Date: 19-Nov-2006
From: Clare Wright <Clare.Wright1newcastle.ac.uk>
Subject: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (2nd edition)
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-1354.html
AUTHORS: Steinberg, Danny D.; Sciarini, Natalia V.TITLE: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (2nd edition)PUBLISHER: Pearson LongmanYEAR: 2006
Clare Wright, Department of Education, Communication and Language Sciences,Newcastle University, United Kingdom
SUMMARY
The second edition of this Introduction to the rapidly changing field ofpsycholinguistics research is a timely update to the first editionpublished in 1993. The book is aimed at a university level readership,whether students or academics from a variety of fields, from psychology andphilosophy to second language teaching and speech pathology. The questionsraised by the book provide the foundation for a standard textbook onlanguage acquisition and cognition: how do children learn to speak and readtheir native language, is language unique to humans, does languageinfluence culture, how does language work in the brain? Using case studiesand referring to a broad range of both well-established research and veryrecent studies, the authors explore the debates that lie behind thesequestions. Their stated aim is thus to allow a reader with ''no specificknowledge of any topic … presupposed'' to reach the ''highest level ofunderstanding of the topics considered in an engaging way'' (page xiii).
There are three parts to the volume, first-language learning,second-language learning, and language, mind and brain. Each part iswide-ranging, and aims to cover the major questions of the field in linewith the goals set out above. These questions are often addressedcross-linguistically, although the predominant focus is on Americanresearch and English as the target language.
However, going beyond the remit of a standard introductory textbook, theauthors present their own views on the issues they discuss, in an oftenpersonal and informal way, throughout the book, with particular emphasis ona critique of the ''mystical aura'' (page 27) of generative Chomskyanlinguistics. The authors conclude the book with an outline, new to thisedition, of their own theory of grammar – ''Natural Grammar''.
Part One: First Language Learning
Chapter 1 covers how children first learn to produce and understandlanguage, referring to well-known early studies, such as Leopold (1953),Klima & Bellugi (1966), Brown (1973), which described language acquisitionin children. The authors reiterate their own theory for the acquisitionorder of consonants and vowels (first proposed in Steinberg 1982), based on''visibility of articulators'' and ''ease of articulation'' (page 5); similarlyfor morpheme acquisition, they suggest there are three variables based on''universal and accepted'' (page 11) psychological learning principles,namely ''ease of observability of referent, meaningfulness of referent anddistinctiveness of the sound signal that indicates the referent'' (page 13). The authors suggest, for example, that the plural marker ''s'' in English islearned before the third person ''s'', since person is more abstract, andtherefore less observable and less meaningful than number. Justificationfor these principles is, however, rather unconvincing, with littleempirical evidence offered, although they appear to have some similaritieswith Slobin's (1985) more widely known and researched Operating Principlesof language acquisition.
Chapter 2 describes the nature and acquisition of sign language, withinformative sections on the history of teaching deaf children, particularlyin the USA, and on the distinction between speech-based sign languages andlanguage-independent sign languages such as American Sign Language orBritish Sign Language. The chapter seems, however, to have a primarilysociolinguistic purpose in focusing on ''the problem'' (page 54) of how deafpeople can communicate with hearing people, and the lack of success (page55) in teaching deaf children to read once they are at school. This is nodoubt a pressing question in certain quarters and the authors promote a''Written Language Approach'' as a solution (based on the first author'sresearch in the 1980s, where reading English was successfully taughtsimultaneously with sign language to pre-school deaf children). Evidenceof similar research in other languages would usefully strengthen thepsycholinguistic principles rather briefly alluded to in this approach.
The discussion of reading continues in Chapter 3, where somecross-linguistic comparisons are made between sound-based systemsrepresenting phonemes or syllables (such as most Western Europeanlanguages, Japanese, Korean) and meaning-based systems representingmorphemes such as Chinese. Much of the chapter is devoted to the so-called''whole-word vs. phonics/decoding'' controversy within reading English withthe authors strongly on the side of the ''whole-word approach''. Thisemphasis on the separation of reading from learning sounds of letters leadsto the main purpose of this chapter: to set out details of the firstauthor's Reading Programme briefly discussed in chapter 2, through whichchildren between the ages of 2 and 4 can be taught to read words andsentences, although there is little theoretical analysis of thepsycholinguistic processes involved.
The concluding chapters in this first section return to more corepsycholinguistic issues: the notion of a ''critical period'' for languageacquisition, and whether language is uniquely human.
Chapter 4 examines cases of wild (or ''feral'') and isolated children,examining how far children deprived of language may or not may not learn tospeak. The well known cases in the research literature are discussed,including Helen Keller, and Genie, who was isolated until the age of 13, aswell as more recent cases such as Edik, found in the Ukraine in 1999, whohad been raised by dogs. The evidence from these cases for some kind ofcritical period for language learning is assessed. The authors concludethat any early exposure to some kind of language input, even for childrenwho do not hear (such as Helen Keller), is indeed critical to languagedevelopment. However, the clinical evidence is not discussed in depth, andthere is no evaluation of the psycholinguistic concepts and theoriesinvolved in these cases – indeed the authors warn against drawing any firmconclusions about theories of a specific critical age for language from sofew and so traumatised children.
Chapter 5, on animals and language learning, rounds off the first sectionwith a descriptive account of various well-known experiments to teach humanlanguage to animals such as gorillas, chimpanzees or parrots. The authors'conclusion, that animals ''have only a rudimentary language ability'' (page118), follows the widely held view of language as a uniquely humanphenomenon (see a letter to LinguistList by Jackendoff et al. 2006).
The second part focuses on Second Language Learning; it adopts theassumption that children are monolingual, and that a second language istherefore an ''additional'' psycholinguistic burden, managed differently bychildren and adults.
In Chapter 6, the authors divide factors involved in second languageacquisition into two categories: psychological and social, with suggestionsof how these factors might play different roles for children than for adults.
Psychological factors are simplified into three areas: intellectualcapacity, memory and motor skills. In intellectual terms, as the authorssee it, acquiring the grammar of a second language is seen as based eitheron explication, to be taught in the learner's first language (page 124), oron induction, or self-analysis. A learner's capacity to learn eitherexplicatively or inductively changes with age, with children under 7 leastlikely to learn explicatively, in comparison to children over 7 or adults. The authors conclude, however, that ''so long as the structures involvedare not far beyond the learner's level of syntactic understanding, there isa good chance that the learner can discover the rules by self-analysis''(page 125). The role of memory is briefly touched on, although with nomention of the different models and theories of memory which are crucial tothis topic, such as Ullmann's (2006) model of procedural/declarativememory, or Baddeley's (2003) model of Working Memory. Children's andadults' differing motor skills are then considered, albeit briefly, fortheir role in acquiring successful pronunciation, something which is oftenharder for adults.
The authors then review some research on social factors suggesting thatmotivation and attitude are both key to successful second languagelearning, and whether classroom or natural learning provides a betterlearning environment.
This, at times speculatively written, overview of what is a highly debatedfield (Hyltenstam and Abrahamsson 2000) concludes that there is nodemonstrated critical age for second language learning, in either syntax,or, more contentiously, in pronunciation.
Chapter 7, on second-language teaching methods deals with what could beseen as an unusual choice of topic in most psycholinguistic textbooks, butis justified by the authors as offering ''a chance to see how ideas of humanlanguage and learning interconnect'' (page 138). The bulk of the chapterprovides a history of various teaching methods (such asGrammar-Translation, Audio-Lingual, Communicative Language Teaching,Computer-Assisted Language Learning). Some passing references are made tothe psycholinguistic theories of learning at the core of each method, but areader unfamiliar with the concepts involved would remain unclear why thischapter is included. If the discussion were greatly summarised andsynthesised into the impact of learning strategies for bilingualism inchapter 8, this would make for greater logical coherence and relevance.
Chapter 8 attempts to provide a stronger conceptual framework for the twopreceding descriptive chapters. However, as in the chapter on signlanguage, the ultimate motivation for the chapter appears as muchsocio-political as psycholinguistic, taking as the starting point the''controversy''(page 161) whether learning a second language, particularly ata young age, ''is a good idea'' or not. This question is then examinedthrough a brief history of attitudes to bilingualism, as well as researchinto different case studies of bilingual children. The chapter concludeswith a brief overview of strategies for becoming a ''better second languagelearner''. References to the research literature remain tantalisinglybrief, and with no mention of the ground-breaking psycholinguistic andneurolinguistic research in this field since the 1990s (see for exampleParadis 2004).
Part 3 returns to more core issues of psycholinguistic research, such aslanguage and the brain (chapter 12), but also extends the discussion to themore philosophical debate over how language may affect or be affected byculture (chapter 9). However the heart of this section lies in chapters 10and 11, where the authors finally clarify many of their previous passingcriticisms of the innate or Chomskyan paradigm of language (Chapter 10) andsuggest instead a ''radical new theory of grammar'' – Natural Grammar(chapter 11).
Chapter 9 sets out the traditional Whorfian debate over whether language isshaped by culture, with helpful synopses of the research by Whorf in the1930s and Bloom in the 1980s (amongst others cited) which led to certainbeliefs that language determines one's cultural or social beliefs, and thatconstructs such as time, space and colour were not universal but shaped bytheir expression in different languages. The authors provide philosophicaland empirical evidence from more recent research against these ideas,concluding with the truism that language cannot precede thought, otherwisemultilingual people would have ''as many distinct world views'' as languages(page 193).
Chapter 10 begins with a short discursive section on different types ofepistemology underpinning different views on language and languagedevelopment – behaviourism, led by philosophers and linguists such as Quineand Skinner, rationalism (or ''Mentalism'' (page 200), led by Chomsky, Searleand the authors themselves. This section, although a little confusing,allows the authors to lead into their main focus: a critique of Chomskyaninnatism, or generativism, as expressed in three of Chomsky's mostinfluential works from the 1960s to the 1980s. The four main premisesaddressed are ''Plato's problem'' or why children learn language despitedegenerate and meagre language input; the ease and speed of child languageacquisition; the modularity of language from other cognitive faculties; andthe principles and parameters model of linguistic competence. These areashave been widely debated, and the authors cite perhaps the best known ofthe debates, when Chomsky met with Piaget, Putnam and other notablethinkers (Piatelli-Palmarini 1980).
There is a wealth of readily available evidence for and against Chomsky'spremises for the existence of a ''Universal Grammar'', and the authors'objections overlap with counter-arguments made elsewhere (see, for example,Pullum and Scholz 2002). ''Plato's problem'' of degenerate input may be lessextensive than originally thought, as the rise of corpus linguistics andcomputational linguistics allows researchers to identify the frequency ofeven complex syntactic structures in the input. However, the authors'arguments against the other premises are based on claims, no longer made bymost generative theorists, that knowing the universal and formal rules ofsyntax is equivalent to understanding how languages are learnt and used byany given individual. The authors' objections to the notion of multipleparameter settings, for example, are no longer germane.
In Chapter 11, the authors propose a ''new unique psychological conception''– a theory of Natural Grammar (page 217). Having swept away UniversalGrammar as ''psychologically contradictory and invalid'' (page 221), theauthors also dismiss, with little in-depth analysis, non-generativelinguistic theories, such as Bates and MacWhinney's (1982) functional orconnectionist grammar. These theories are seen by the authors as''inadequate'' (page 230), as they are too dependent on models based onspeech production. They fail, according to the authors, to capture the''primary drive of language acquisition'' (page 232) – speech comprehension.
The authors propose that a child's mind ''is primed for comprehension'',allowing the child to associate a sound with a lexical concept: the sound''cat'' elicits the meaning ''cat'' by association with an experience of theobject -''or some representation'' of it (page 232). Syntactic rules toinfer arguments and predicates are similarly acquired through associationof known lexical concepts (''John'' ''give'', ''Tom'', ''the ball'') with anexperience when ''John gave Tom the ball''. Complexities underlyingnegation, relative clauses, passives, are again learnt ''by the process ofguessing the meaning of the unknown speech constructions'' (page 235). Thechild has, therefore, by the age of around 3 years, developed a ''readysyntax'' or Comprehension Grammar (page 238).
Speech production, in turn, derives from the child developing productionstrategies and functions, located within a ''Production Module''. TheProduction Module interacts with the Comprehension Grammar to allow thechild to produce ''syntactically sound sentences'' (page 239). The finalelement of this schema is a ''Central Thought Processor'', briefly outlinedas ''a primary pre-linguistic entity with prepositional formats, argumentsand predicates, as well as innate analysing processes'' (page 239). Withthis schema, the authors confidently reject the pessimism expressed byJerry Fodor (1976) that a model of comprehension would take at least ''500years'' to build (page 241).
I do not share the authors' confidence, not least since there is inadequatefoundation given here for an effective research agenda. No theoreticaljustification or empirical evidence is provided on their generalisationsabout the ''psychological operations'' (page 230) of the various elements ofthis suggested schema. Nevertheless, I do share their commitment to theneed for theories that connect language comprehension, processing andproduction. There is a range of interesting work increasingly being donethat crosses linguistic paradigms in this way, such as Truscott andSharwood Smith's (2004) Acquisition by Processing Theory.
The final chapter appears somewhat as an afterthought, providing a briefoverview, rather unconnected, of key neurolinguistic areas that play amajor role in understanding psycholinguistic research, such as the roles ofthe hemispheres of the brain, language impairment such as Wernicke's andBroca's aphasia, and developments in the methods of investigating brain andlanguage, such as Event-Related Potentials (ERPs). Greater explanation ofthese important areas, and more central placing in the textbook, wouldhighlight the centrality of these topics to the psycholinguistic field.
EVALUATION
To conclude, the book provides a lively and accessible introduction to bothmainstream and less central topics in psycholinguistics. The personal andoften informal tone in many of the sections should appeal to most studentsnew to the field. However, there are a number of limitations and omissionsthat undermine the book's opening claim to ''bring the reader to the highestunderstanding'' of the issues involved.
The structure and content throughout the book lacks the clarity and rangeexpected of a textbook introducing such a highly complex and ever changingfield (see in contrast Gleason and Ratner 1998, Obler and Gjerlow 1998, deBot et al. 2005). Furthermore, this second edition changes the order ofthe chapters, and omits discussion points and suggested further reading foreach chapter, which gave the first edition greater cogency andaccessibility. Certain sections have been updated more than others (suchas the section on research into critical period limitations on secondlanguage learning in Chapter 6), but overall, the text relies on researchpredating the first edition, some of which no longer has high priority oncurrent research agendas (such as the critique of Chomsky which forms thebackbone of the book). Furthermore, several key contributions topsycholinguistic research are noticeable for their absence, such as thework of Slobin (1985) and Tomasello (e.g. 2000) in first languagedevelopment, and Pienemann's (1998) Processability Theory in secondlanguage development.
In sum, this book serves less as an introduction to the field ofpsycholinguistics, and more as a summary of Steinberg's important andwide-ranging contributions to the field of first and second languagelearning over the past 30 years. Provided the reader is aware of thisspecific purpose, this book can be recommended to first year students orother readers interested in the demands and fascination of psycholinguisticresearch.
REFERENCES
Baddeley, A. (2003). Working memory and language: an overview. Journal ofCommunication Disorders 36 (3): 189-208.
De Bot, K., Lowie, W. and Verspoor, M. (2005). Second language acquisition:an advanced resource book. Abingdon: Routledge.
Gleason, J. and Ratner, N. (eds.) (1998). Psycholinguistics. Fort Worth:Harcourt Brace.
Hyltenstam, K. and Abrahamsson, N. (2000). Who can become native-like in asecond language? All, some or none? On the maturational constraintscontroversy in second language acquisition. Studia Linguistica: 150-166.
Jackendoff, R., Liberman, M., Pullum, G., and Scholz, B. (2006). Disc:starling study: recursion <http://linguistlist.org/issues/17/17-1528.html>(Date last accessed October 2006).
Obler, L. and Gjerlow, K. (1998). Language and the brain. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Paradis, M. (2004). A neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Pienemann, M. (1998). Language processing and second language development.Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Pullum, G and Scholz, B. (2002). Empirical assessment of stimulus povertyarguments. Linguistic Review 19 (1/2): 9-50.
Slobin, D. (ed) (1985). The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition.Hillsdale, NJ.: L. Erlbaum.
Tomasello, M. (2000). Do children have adult syntactic competence?Cognition 74: 209-253.
Truscott, J. and Sharwood Smith, M. (2004). Acquisition by processing: amodular perspective on language development. Bilingualism: Language andCognition 7 (1): 1-20.
Ullmann, M. (2006). Language and the brain. In Connor-Linton, J. andFasold, R. (eds.). An introduction to Language and Linguistics. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. 235-274.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Clare Wright is in her second year of Ph.D. study at Newcastle University,UK. Her research, funded by the Economic and Social Science ResearchCouncil, is investigating the role of working memory in second languageacquisition for Chinese learners of English (supervised by Professor VivianCook and Dr Martha Young-Scholten).
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