Psycholinguistics: a cognitive view of language By Helen S. Cairns and Charles E. Cairns, and: Introduction to psycholinguistics By Insup Taylor (review)

480LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) Psycholinguistics: a cognitive view oflanguage. By Helen S. Cairns and Charles E. Cairns. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976. Pp. xi, 252. Introduction to psycholinguistics. By Insup Taylor. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976. Pp. xiii, 434. Reviewed by Thomas Scovel, University ofPittsburgh In his plenary address to the 10th International Congress of Linguists in 1967 at Bucharest, Roman Jakobson pointed out that, in contrast to the emphasis on the autonomy and emancipation of linguistics from other sciences expressed by Meillet, Schrijnen, and other scholars attending the 1st International Congress held almost forty years earlier, modern linguists 'are faced with an urgent need for interdisciplinary teamwork to be pursued diligently by savants ofdifferent branches. In particular, the relationship between linguistics and the adjacent sciences awaits an intensive examination' (Jakobson 1969:75). Prominent among the hybrids which have sprung from the intercourse of linguistics with adjacent sciences is psycholinguistics, and it is now only natural that introductory texts be published which deal exclusively with such an interdisciplinary field. Psychologists have been interested in language as a window to thought for over a century, but it has been only recently that linguists have developed a reciprocal interest in the human mind. Thus Chomsky 1968 elaborates on the interdependence of psychology and linguistics, claiming that linguistics is a subfield ofpsychology—a view, incidentally, which is shared even by one of his severest critics, Derwing 1973. The two books under review are not the first introductory texts in the field, but both deserve to be considered by anyone teaching a graduate-level introductory course. Like Fodor, Bever & Garrett 1974, C&C's text covers an introduction to modern linguistics, the literature of verbal learning, and the psychological reality experiments. T's introduction, like Slobin 1974, covers a broader range of issues, taking time to discuss such diverse topics as aphasia and the Whorfian hypothesis. It is a clear demonstration of the knowledge explosion, and the concomitant rise of hybrid fields of specialization, that these two fairly complementary and comprehensive introductory texts in psycholinguistics fail to mention important developments in the field—e.g. the prolific research in second-language learning, best reported by the Working Papers in Bilingualism ofthe Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Toronto. This particular comment is not so much a criticism of the two books under review as it is testimony to the fact that almost no field ofscientific endeavor today can enjoy autonomy from related disciplines, or emancipation from the findings of scientific pursuit in other fields. The interdependence oflinguistics with the other behavioral sciences also makes it difficult to define the appropriate domain of a subject such as psycholinguistics. By failing to discuss neurolinguistics or language determinism, it appears that C&C have defined the field too narrowly; on the other hand, T has described the field so broadly that she devotes an entire chapter to universal sound symbolism—a topic which would be more advisedly covered in a paragraph, especially when the chapter is summarized in as timid and inconclusive a sentence as this (331): ' UPS [universal phonetic symbolism], if it exists at all, is limited to speech sounds that have specific tonal qualities on which speakers of different languages can agree, REVIEWS481 and to a handful of words that might contain these sounds to express the appropriate meanings.' Despite their difference in the range of issues, the books share several features. Both are self-contained and are written as primary sources of reference; both spend considerable time introducing the approaches and methods of modern linguistics; and both present the same model of grammar—a syntactic component mapping surface structures onto deep structures via phrase-structure rules and transformations, with two interpretive components which specify the phonology and the semantics of the language. However, the books also contain sharp differences of opinion as to how language and language learning are to be viewed; most striking is the constant emphasis ofC&C on the superiority ofthe cognitive view of language and language acquisition over the behavioral approach. In contrast, T admits in the preface that her text is 'expository rather than polemic'. Even if one accepts C&C's arguments for the cognitive viewpoint as convincingly superior—and I, for one, do not...