What books would you recommend reading if someone wanted to understand what you were studying?
This is sort of a disingenuous answer because I'm not sure there are a lot of good non-technical book on discourse processing and pragmatics but these selections are definitely related to the larger field of cognitive psychology. (Click on the links to go to the Google Books page.)
Herbert Clark, Using Language. This is probably the most closely related to what I study: how people use and understand conversation. I've read a ton of papers by Clark... but I have not read this book (shhh, don't tell my advisor). I hear this is actually a sort painful-to-read book... which is bizarre because Clark is a usually a lucid academic writer.
Steve Pinker, The Language Instinct. I don't trust him on much else (like, to explain most of human behavior) but this is a great introduction on psycholinguistics (and you can totally hop around chapters to read about what you're interested in). Pinker's extremely readable and funny and he explains the basics of the field in a clear and entertaining manner. This is the book that got me into psycholinguistics back in high school.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, Hearing Gesture. I think this is an awesome book and I think I've mentioned it before here. This book is on how we use and interpret gesture when we talk. This is related to what I do because I essentially study extralinguistic cues (the information we process when we talk that is NOT the talk itself). I've done a little work in gesture and would love to return to it someday.
Mark Lieberman & Geoffrey Pullum, Far From the Madding Gerund. What linguists do: they describe language... and they don't go around telling you what not to say! Common misconception of what I do as a researcher: I don't give a flyin' flip about proper speech. I give a flyin' flip about how people actually talk (and I'm tellin' you now, pretty much no one speaks properly when they are speaking naturally). I enjoy this group of researchers and am a longtime follower of their blog, The Language Log. This book is a compilation of their greatest hits... probably a much better value to just read Language Log though.
George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By. This is not really my little section of the field but for those interested in language, this is a really interesting book on common metaphors and how they shape our understanding of the world.
Ulric Neisser, Memory Observed. This is not really about language at all but I rather liked this one. As the title says, it's about memory, which is a huge part of cognition (I actually think it's the most important part of cognition). This book takes a different tack though: it's about remembering in natural contexts... which seems revolutionary to researchers and completely stupid to the lay audience. (A lot of psych research on memory takes place in a lab, under controlled conditions. This is about what happens in memory "in the wild".)
Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? I thought this was a particularly cogent examination of the reasons why girls lag behind boys in math and science (and thus have less representation at the upper levels of academia). I always thought of her as a psycholinguist but her more recent work has focused on gender differences in schooling. This is not really what I study either but I am very much interested in the role of gender (and the effects of emphasizing gender as important) in society.
I feel like I should add in an NOTD photo or something to keep this post "on topic" so here are non-ideal photos of Milani Cyberspace that I didn't originally want to post because they aren't shots of it in natural light (and therefore, do not show off the holo as well).
Milani Cyberspace (lightbox)
Milani Cyberspace (indoors with flash)
I'm working on getting a full Milani 3D review up and will talk about this one more at a later date. I just really felt the need to add it in so people don't feel cheated. ;)
