Update

Thanks to Colin Phillips and Christina Manouilidou for their excellent suggestions, the main list is now taking shape. Please help by sending me other references, and/or voting up existing entries.

Getting the ball rolling

To encourage suggestions, I've made a start in compiling a Master List of significant titles: click to access. I have no illusions that this is the best choice—it may not even be a very good selection! Also, there are some obvious imbalances in coverage that I am aware of—for example, with respect to the Psycholinguistics of Bilingualism, and the whole area of Laboratory Phonology—as well as many others that I am not aware of: the purpose of this blog is that you can help to draw attention to these areas, and suggest indispensable articles.

A few words about the list: it is open-ended (though I hope we can agree on a total below 150 articles, particularly bearing in mind that there will be specialist lists for particular subtopics). It is also currently sorted by alphabetical order only: as I hear from other contributors with their rankings, the list will be regularly resorted first by rank order (Column G) and then alphabetically, to arrive at a Top 30 in a few months' time.

Please email me with any new suggestions or votes for existing entries, or post comments. In the medium term, I hope to be able to develop a form so that you can add and rank automatically, but for now, please write to me first.

Finally, notice that there is one important criterion for all list entries, namely, they must have been published in peer-reviewed journals. I am aware that many of the most influential papers—particularly in generative psycholinguistics work—appear instead in edited volumes or as monographs, or conference proceedings. While these will be referenced in the textbook, they will not appear in the lists for two reasons. The first is a practical one: undergraduate students should be able to easily access all sources, which is normally the case if the articles have been published in journals. The second reason is that I believe that articles that have been subject to anonymous peer-review—for all its many imperfections—should carry more weight than those that have not been so tested. So, at least for now, I'll start with peer-reviewed journals only.

Introduction

I have been contracted to write an upper-level undergraduate/postgraduate textbook on psycholinguistics, focussing on 'classical' Psycholinguistics (i.e. chronometric studies of language representation and processing in adult monolinguals), but also touching on more recent neuropsychological and neurophysiological studies of language, first and second language acquisition and development, multilingual processing and empirical research in Language and Cognition, including Linguistic Relativity). In order to tackle this highly ambitious undertaking, my intention is to structure the book and the constituent chapters around a canon of key articles in psycholinguistics, papers published over the last sixty years (and especially since the mid 1980s. For concreteness, one might take Fodor's Modularity of Mind as a useful watershed date.)

To make this textbook as relevant and interesting as possible, I would like to ask for your help in sending me your "Top 10s"  lists for a wide range of mid-level topics, such as "spoken word recognition", "morphological processing", "lexical organisation in bilinguals", "syntactic priming" etc. To begin, though, I'd like your help in constructing a overall "Top 30", the thirty most significant articles in psycholinguistics since 1950.

The lists should consist of primary sources, journal articles published in peer-reviewed journals (with an impact factor sufficient to make them accessible to undergraduates through any university library, or articles that are easily accessible though other databases e.g., JSTOR, Web of Science, etc). I am not necessarily looking for the articles that are most cited, though this is an important measure of significance, but for those that you consider most interesting, perhaps because they present counter-intuitive or controversial findings.

It is not necessary to send me 30 titles—or 10 titles, in the case of subtopic—(though that's fine!): you can just send in one or two, I will collate and rank-order all suggestions for all of the relevant lists. You can find links to collated lists on this page. To contact me, either post a comment to this message, or email me at nigelduffield@gmail.com

Many thanks in advance.