17.597, Review: Psycholinguistics: Cutler (2005)

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Subject: 17.597, Review: Psycholinguistics: Cutler (2005)

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What follows is a review or discussion note contributed to our 
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1)
Date: 21-Feb-2006
From: Oren Sadeh Leicht < Oren.SadehLeicht at let.uu.nl >
Subject: Twenty-First Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:01:07
From: Oren Sadeh Leicht < Oren.SadehLeicht at let.uu.nl >
Subject: Twenty-First Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones 
 

EDITOR: Cutler, Anne
TITLE: Twenty-First Century Psycholinguistics
SUBTITLE: Four Cornerstones
PUBLISHER: Lawrence and Erlbaum Associates
YEAR: 2005
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2738.html 

Oren Sadeh-Leicht, Utrecht Institute of Linguistics, OTS

SYNOPSIS

The book is a collection of various articles about four major problems 
in psycholinguistics: Psychology and Linguistics, Biology and 
Behavior, Production and Comprehension, and Model and Experiment.

The book begins with a very brief review (by Cutler, Klein and 
Levinson) of what psycholinguistics is and discusses in very general 
lines the development of those four problems over the past five 
decades of psycholinguistic research.

The following review is organized in the same manner as the book. A 
short summary of what is claimed in each article is given, followed by 
my assessment, where appropriate.

Psychology and Linguistics
The purpose of ''Cognitive mechanisms and syntactic theory'' by 
Boland is to show that there exist psycholinguistic data formal linguists 
may consider to be in support of their theories, that is the fundamental 
distinction between arguments and adjuncts. A short theoretical 
introduction about the relation between formal linguistics and the 
parser is provided, where the position of weak transparency between 
parsing mechanisms and formal linguistics is advocated. The 
authoress proceeds to assume that adjuncts are attached during 
parsing with a different attachment rule: there is no lexical head that 
specifies attachments of adjuncts. Thus she suggests the Argument 
Structure Hypothesis: lexical frequency effects would be predicted for 
arguments, but not for adjuncts. This is relevant to formal linguistics: 
arguments will be processed differently than adjuncts.

Boland continues to discuss the on-going debate on this issue: 
whether lexical frequency or rather plausibility can explain 
argument/adjunct effects. She presents three experiments in which 
the passive listening paradigm (not explained, but I gather that people 
listen to sentences while manipulated pictures are presented, and 
their eye movements are monitored) was used. She found that 
subjects' visual attention was drawn to likely referents of the verb's 
arguments: when a verb is introduced into discourse, its arguments 
are implied before they are explicitly mentioned, but not adjuncts. This 
suggests that arguments were syntactically analyzed via a lexicalized 
mechanism. She concludes that only arguments are represented in 
the lexical entries of their heads. Although potentially useful to formal 
syntactic theory, the paper ends in a somewhat pessimistic tone: 
Psycholinguistic data will always play a secondary role in formal 
linguistic theory: 'This is as it should be, under the assumptions of 
weak transparency.' (p. 40). Why this should be so? It is unclear in 
what cases weak transparency indeed bares on formal theory or not, 
which works against the goal of the paper. It would be far more 
revealing to assume that the link is strong, as it allows for clearer 
predictions.

In ''Getting sound structures in mind'', Fikkert focuses on showing that 
children's production forms support the claim that children: (1) build up 
abstract phonological representations of words, and (2) make 
generalizations over their own productive lexicon resulting in 
phonological constraints which are part of children's developing 
phonological system. After a short introduction of basic concepts, the 
paper continues to report the study of place of articulation patterns in 
early production. Largely, children start from a harmonic stage, where 
all sounds of the word share the same place of articulation features 
determined by the stressed vowel of the word. Subsequent stages 
lead to better segmentation, until it reaches adult level.

It was also found that if a segment has no place of articulation 
specification in the lexicon, it will be generalized as coronal, and that 
children use the same place of articulation features as required to 
produce target words, meaning that only target words that can be 
produced correctly are attempted.

It was not mentioned what ''targeted words'' are and what a ''fully 
segmentized'' adult representation is, or what was coded exactly. It was 
therefore difficult to understand whether the conclusions Fikkert made 
follow from the database coding.

Further, Fikkert claims that once a child's production lexicon (does this 
distinction exist?) may contain for example a certain number of 
occurrences of the sequence labial vowel coronal, and that the 
child ''will generalize over this productive lexicon and derive a rule or 
constraint stating that labial consonants are at the left edge of the 
word'' (p. 49). It is not clear, and in fact highly controversial, how 
overgeneralization, a matter of frequency, may or may not directly 
lead to a formation of a rule or constraint. Fikkert shows that if this 
rule is introduced, then words like kip (chicken, in Dutch) would be 
produced unfaithfully, as pip, by consonant harmony, as evidenced. 
But then, it is not clear why the rule of consonant harmony was not 
acquired instead of the suggested rule, if at all. And it is not clear 
whether the unfaithful mistakes are not just a matter of pure 
coincidence in children production.

Indeed Fikkert discusses alternative explanations that may account for 
the data. She writes that frequency accounts, for example, do not fare 
well, since harmonic words are of very low frequency and yet are 
produced early. But it still doesn't follow that children did study the rule 
she suggested, if at all. She adds that optimality theory also does not 
explain the patterns found, and argues that only an account that 
assumes both initially underspecified and developing representations 
and a developing grammar (consisting of emerging constraints) 
provides an account of the data. But it is hard for me to see how the 
claim is supported due to these conceptual issues, and it is not clear 
to me why a child would over generalize, and on what basis this 
overgeneralization would follow, this is a matter of observation.

A short discussion of infant perception and early word recognition 
shows that vowel contrasts become language specific at about 6 
months of age, and in perception and production, acquisition of 
vowels precedes the acquisition of consonants. At 9 months, children 
are sensitive to phonotactically possible and impossible strings of 
segments in their native language. By assuming underspecified lexical 
representations, Fikkert can account for the gradual and systematic 
changes encountered in child production studies, and for the 
difference between discrimination of sounds. On this basis, she 
argues that acquisition is important for linguists and psycholinguists, 
but in the end states that ''it is still a long but interesting way to test the 
psychological reality of linguistic theories'' (p. 54).

The paper by Haverkort, ''Linguistic representation and language use 
in Aphasia'', purports the argument that aphasics have the knowledge 
of their native language available, but cannot make quick use of it, in 
both production and perception. First, it is shown that aphasics 
demonstrate equal priming effects as normals on a cross-modal lexical 
decision task, where a certain word does not conform to previous 
syntactic context. This effect is obtained only when the time between 
hearing the last word of the syntactic context and being presented 
with the word for which a lexical decision is to be made is stretched to 
1100ms. Second, it is shown that simplifications of syntactic structure, 
i.e. omission of functional categories, are directed by the grammatical 
representation of the language. Patients use simpler representations 
because they impose less burden on working memory. Thus 
representations are either ''pruned'', as in the ''Tree Pruning 
Hypothesis'' (Friedman, 2002) to meet processing limitations or a verb 
cannot move up too far.  For instance, the distribution of errors of 
patients suggests that tense dominates agreement in a 
representational tree. Therefore, no pure errors of agreement are 
found: Since information always becomes available from the top down, 
agreement and tense errors will always occur together, as evidenced.

Based on this, the author claims that ''there is thus interdependence 
between linguistic representations and psycholinguistic processes'' (p. 
67). But that makes it unclear why the author claimed in the beginning 
that: ''This paper argues that a clear distinction should be made 
between the representation of linguistic knowledge and the use that is 
made of such a knowledge representation in processes of language 
comprehension and production'' (p. 57). If linguistic representations 
depend on psycholinguistic processes and vice versa, then there 
cannot be a ''clear distinction'' between representation and its use.  
The author seems to have conflated difficulty of mental processes with 
complexity of representation reminding me of the Derivational Theory 
of Complexity, an assumption that turned out to be incorrect (although 
see Phillips, 1996). If the author does support such equivalence, then 
it goes against what is stated in the beginning. Simply put, the 
evidence the author supplies go against his initial declaration, but 
seems to fit his final conclusion: That linguistic knowledge describes 
mental processes, as Chomsky has already pointed out:

''...that the speaker-hearer has internalized a rule system involving the 
principles of locality and opacity and that judgment and performance 
are guided by mental computation involving these internally-
represented rules and principles'' (Chomsky, 1980, p. 130).

But that is hardly new. For the ''clear distinction'' to gain more 
credibility, it should be shown that for normals with low working 
memory, comparable to that of aphasics, the same patterns of errors 
will be produced as of aphasics, but that is not provided.

In ''Data mining at the intersection of psychology and linguistics'' by 
Baayen, it is shown how the combination of linguistic and 
psychological resources can be a rich source of data for studying the 
lexicon and lexical processing. New methodological possibilities for 
data mining are presented by examination of databases complied by 
Balota et al., CELEX, the BNC and WordNet. The predictive potential 
of certain variables are studied for three behavioural measures: visual 
lexical decision latencies and word naming latencies in ms, and 
subjective familiarity ratings on a seven-point scale. From a statistic 
analysis of the various databases, it appears that word frequency is a 
semantic measure and not a measure of form-related lexical 
properties in visual lexical decision latencies and word naming 
latencies. Thus there is a tight correlation between word frequency 
with measures of word meaning, compared to measures of word form: 
Word frequency is primarily a measure of conceptual familiarity.
The distributional observation supports the hypothesis that word 
frequency effect is a strong post-access component, and argues 
against the idea that frequency effects would arise primarily or 
exclusively at the access level.

Subjective familiarity ratings are found to be a dependent variable in 
their own right, much like eye fixation duration. This leads to the 
conclusion that ratings should not be used as a substitute for a corpus-
based frequency counts.

In its final conclusion, the author suggests to reintroduce word 
frequency into psychology being a reliable predictor of behavioral 
measures. The author further purports the opinion that a factorial 
design should only be used as a last resort, since they require (among 
other problems) matching on all other potentially relevant variables: 
only use it when no-fine grained numerical information is available.

The paper ''Establishing and using routines during dialogue: 
Implications for psychology and linguistics'' by Pickering and Garrod 
(P&G) discusses the relation between dialogue processing and the 
nature of the mental lexicon.

They describe an experiment where two interlocutors have to explain 
to each other where they are in a maze. One of the interlocutors makes 
repeated use of an expression and this expression is ultimately 
adopted by the other interlocutor. P&G give an example that one of 
the interlocutors used the term ''right-indicator'' (right hand protrusion 
on a maze) invented by one of the interlocutors to be used as a 
reference point. The term was ''routinized'' by storing it in the mental 
lexicon for that conversation alone. Therefore, they claim, the lexicon 
must be constantly and dynamically updated. Logically then, there is 
no strict division between acquisition and adult usage, providing 
support to Jackendoff's (2002) conception of the mental lexicon.

This approach to dialogue is called the interactive-alignment account. 
It argues that a conversation is successful to the extent that 
interlocutors end up with aligned situation models: ''They come to 
understand the relevant aspect of the world in the same way'' (p. 87). 
Interactive alignment involves the priming of particular levels of 
representation and the links between those levels. Producing or 
comprehending any utterance leads to activation of those 
representations, but their activation gradually decays. However, when 
interactive alignment leads to sufficiently strong activation of the links 
between the level, routinization occurs. Routinization is tracing new 
memory traces associated with a particular expression. For 
example, ''right indicator'' is routinized by the activation of right and 
indicator, plus the specific meaning that right indicator has in this 
particular context. This leads to the activation of phonological 
representation and syntactic presentation (as in Jackendoff, 2002), 
together with the activation of the specific meaning (right-hand-
protrusion on a maze).The links among phonology, syntax and 
semantic are activated, and this increases the likelihood that the 
interlocutors are going to use right indicator with that specific meaning.

Several caveats should have been explained. For instance, how does 
interlocutor B know to interpret interlocutor's A utterance right 
indicator to refer to a right hand protrusion on maze? That is hardly 
evident. P&G suggest that it is done by ''normal processes of meaning 
decomposition, corresponding to the compositional processes that A 
has used in production'' (p. 94). But it is not known whether two 
interlocutors use the same compositional or decompositional 
processes. What normal processes of meaning decomposition are 
should have been clarified. P&G suggest the following account. When 
activation is strong enough, a new lexical entry is constructed by 
indexing the phonological/syntactic presentation of right indicator not 
to the meaning representation of ''pointer to the right'', but to the 
intended meaning of ''right hand protrusion on the right''. They note 
that ''clearly, we cannot specify exactly what makes activation strong 
enough for routinization to occur, but assume that it depends on at 
least the frequency of use of the expression with that meaning by both 
speakers'' (p. 95).

By parity of argument, one would be able to claim that the 
expression ''couch potato'' may refer to ''right protrusion on maze'' if 
the phonological/syntactic presentation is sufficiently activated (but 
what exactly makes this routinization is unknown) and indexed with 
the meaning ''right protrusion on maze''. There can be actually any 
infinite number of expressions that may refer to ''right protrusion on 
maze'' under this account, which is therefore reduced to an 
uninteresting one.

It seems to me that the account P&G have to offer to routinization is a 
version of behaviorism, only the terms have been cast anew: Simply 
replace activation by positive reinforcement, meaning representation 
with stimulus, and routinization by response. The explanatory power 
of the model is inadequate suffering from the same known set of 
problems of behaviorist models (see Chomsky, 1959).

Poeppel and Embick's paper ''Defining the relation between linguistics 
and neuroscience'' is an interesting introspection of the link between 
the rapidly developing field of neuroscience and linguistics. They 
focus on the questions of whether current brain/language research 
provides an example of interdisciplinary cross-fertilization or cross-
sterilizations, i.e. whether either discipline can learn something in an 
explanatorily significant way from one another. There are two 
problems: (1) Granularity mismatch problem (GMP): linguistic and 
neuroscientific studies of language operate with objects of different 
granularity. In particular, linguistic computations involve fine grained 
distinctions and explicit computational operations. Neuroscientific 
approaches to language operate in terms of broader conceptual 
distinctions; (2) Ontological incommensurability problem (OIP): the 
units of linguistic computation and the units of neurological 
computation are incommensurable (there is no solid connection linking 
these computations). The authors suggest a solution for both 
problems: ''spelling out the ontologies and processes in computational 
terms that are at the appropriate level of abstraction (i.e. can be 
performed by specific neuronal populations) such that explicit 
interdisciplinary linking hypotheses can be formulated.'' (p. 106). The 
authors then briefly describe the standard research program in 
cognitive neuroscience, and whether progress in this program can be 
made, specifically by imaging Broca's area. They point out that 
Neurocognitive research of Broca's area is not done at the proper 
level of granularity, and that what appear to be results are actually 
problems, in the sense that the expectation that syntax should 
correspond to a single cortical region is unrealistic (but that is the way 
research is being done). Syntax is made of various computations, and 
cortical areas involve many (assumingly) differentiated processes. 
Thus it is difficult to see on-to-one correspondence. ERP studies are 
discussed to be a solution to this problem, but are then discarded on 
the same reason of granularity mismatch.

The following point the authors put forward is the idea that that some 
notion of grammar must be computed in the brain in real time, in 
contrast to current generative syntax that argues that computations 
proposed in syntactic analyses need not be performed in real time. 
They authors insist that in order for progress to take place in 
addressing problems (1) and (2) that we restrict out attention to 
(abstract) computations that are actually performed by the human 
brain. Several ways to proceed are sketched in general lines. In 
syntax for instance, the authors suggest to study how linearization 
occurs. They argue though that ''the hierarchical representations 
motivated by syntactic theory must have a linear order imposed on 
them'' (p. 116). This is controversial: Syntactic representations may be 
hierarchical but linearization is perhaps a constraint of articulatory 
systems - linearization is thus outside of syntax.

The discussion of the problems is illuminating and interesting, but I 
found the solutions to be sketchy. The authors point out that the link 
between linguistics and neuroscience is computations, which should 
be executed by assemblies of neurons. But it is still unclear to me 
what type of computations can or cannot be executed by neurons. It is 
a plain truism that language is computed by neurons. And although 
theories of grammar suggest computations that need not be executed 
by the brain as formulated, it is unclear how the study of neuronal 
activity may lead to their abandonment. There is nothing on neuronal 
activity that labels it as a computation a neuron can perform or not, 
indeed there is nothing yet that labels it as this or that cognitive 
computation.

Biology and behavior

In ''Genetic specificity of linguistic heritability'', Stromswold reports 
linguistics studies of twins, in an effort to understand better heritability: 
the proportion of the phenotype variance that is due to genetic 
variance. She compared concordance rates for developmental 
language disorders in twins (SLI, dyslexia). The logic is the 
concordance rate for language disorder is significantly higher for 
monozygote twins than for dizygotic twins. This suggests that genes 
play a role in language disorders. She found that normal monozygotic 
twins more similarly to own another than dizygote twins do. This 
suggests that heritable factors play a substantial role in linguistic 
abilities of normal people. She contends that the analyses reported 
were univariate, and not multivariate, yielding certain limitations: It 
doesn't allow knowing whether the heritable factors that affect 
language are specific to language.

The paper mostly points out to future research. The impression of a 
field in its beginning, and the repetitive use of speculative or of a 
pessimistic note was all over the paper: ''unfortunately...one must 
have data from a very large number of twins'' (p. 125), ''can be 
estimated''(p. 129), ''one could investigate'' (p. 129), ''we can perform'' 
(p. 135), ''the ... hypothesis could explain'' (p. 136).

The paper continues to briefly discuss the role of environment, 
prenatal environment and how to tease these apart. The paper 
continues to discuss the molecular studies of genes of language 
(FOXP2), the DNA loci of written language impairments, and spoken 
language impairments. This is essentially a list of correlation between 
language impairments and the loci of genes that correspond to them. 
It is pointed out that there are at least 9 distinct loci linked to dyslexia, 
and a dozen loci linked to spoken language impairments. This 
indicates that different genotypes can cause broadly defined 
phenotypes such as written and spoken language impairments. 

Scott aims to delineate the neural systems underlying speech 
perception in ''the neurology of speech perception''. She makes a 
comparison between the organization of primate auditory cortex and 
human auditory cortex.  It is argued that like in visual system of 
primates, there is hierarchically organized processing of auditory 
information. And that there are two distinct pathways: a pathway 
responsible for what is being heard, and a pathway for the location of 
sound in space. In humans, there are also two pathways: a pathway 
from sound to meaning, and another from sound to articulation. These 
pathways appear to share anatomical and functional similarities.

Hagoort's paper ''Broca's complex as the unification space for 
language'' outlines how a neurobiological account of language 
contributes to the understanding of the workings of Broca's area. It is 
argued that Broca's area is not limited only to BA 44 and 45, but also 
to adjacent areas, too, such as BA 46 and BA 47 - therefore Broca's 
area is a complex in the prefrontal cortex. Several other points are 
made about Broca's area: that it is not language specific, that it 
subserves only a very specific function in language and that within 
Broca's area there are functionally defined sub-regions. Hagoort 
further pursues an account of how Broca's area unifies lexical 
information with overall sentential representations, perhaps in attempt 
to solve the Binding Problem in linguistic Neurocognition. He mostly 
relies on Vosse and Kempen's (2000) model.

In ''Dissecting the language organ: A new look at the role of Broca's 
area in language processing'' by Thompson-Schill, there is a brief 
review of hypothesized roles of Broca's area as the area for 
articulation, syntax, selection or verbal working memory. The 
discussion focuses on data from brain lesions. This paper shows that 
the actual function of Broca's area is undecided, although the 
authoress suggests that Broca's area is involved in selecting 
information among competing sources of information. 

Morgan's ''Biology and Behavior: Insights from the acquisition of sign 
language'' discusses insights from acquisition on language in a 
different modality than speech: sign language. After a sketchy 
introduction to British sign language, several interesting questions that 
have arisen in relation to spoken language acquisition are brought 
about. The first is how are children's attempts of producing language 
altered when the input is not sound? It is argued that limitations of 
hearing systems are the same as limitations of hearing: ''There are 
underlying similarities between what children so with signs and words 
in the beginning of language acquisition'' (p. 197). This forces a strong 
biological component active in these processes. The second topic is 
the development of grammar. Again, developmental parity between 
deaf and hearing language acquisition is found. The third topic is 
specific language impairment. The interest is to find out how specific 
language impairment is manifested, if at all, in sign language: Is it the 
same or different from SLI in spoken language? Problems of this type 
of research are discussed and results of preliminary tests. The claim is 
that the studies of developmental sign language impairment will show 
that the general role of auditory processing in SLI is overstated.

Production and comprehension

In ''Maximal input and feedback in production and comprehension'', 
Vigliocco and Hartsuiker argue for a maximalist view of sentence 
production. They claim to present evidence favoring maximal input 
and bidirectional flow of information between assumed levels of 
integration, just like in comprehension. The different levels of 
integration are described, such as message, functional and positional 
levels. Then the directionality of information flow between these levels 
is discussed, relying mostly on studies of spontaneous errors. The 
ensuing topic is concerned with benefit of feedback between different 
levels.

This paper is extremely unclear to me, perhaps because of lack of 
background knowledge. Nonetheless, there should have been a 
clearer discussion of the debate and its premises in the beginning of 
this paper. I found it difficult to understand the theory or the motivation 
behind the various ''illustrative examples'' (p. 211). For instance, I did 
not understand how ''maximal'' and ''minimal'' input is measured or 
defined. 

In ''Spoken-word recognition and production: regular but not 
inseparable bedfellows'', McQueen argues that speech production 
and comprehension should not be studied in isolation. He examines 
two specific properties of speech decoding and encoding. The paper 
discusses questions such as whether speech decoding/encoding is 
serial or cascaded. It is argued that from work on prevoicing in Dutch, 
for instance, there are limits on the kind of segmental information that 
is passed to the lexical level in decoding: Only information useful for 
lexical distinctions influences lexical processing. It is argued that 
phonological encoding is distinct yet tightly linked to phonological 
decoding.

Schiller discusses whether there is cross talk between the production 
and the comprehension systems in ''Verbal self-monitoring''. Internal 
monitoring is brought as an example for this cross-talk. 
Levelt's ''perceptual loop theory of self-monitoring'' is presented. 
Various predictions of the model were tested, and the results of four 
experiments are provided. It is shown that onset complexity and 
morphological complexity do not play a role in monitoring. 
Phonological representation (syllable boundaries or metrical stress) 
show strong effects in monitoring. These results favour a sequential, 
multi-tiered, phonological assignment process.

In ''The production and comprehension of resumptive pronouns in 
relative clause 'island' contexts'', Ferreira and Swets argue that 
people appear to relax the grammatical rules governing long-distance 
dependencies in production. It appears that sentences that violate the 
Subjacency constraint on wh-movement are produced in English in 
high frequency. To compensate this violation, so it appears, a 
resumptive pronoun is inserted in the gap position of the moved 
element to ameliorate the violation. This in turn may answer the 
question of incrementality of the human sentence parser, which seems 
to interest the authors more than the link between comprehension and 
production. If the parser is incremental, it should ''know'' about the 
island/gap resumptive pronoun close to the point of the gap. If the 
parser is clause-based, then an effect of gap/resumptive pronoun 
would be seen later than the gap. Two experiments for island 
elicitation plus resumptive pronouns are described, and a 
grammaticality judgment task (where comprehenders found island 
violations ungrammatical).

In one of the elicitation experiments, it is shown that the earliest words 
were longer in the island+resumptive pronoun condition than a 
grammatical control (although the control is plausibly odd ''this is a 
donkey that doesn't know where it lives'' - is it to be expected that 
donkeys know where they live at all?), suggesting that the production 
system uses a great deal of look-ahead. On this basis, it is argued 
that ''the production system appears to be unaware of a grammatical 
constraint to which the comprehension system is quite clearly 
sensitive, suggesting a production - comprehension asymmetry'' (p. 
268). Furthermore, it seems that the difficulty of producing island 
violations shows up early, suggesting incrementality in production.

In ''On the relationship between perception and production in L2 
categories'', Sebastián-Gallés and Baus add evidence to the 
coherence of phonetic representations in natives and the lack of 
robustness of these representations in non-native speakers. A group 
of L1 Catalan, Catalan-Spanish bilinguals and another group of L1 
Spanish, Spanish-Catalan bilinguals were tested in three perceptual 
tasks, such as categorical perception, gating task, lexical decision; 
and in a production task (picture naming). The comparison focused on 
vowels found in Catalan but not in Spanish thus differing in phonetic 
representation across languages. It was found that ''the relationship 
between perception and production is a complex one'' (p. 291), and 
that the percentage of Spanish dominant participants who scored 
within the range of Catalan native speakers for all perception tasks 
was low (except for categorization).

Other than that, it was difficult for me to glean the insight of this paper 
regarding the purpose that was set in the beginning. A clear 
conclusion as to the relationship between production and perception 
should have been stated.

Emmorey's paper, titled ''Signing for viewing: Some relations between 
production and comprehension of Sign Language'' is a very insightful 
and interesting paper in the emerging research field of sign language. 
The paper sets out to discuss how visual perception and manual 
production interact at the level of phonology (expressed by signing 
contrasts, such as ''whispering'' and normal signing), elaborating 
mainly on monitoring of manual articulation.

An interesting discussion deals with the pairing of visual perception 
with manual articulation in the brain by mirror neurons - a necessary 
link for studying the link between production-perception. Evidence are 
brought to show that visual feedback from one's own signing occurs in 
peripheral vision, and that signers do not look at their hands while 
signing, and they also do not track the hands of their interlocutors. 
Therefore, signers monitor their own internal representations of signs. 
It is claimed that also speakers perhaps do the same. Further 
research is indeed a promising avenue for studying the link between 
perception and production and how these processes are monitored.

Model and Experiment

In ''From Popper to Lakatos: A case for cumulative computation 
modelling'', Roelofs discusses the common problem that modelling in 
psycholinguistics is not cumulative in the sense that one does not 
build on earlier modelling results. Two approaches are 
described: ''The toothbrush approach'', where a model is built for the 
given data only, and the ''skeet shooting'' approach, where the aim of 
the experimenter is to collect data that disconfirm models. The article 
further discusses when it is appropriate to reject a model. It seems 
that the article was a response to a certain criticism of the author's 
own programme ''Weaver++'' designed to simulate lemma retrieval in 
various perceptual tasks. The criticism argued for the rejection of 
WEAVER++, but the author replies that it can be saved by adding a 
new assumption. The rest of the paper seems like a complaint that 
rejection should not be brought up before new assumption(s) can be 
added to modify the model. The paper goes on to describe the 
successful ''academic career'' of the programme in modelling lemma 
perception in the human brain, arguing for cumulativeness as its 
validation.

In the humorously written paper ''How do computational models help 
us develop better theories'', Norris discusses the benefit of building 
computational models in developing better theories. The difference 
between a computational model and a theory is discussed. It is argued 
that computational models are required to be constructed even if one 
does not deem to do so because computational models help in 
establishing whether something is missing in the theory or whether a 
certain mechanism in the theory does not work. However, it was not 
made clear how failure can be attributed to limitations of the 
computational model, the programmer, the particular programming 
language used, or indeed the theory. It is simply taken as self 
understood that in principle a failure in a computational model equals 
failure of the theory.  Given that the two are different, how can a 
failure in the model be so influential on the theory?

The paper further gives examples of models without theories and 
theories without models. A case study is provided (Shortlist: a model 
of word recognition in continuous speech). It is shown that the 
assumptions behind the original Shortlist model and the computational 
model of it were different and that none of those assumptions belong 
to the underlying theory. Thus it is argued that one should inquire how 
the model relates to the theory. If the model does what it was 
designed to do, one needs ask why is it so: ''Simulations from the 
model will convince you (and maybe even your critics) that the theory 
makes the right predictions, but it is only by thinking about the model 
that you will be able to explain why things work the way they do''. Note 
though that ''being able to explain why things work'' is a theory by 
itself, and its relation to the theory implemented may not be 
necessarily obvious.

In ''Tools for learning about computational models'', Pitt and Navarro 
discuss problems of comparison between models. Two qualitative 
tools are introduced: (1) Minimum description length and (2) 
Landscaping. The former is basically testing the success of 
generalizing a model designed for a certain set of data to another set 
of data instead of goodness of fit (the model that best fits the data). 
The latter is method which allows assessing sources of complexity in 
given models, gaining insight into the inner workings of the models - 
that is, how to distinguish between models. Further, it is briefly 
explained how complex relationships between models and data can 
be described. The paper is meant for people with high proficiency in 
statistics, at least in its second part.

In ''Rational models of comprehension: Addressing the performance 
paradox'', Crocker points to the problem that models account only for 
their own experimental findings, and not to more general performance. 
Limitations of models are identified (limited scope, model equivalence, 
measure specificity, weak linking hypothesis). A rational model is 
suggested, where the most plausible hypothesis is selected first. The 
advantages of such a model are discussed.

The last paper ''Computation and cognition: Four distinctions and their 
implications'' by Fitch, discusses the very difficult question how the 
brain computes the mind. Key computational distinctions are given, the 
most important one seems to be analog vs. digital. This distinction is 
compared to the electric/chemical activity of neurons, which receive 
analog information but emit digital information. How neurons compute 
hierarchical structure is also illustrated in general lines. Implications for 
cognition and language are discussed.

EVALUATION

The book provides reasonable information about the state-of-the-art 
in psycholinguistics in general lines. Although it tackles the four 
cornerstones of psycholinguistics, I think a more elaborate review of 
these four cornerstones was warranted to elucidate the problems 
being faced. The problem is intensified in the first section, Psychology 
and Linguistics: Most writers advocate a weak link between 
psychology and linguistics. No discussion was offered as to other 
approaches, which advocate a strong link. Most papers emphasize 
the estrangement between psychology and linguistics, and not how 
the two can be reconciled.

Each paper has given its own interpretation of the specific 
cornerstone, resulting in the same problem that the book is trying to 
focus on: A comparison and reconciliation between various 
approaches is extremely difficult. A certain researcher may take his or 
her view to be the working hypothesis, creating sub-approaches in 
sub-approaches built for solving a certain problem and only it. 

REFERENCES

Chomsky, N. 1959. Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. 
Language 35:26-58.

Chomsky, N. 1980. Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia 
University Press.

Friedman, N. 2002. Question Production in Agrammatism: The Tree 
Pruning Hypothesis. Brain and Language 80:160-187.

Jackendoff, R. 2002. Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, 
Grammar, Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Phillips, C. 1996. Order and Structure. PhD dissertation, 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge.

Sadeh Leicht, O. 2003. Sporadic Occurrence of the Garden Path 
Effect. In Yearbook 2003, eds. W. Heeren, D. Papangeli and E. 
Vlachou, 59-68: Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS.

Vosse, T. and Kempen, G. A. M. (2000). Syntactic structure assembly 
in human parsing: A computational model based on competitive 
inhibition and lexicalist grammar. Cognition 75:105-143. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Oren Sadeh-Leicht is a Ph.D. student in Psycholinguistics at the 
Utrecht Linguistics Institute, OTS, The Netherlands. He is studying the 
relation between parsing performance and grammatical competence. 
His M.A. thesis was entitled "Parsing Optional Garden Path Sentences 
in Hebrew" (cf. a summary of this work in Sadeh Leicht, 2003). He is 
more generally interested in parsers, evolution of language, and 
neurolinguistics.





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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-597