Psycholinguistics: Language, Mind and World (review)

This is a massive contribution to the psycholinguistics textbook market. The second edition of a successful text, Psycholinguistics: Language, mind and world presents a detailed account of the psychology of language as it relates to learning and the brain as well as to various aspects of social and cultural life. No doubt, it is one of the fundamental tasks of psycholinguistics to explain how children learn language. This has always been the central problem in various research studies (see Radford 1990, Lakshmanan 1994, Landau et al. 2000); this book, however, clearly stands out by virtue of presenting its topic in the most welcome manner of a good textbook. The complexity of the subjects by no means overloads the text with academic jargon, yet at the same time, the book is not at all oversimplified. The main question the book seeks to answer is how people learn to produce and comprehend speech. Authors Danny D. Steinberg, Hiroshi Nagata, and David Aline (hereafter S) organize the discourse in a way that enables a reader with little or no specific knowledge of the subject to grasp things readily; basic terms and concepts are presented and discussed before more complex or abstract matters are considered. The book has a narrative structure, helping S to create a harmonic and unified picture of speech production and speech comprehension research from the mosaic of data.

The book is logically divided into four parts, each consisting of a few chapters. Part 1, First language learning’ (1–166), deals with the following topics: how children learn language, the deaf and language, principles and methods of teaching reading, the issue of critical age in learning language, and animals and language learning. S separates language learning into two distinct, but related, psychological processes—speech production and speech comprehension—then deals with them in turn. S argues that the principles and parameters theory cannot explain the general order of acquisition of morphemes and proposes the ‘three variables theory’ as an explanation. Contrary to Noam Chomsky’s and Jerry Fodor’s theorizing about innate language knowledge (Chomsky 1986, 1988; Fodor 1976), S argues that the nature of speech and environmental input is indeed essential and is often contrived to assist language learning. Following Lev Vygotsky’s tradition of understanding thought as the basis for developing language (Vygotsky 1986), S proves that children learn to comprehend abstract notions by hypothesizing about the speech they hear and seeking confirmation about their hypotheses until they are able to make a connection between the sound form and the idea (46). Discussing the problem of language learning by deaf and mute people, S states that the inability to produce speech may not indicate the absence or lack of language knowledge. S gives a detailed outline of the existing sign languages and suggests that in addition to Total Communication programs, ‘Written Language’ must be taught (67), as it has definite advantages; for example, the learning medium is appropriate, and no new knowledge must be acquired by instructors (79). More than that, S suggests a program for teaching written language guided by the fact that words are best acquired as conceptual wholes in a relevant context, and phrases and sentences are best acquired in a relevant context through induction, just as hearing children learn their first language (80).

The subject matter of Part 2 (167–239) is clear from its title: ‘Second language learning’. First, S outlines three categories of factors involved in second language learning—psychological, social (including the person’s first language), and motivational (169). Every factor is carefully analyzed and explained. S covers basic social situations involved in second language learning and proceeds to describe a variety of second-language teaching methods. Part 2 is indeed a treasure chest for an ESL teacher, as every piece of practical methodological advice is thoroughly supported by research data in the theory of language production.

Part 3, ‘Language, mind and brain’ (241–342...