Neurolinguistics: An introduction to spoken language processing and its disorders (review)

The field of neurolinguistics—the study of language structure and processing, their disorders, and the neural basis of these processes and disorders—is in serious need of an introductory review book. To my knowledge, the last books that reviewed these topics are twenty years old or so, and are seriously outdated. Since their publication, the field has been greatly influenced by new models of language processing, the advent and application of functional neuroimaging, the use of new on-line tasks to study normal and abnormal processing, and other developments, and thousands of papers have been published that are relevant to these topics. Scientists and students interested in learning about these topics must work their way through numerous reviews of subsets of the field. Neurolinguistics begins to fill the need for a more comprehensive review, providing an overview of work in one area—spoken language comprehension. Ingram's stated goal is to provide 'a self contained introduction to the study of language-brain relationships for students of cognitive science, linguistics and speech pathology' (xix). Neurolinguistics also seems intended, however, to fill the need for an introduction to the field for working scientists.

The book covers a large area. After an introduction containing general chapters on linguistic structure, neuroanatomy, and psycholinguistic models, the book is organized into sections dealing with perception of sounds and words, word meanings, sentence processing, and discourse processing. In each section, I reviews the linguistic structures in the domain, their processing, and their disorders. In each part of the book, he tries to make connections across disciplines. He focuses on work that characterizes language disorders in terms of disturbances of elements specified in theories of language structure and processing; on work that uses data from language disorders to suggest or adjudicate between different theories of language structure and processing; and on work that relates linguistic structures and psycholinguistic operations to brain areas through correlations of deficits and lesion locations and through patterns of neural activation associated with performance of psycholinguistic operations in normal individuals. Superimposed on discussions of these specific phemonena are several basic issues that appear in the introductory sections of the book, in particular, whether the process of perception and recognition of linguistic forms is 'modular' and whether linguistic representations and psycholinguistic processes are localized in particular brain regions.

I believe that these topics are central to the field of neurolinguistics and stand in most need of updating in a comprehensive review monograph or text. The reader will be exposed to a wide range of work in this area, to which there is no other single introduction. For that reason, Neurolinguistics is a useful volume. In my view, unfortunately, it has several shortcomings that limit its utility and interest.

First, as a text, the most obvious limitation is the absence of discussion of spoken language production or written language. This matters less in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science, where a good introduction to part of the field can equip a student to approach the literature in other areas; but it is a serious problem if the book is intended for use in speech language pathology (SLP), where there is often a single course that students undergoing professional training take that must cover all aspects of language. The book is also not suited as a text in SLP because of the total absence of discussion of diagnostics and therapeutics.

As a volume that a professional might pick up to acquaint him/herself with the field, the book also falls short in several ways. I must acknowledge that, when I think of such books, the ones I have liked the best are critical reviews of the literature that advocate for one or more theoretical positions, such as Neisser's Cognitive psychology, Pashler's The psychology of attention, or Shallice's From neuropsychology to mental structure. Perhaps because Neurolinguistics is intended as a textbook, I is much more equivocal about the positions he discusses than the...