28.2945, Review: General Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics: Dronkers, Menn (2016)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2945. Thu Jul 06 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2945, Review: General Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics: Dronkers, Menn (2016)

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Date: Thu, 06 Jul 2017 11:40:06
From: Phaedra Royle [phaedra.royle at umontreal.ca]
Subject: Psycholinguistics

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-1539.html

AUTHOR: Lise  Menn
AUTHOR: Nina F. Dronkers
TITLE: Psycholinguistics
SUBTITLE: Introduction and Applications
SERIES TITLE: Second Edition
PUBLISHER: Plural Publishing, Inc.
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Phaedra Royle, Université de Montréal

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

Summary

Psycholinguistics: Introduction and Applications, Second Edition, by Lise Menn
and Nina F. Dronkers,  is a textbook mainly targeting undergraduate students
in speech-language pathology and education, but it could also be used in
teaching introductory level students in psychology and linguistics. 

The book provides a clear, lively introduction to research and ideas about how
human brains process language in speaking, understanding, and reading. Within
a unifying framework of the constant interplay of bottom-up (sensory) and
top-down (knowledge-based) processing across all language uses and modalities,
it is an integrated, self-contained, fully updated account of
psycholinguistics and its clinical and pedagogical applications. In this
second edition, the author, Lise Menn, is joined by leading brain researcher
and aphasiologist, Nina Dronkers. The significantly revised brain chapter
contains current findings on brain structure and function, including the roles
of newly delineated fiber tracts and language areas outside Broca's and
Wernicke's areas. Fully-explained examples are taken from Spanish and other
languages as well as English. 

Five core chapters (language description; brain structure and function;
pragmatic and semantic stages of speech production; syntactic, morphological,
phonological, and phonetic stages of speech production; and experimental
psycholinguistics) form the foundation for chapters presenting classic and
recent research on aphasia, first language development, reading, and second
language learning. A final chapter demonstrates how linguistics and
psycholinguistics can and should inform classroom and clinical practice in
test design and error analysis, while also explaining the care that must be
taken in translating theoretically based ideas into such real-world
applications. Concepts from linguistics, neurology, and experimental
psychology are kept vivid by illustrations of their uses in the real world,
the clinic, and language teaching. Technical terms are clearly explained in
context and also in a large reference glossary. 

This book, is the second incarnation of _Psycholinguistics: Introduction and
applications_ (Menn, 2011), and is authored by Lise Menn with contributions by
Nina Dronkers, who has substantially updated a chapter on Brain and language.
The book has ten chapters covering Basic linguistic concepts, Brain and
Language, Speech Errors, Experimental research in typical and atypical
populations, Reading and language acquisition, as well as Psycholinguistics in
Testing, Teaching, and Therapy. The book also contains an afterwards on Other
Important Areas for Applying Psycholinguistics, a Glossary and an Index. The
text is accompanied by a companion website with a Web-based Student Workbook
as well as an Instructor's Manual (the previous incarnation was accompanied by
a CD-rom for similar purposes). This site provides sound files illustrating
the International Phonetic Alphabet, and other (colour) visual and auditory
elements supplementing the text, student quizzes and exercises, as well as a
teacher’s manual. An interesting aspect of the student workbook is that is
contains challenging exercises for those students who wish to go beyond course
content. 

The chapter on Brains and Language is the one with most major transformations
since the last edition; it has been expanded by thirteen pages, adding
sections on the following topics: Brain areas for Specialized functions,
Structural Connectivity, and Right Brain Implication in Language Processing.

Evaluation 

The book is developed as an undergraduate manual for various student
populations (speech language pathology, linguistics, psychology or education).
The introductory chapter is probably superfluous for linguistics students as
it covers the basics of phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and
pragmatics. It is also mainly useful for English-speaking students, as the
main language described in the book is English. However my knowledge of SLP
undergrads’ abilities to assimilate theoretical linguistic knowledge leads me
to believe that more than a few weeks would need to be spent on phonology and
morphology alone in order to understand these concepts fully. Thus I would
only use the preliminary chapter as a refresher for non-linguistics students
in order to make sure they are up to speed on topics introduced in more
in-depth courses. 

The approach used by Menn in this manual is to clearly present in layman’s
terms (or more scientific when necessary to avoid ambiguity, e.g., she uses
the term ‘lemma’ not ‘word’) basic issues pertaining to psycholinguistic
processes, grounding her work in experimentally sound data. The data is not
necessarily referred to directly, except for examples in the chapters where
discussion of experimental data is presented, and the text is kept light, but
a large amount of supplementary materials (including links to articles online,
scientific videos available on YouTube or other sites, and so on) are
available and clearly mentioned in the textbook or on the companion website.
Many concrete examples are presented in the manual and on the companion
website, and exercises are also included: these help ground the concepts
presented in real language use, based on typical and language-disordered
populations. 

The book covers lots of ground and could be used for a global course in
psycholinguistics, or by picking and choosing some chapters for a course
focusing more specifically on some topics addressed in the manual.
Alternatively, it could be used as a refresher, for the specialized teacher,
speech-language pathologist (SLP), and so on. The writing style and glossary
make the book accessible to a general public interested in psycholinguistics.
>From a teacher’s point of view, this book is very versatile, as many topics
can be covered, or alternatively, a few can be developed in depth. The
teacher’s manual online offers ideas on how to develop class discussions on
specific topics and what some answers to wider ranging questions might be,
thus priming or engaging the teacher in developing a thoughtful learning
experience.

I especially appreciate the clarity with which language production is
described over the course of two chapters (Normal Speech Errors and How They
Happen: I. From Speech to Words,  and II. Saying Words and Sounds in The Right
Order). The following chapter on experimental psycholinguistics presents
(mostly) seminal research on word naming, sentence production and so on,
giving us a good idea of how research was originally run and how it has
changed in the field, and allows readers to understand how research in
psycholinguistics might proceed. A whole chapter in the book is allotted to
bilingualism. Considering that teachers and SLPs are confronted daily with the
issue of child second-language learners, even in the United-States, this is a
very helpful chapter. However, not much is said about working with patients
who might have lost their ability to use English (or have other
bilingual/multilingual specific pathologies, see e.g., Fabbro 2001); this
seems like a notable oversight. 

Regarding the newly expanded chapter on Brain and Language, I was happy to
find a thoughtful and up-to-date discussion of brain specialization for
language that avoids the usual Broca-Wernicke dichotomy and presents important
data on the implication of less traditional areas for language processing (for
example the different areas of the Temporal gyrus and underlying fibre tracts,
see e.g., Mesulman, 2015). However, I was astonished that most of the content
focused on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data of impaired brain
function, with few normal aspects being highlighted nor other methods for
brain imaging presented, especially given the difficulties evaluating
sentence/discourse processing using fMRI. The authors highlight the importance
of dynamic integration of information and prediction in language
comprehension, but fMRI techniques are not well suited for this type of
investigation as they provide (mostly) static images of the brain following
stimulus presentation. In fact, there is a legion of ongoing research on
dynamic language processing that is often, but not exclusively, focused on
typical language processing, and that uses ERPs (Event related potentials,
scalp-based measures of positive and negative deflections in brain-based
electrical changes linked to specific cognitive events) to study language
processing with extremely high time resolution (every millisecond or so,
depending on the system used) during language processing. Linking up to
concepts developed in section 2.9 of the book (top-down and bottom-up
processing), ERPs are an excellent tool for the study of on-line real-time
integration and prediction of information. In particular, the N400, a
negative-going ERP component is highly susceptible to semantic and syntactic
constraints established in the sentence but also in discourse (see Kutas and
Federmeyer, 2011 for a recent review of semantic N400s, Tanner and Van Hell,
2014 for an example of morpho-syntactic processing, and Kuperberg et al, 2006
for thematic-role processing using this indicator). I think this type of
scientific data, although challenging to present, should be explored in this
type of book. 

References

Fabbro, F. (2001). The Bilingual Brain: Cerebral Representation of Languages.
Brain and Language, 79(2), 211-222. 

Kuperberg, G. R., Caplan, D., Sitnikova, T., Eddy, M., & Holcomb, P. J.
(2006). Neural correlates of processing syntactic, semantic, and thematic
relationships in sentences. Language and Cognitive Processes, 21(5), 489-530.
doi:10.1080/01690960500094279

Kutas, M., & Federmeier, K. D. (2011). Thirty Years and Counting: Finding
Meaning in the N400 Component of the Event-Related Brain Potential (ERP).
Annual Review of Psychology, 62, 621-647.
doi:10.1146/annurev.psych.093008.131123

Menn, L. (2011). Psycholinguistics: Introduction and applications. San Diego,
CA: Plural Publishing Inc.

Mesulam, M. Revisiting Wernicke’s Area, Abstracts of the Society for the
Neurobiology of Language, Chicago, IL. October 16th, 2015 : 5. Downloaded at
http://www.neurolang.org/programs/SNL2015_Abstracts.pdf

Tanner, D., & Van Hell, J. G. (2014). ERPs reveal individual differences in
morphosyntactic processing. Neuropsychologia, 56, 281-301.
doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2014.02.002


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Phaedra Royle holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Université de Montréal and
pursued postdoctoral studies at the School of Communication Sciences and
Disorders at McGill. Her interests lie in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics,
language disorders, language acquisition, lexicon, morpho-phonology and
morpho-syntactic processing in French populations with and without learning
challenges (SLI, Cochlear implants, Bilingualism, Ageing). She is a professor
at the School of Speech Language Pathology and Audiology at the Université de
Montréal, and is a member of the Centre for Research on Brain, Language and
Music.





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