At the Interface of (Bio)linguistics, Language Processing, and Neuropsychology

Abstract

This book, part of the Oxford Studies in Biolinguistic series, presents a state-ofthe-art overview of the field, more specifically, on psycho- and neurolinguistics and their relation to models of syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology, while advancing its limits with cutting-edge research. A distinctive feature of the piece is the strong presence of interdisciplinary work and the internal coherence of the volume, integrating computational science, cognitive science, neurology and psycholinguistics, as well as syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology; an integration that is most welcomed as it triggers debate and productive revisiting of the machinery assumed within all aforementioned sub-disciplines of linguistics. The volume is organized around the notion of garden path sentences, relative clauses, and their relations at the processing level; this includes major problems of natural language processing and the relations between syntax, semantics, and morpho-phonology from a more general point of view as well. The editors have chosen to open the book with a reprinted article by Thomas Bever, from 1970 (which becomes a recurrent motif to which the contributors refer once and again as a departing point, thus giving structural and thematic unity and coherence to the book as a whole), a locus classicus for the psycholinguistic and neurocognitive approaches to ambiguity resolution, parsing (sentence perception, at the moment) strategies, and so-called ‘garden path sentences’ (GPS), the best known example being The horse raced past the barn fell, even if, as Tanenhaus claims in the Afterword, none of those is the prime theme of the work (but it is mostly about the relation between language and general cognitive strategies, an early plea for holism). The opening seems appropriate, since it provides the reader with an overall perspective on the studies of language as a concept analogous to those of “species or organ, as they are used in biological science” (p. 2). The article makes a case of distinguishing language as a mental/biological entity from language as a behavior; but, crucially, language structure and development are not to be isolated from the development of other cognitive capacities. Choosing this particular article is a statement in itself: Perceptual mechanisms, cognitive structures (including counting and number approximation, visual patterns and 2-D/3-D illusions), and linguistic structures (grammatical role assignment, abstraction of a structural pattern like ‘active’ or