another (that is, when they say “pass pepper” instead of “pass salt”). He concluded that speech activity is an interactive parallel process, which in turn made him interested in neural network modeling and the study of computer modeling, growing up, and metacognitive processes ^[2] . After receiving his degree, he lectured at the University of Dundee for some time. He then moved to Warwick University , where he remained until 1996, after which he took the post of senior lecturer in Dundee. He became a professor and head of the department in 2003, and then dean of the faculty in 2006. He is the author of not only his academic work, but also the novel “Dirty old rascal” ( ISBN 9781445226224 ), a fantasy about a strange cook. A castle where nothing goes unpunished. Harley published an article "Why the Earth is Almost Flat: The Image and Death of Cognitive Psychology." Recently, he appeared as a stand-up comedian who performed at the Fringe music festival in Einburg in 2013.

Research Areas

Harley's latest major study is from the field of metacognitive processes . His interest in growing up and consciousness grew into an interest in metacognitive processes ^[3] . Most of his research on metacognitive processes is revealed in his subsequent book, “Cognition: The mindful brain - why we behave as we do” ^[4] . He is also interested in how we carry out speech activities, although he is currently studying this issue in a broader context of how we convey the meanings of words, how brain disturbances, normal or pathological adulthood affect language (for example, Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease ) In addition, he works on the question of how we control our own consciousness and how this ability changes with age. Underneath all these studies lies his belief that the brain is a parallel, interactive computer, better studied through experiment and computer modeling . As well as his interest in language and computer modeling, his studies on maturation and metacognitive processes are significant ^[2] . He is also interested in weather, and he maintains a site about bad weather in Britain and about British weather in general. The site is available at trevorharley.com ^[5] . He also conducts a psychological study about the weather, which includes the question of why people are so interested in weather; and maintains a weather station in Lundi, next to Dundee. He wrote a famous article called “Promises”, in which he states that cognitive neuropsychologists are increasingly deviating from the original goals and methods of their subject ^[6] .

The Psychology of Language

One of Harley’s most famous publications is The Psychology of Language. In this book, he discusses psycholinguistics, which studies the relationship between linguistic behavior and psychological processes. Harley discusses both processes of a low cognitive level, including speech and visual recognition of a word, and processes of a high cognitive level, that is, those associated with understanding ^[7] . The text tells about the recently appeared neural network language models that describe a set of ideas in a simple and accessible language. Following a decisively evolving leitmotif, the text describes how children learn a language (sometimes more than one), and how they learn to read ^[8] .

• Harley, TA (2014). The Psychology of Language: From data to theory (4th. Ed.) Hove: Psychology Press. (Earlier editions 2008, 2001, 1995.)
• Harley, TA (2010). Psycholinguistics. (6 volumes) London: SAGE.
• Harley, TA (2009). Talking the talk: Language, Psychology and Science. Hove: Psychology press.
• Harley, TA (2006). Speech errors: Psycholinguistic approach. K. Brown (Ed.), The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd. Ed., Vol. 11: pp. 739-744), Oxford: Elsevier.
• Harley, TA, Jessiman, LJ, MacAndrew, SBG, & Astell, AJ (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, TA, & O'Mara, DA (2006). Hyphenation can improve reading in acquired phonological dyslexia. Aphasiology, 20, 744-761.
• Harley, TA, & Grant, F. (2004). The role of functional and perceptual attributes: Evidence from picture naming in dementia. Brain and Language, 91, 223-234.
• Harley, TA (2004). Does cognitive neuropsychology have a future? Lead article in a special issue of Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 3-16.
• Astell, AJ & Harley, TA (2002). Accessing semantic knowledge in dementia: Evidence from a word definition task. Brain and Language, 82, 312-326.
• Harley, TA (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, TA, & MacAndrew, SBG (2001). Constraints upon word substitution speech errors. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 30, 395-418.
• Vousden, J., Brown, GDA, & Harley, TA (2000). Oscillator-based control of the serial ordering of phonology in speech production. Cognitive Psychology, 41, 101-175.
• Harley, TA, & Bown, H. (1998). What causes tip-of-the-tongue states? British Journal of Psychology, 89, 151-174.
• Astell, AJ, & Harley, TA (1998). Naming problems in dementia: Semantic or lexical? Aphasiology, 12, 357-374.
• Harley, TA (1993). Phonological activation of semantic competitors during lexical access in speech production. Language and Cognitive Processes, 8, 291-309.
• Harley, TA (1990). Environmental contamination of normal speech. Applied Psycholinguistics, 11, 45-72.
• Harley, TA (1984). A critique of top-down independent levels models of speech production: Evidence from non-plan-internal speech errors. Cognitive Science, 8, 191–219

• http://www.trevorharley.com/Welcome.html
• https://web.archive.org/web/20081004181643/http://www.dundee.ac.uk/psychology/taharley/
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/tayside_and_central/7521264.stm for information on the study of memory loss in Alzheimer's disease.