While discussions of English tend to treat examples like pre- and post-war as a matter of coordination, German studies of parallel examples tend to treat them as matters of deletion under identity. The two different approaches give rise to different insights, though neither is perfect. The relevant constructions involve both derivatives and compounds, but constraints are hard to pin down.

Chapter 1 introduces students to MATLAB. Beginning with basic computer science concepts, the student is introduced to how computers work generally, and then to the MATLAB interface itself, instructing students on key buttons, tabs, and windows that they will use virtually every time they open MATLAB. The structure of writing code is introduced, wherein code can be tested in the console (Command Window in MATLAB) but ultimately should be stored and saved in scripts for later re-use. Students learn the basic variable operations: creation and modification (assignment) and later use (reference), and are introduced to the utility of these ubiquitous programming tools, Basic script structure and formatting is introduced, including how to create, modify, and use variables and add comments to their code. The chapter concludes with how to obtain help and access documentation from within MATLAB.

Chapter 14 presents the third application of MATLAB to behavioral sciences: conducting computerized experiments. Students learn basic experimental design before applying their programming knowledge from Chapters 1 to 11 to develop three experiments: the Flanker and N-Back tasks, and the Monty Hall probability puzzle. In the final, longest section of this chapter, students learn how to use the MATLAB add-on Psychtoolbox, which allows full control of and interaction with the screen, keyboard, mouse, and audio systems. The three experiments from earlier in the chapter are extended to incorporate Psychtoolbox functionality, and a new experiment, the Stroop task, concludes the chapter.

In this chapter some of the problems facing the scholar of word-formation are considered, including the nature of the word, the boundaries of word-formation, the question of productivity and problems with determining the nature of evidence for it, whether word-formation is defined by rules, some proposed constraints on word-formation and whether word-formation is part of morphology.

Canonical form is no longer discussed much, but has implications for the distinction between inflection and derivation, for helping us recognize a morphologically complex word and for helping us define a prototypical word in English.

Chapter 9 returns to computer science concepts from Chapter 1 and prepares students for subsequent chapters with detailed instructions for loading and saving data. A crucial component is an understanding of paths, which determine where information is stored on a computer and how to access it when needed. MATLAB has many methods for working with paths, many of which work predictably by default, and each is discussed in turn with its costs and benefits, with emphasis on the easiest way to work with multiple files: storing them all in the same place. Equipped with knowledge of data structures from Chapters 2, 4 and 8, this chapter discusses how to load and save each type of data, both in the native MATLAB data format and in formats other programs use or produce.

Chapter 2 introduces students to the basic building blocks of MATLAB data: arrays. Types of arrays are disambiguated based on their structure into scalars, which are individual values students are familiar with from mathematics, and vectors and matrices, which are often new to students. These concepts are introduced as arrangements of numbers: larger arrays are built from smaller arrays via concatenation, and can be subsetted into smaller arrays via indexing. Importantly, no linear algebra is taught or required in this section, as most behavioral science students do not come in with this knowledge, nor do most applications require it. Instead, the emphasis is on arithmetic operations students will be using most often.

Chapter 11 teaches students how to make graphs in MATLAB. Specifically, students learn to make line graphs, scatterplots, bar graphs, and histograms, four basic and essential visualizations for anyone interested in presenting data. New data types are needed, building on knowledge from Chapter 2 and Chapter 8 to reinforce understanding, and new aspects of the MATLAB interface for graphs are introduced in detail. MATLAB has many ways to customize graphs, each of which is reviewed in turn, along with its strengths and weaknesses. To help students make the most of MATLAB graphics infrastructure, its hierarchical structure is explained in detail, allowing students to modify any graphics feature, using any other graphics feature as a starting point. Critically, this chapter elaborates on how to use MATLAB documentation to identify and specify the graphics features they want to modify, while providing many examples of such modification using different syntax.

A word like tenderfoot has two possible plural forms: tenderfoots and tenderfeet. Why is a regular plural allowed in this word, and what factors license such unexpected regularity? Various factors are considered here, one of which has previously been ignored, and the fact that usage is divided and apparently unpredictable is discussed.

The use of the term ‘head’ in morphology is inherited from syntax, where it has long been used rather differently. When we try to apply the notion in morphology, we find many problems in attempting to find a coherent way of applying it, despite the fact that the right-hand head rule is often thought to give clear answers in English and other Germanic languages.

The general idea that newly coined words should not be synonymous with already established words, through a well-established principle called ‘blocking’, does not always accord with the data. Some instances of systematic competition, for example, seem to allow for synonymous coinages.

Five examples which appear to show morphophonemic alternations are considered, but none of them is straightforward. In some cases, the application of the apparently morphophonemic rule is not regular, in others the alternations turn out to be orthographic rather than phonological.

Some instances of word-formation are subject to orthographic constraints as well as more obviously linguistic ones. Various types are illustrated. This overlooked aspect of word-formation plays an important role.