Perception, Cognition, and Language: Essays in Honor of Henry and Lila Gleitman (review)

The papers in this volume deal with a wide range of topics on the psychology of perception, attention, memory, and language. All the authors and contributors have been either colleagues or students of Henry and/or Lila Gleitman. All reflect the impact the Gleitmans have had on the field.

The essays are organized into three parts. The opening introduction (Part 1) is an overview article by the editors. It provides a general outline of the history of Henry’s and Lila’s careers, paying tribute to the important contributions made by the Gleitmans in the fields of perception, language, and cognition.

Part 2 contains essays mainly concerning Henry Gleitman’s career as a teacher and scholar. The addresses introduce an early history of Henry’s teaching at Swarthmore and his influence on the development of psychology at Penn. The authors unanimously refer to Henry Gleitman as a superb orator, a highly educated person and the quintessential psychologist. His book, Psychology (5th edn., New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), is considered an outstanding American textbook and is extensively used in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and many more countries around the globe.

Part 3 principally contains essays from former students of the Gleitmans, describing their current research and its origin in the Gleitman seminar. This last part reflects the impact that Henry and Lila have had on the field through their students. It is the lengthiest, and the authors’ interests range across fields that are foundational to cognitive science in the frames of formal, experimental, and neuroscientific approaches to issues of representation and learning. Thomas F. Shipley argues that the perception of the present state of things depends on both the way things appear at the moment and how things are changing over time. Michael Kelly shows how basic research in cognitive science can be applied productively to language innovation. John C. Trueswell deals with the organization and use of the lexicon for language comprehension. The topics cover plenty of problems, but all the discussions have one thing in common: honest and sincere gratitude for the Gleitmans’ influence, guidance, and assistance on the authors’ way to independent research.

In general, all the essays in this volume demonstrate a certain kind of attitude both towards the scientists and individuals and towards the matter of research inspired by their lectures and seminars—a respectful and careful coverage of the Gleitmans’ life events, a thorough and accurate approach to the studied topics, and a very interesting interpretation of experimental data. No doubt, the volume will be most interesting to those engaged in psychology studies and subsequent research.