: The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind and Understanding by Gerry T.M. Altmann

Abstract

Oxford University Press, 1997. £18.95 (xi + 253 pages)ISBN 0 19 852378 5If you want a quick tutorial on contemporary psycholinguistics, then this is the book to read. Gerry Altmann has produced an accessible, up-to-date, and entertaining treatment of what is only too often presented as a dull and impenetrable subject. In doing this, the book concentrates on the major theme of the subject, the problem of ambiguity.Psycholinguistics arose originally out of the formal linguistics of Chomsky in the 1960s, which was heavily dependent on the analogy between natural and artificial languages. However, it soon became apparent that natural, as opposed to artificial, languages suffer from a major mechanical flaw. They are inherently vague and ambiguous. Thus, real speech confounds non-human speech recognition systems because the same words, even when spoken by the same speaker under slightly different circumstances, are commonly associated with quite different patterns of sound. In a similar way, automatic parsers are confounded by the multitude of alternative possible interpretations for the same sentence in slightly different contexts. For example, Altmann illustrates at least 50 different interpretations for the written version of ‘Time flies like an arrow’ (e.g. think of fire flies that flash at regular intervals and like to settle on arrows, or imagine a zipper like a time-lock safe!). With the spoken version there turns out to be a further 60 interpretations (e.g. ‘Anne Arrow’ can be a name and ‘lichen’ a plant). The psycholinguistic puzzle is to explain how we manage to converse so easily and usually without the slightest awareness of these potential pitfalls.The book starts out with the problem of speech and how it could be acquired. The problem here is to explain how the newborn infant can even begin to make sense of a complex continuous speech stream. Altmann's approach is to consider the role of prosody and intonation and the contrast between a syllable-driven versus a phoneme-driven early learning mechanism. As with the rest of the book, he takes the reader through the main arguments and discusses the most important and interesting experiments relevant to each. This is all done in a readable and entertaining style that nevertheless does justice to the real complexities underlying the issues.The book goes on to consider core topics such as the organization of the mental lexicon, how we parse sentences, the psychological meaning of meaning, and how this might relate to discourse comprehension. Again, they are all handled in an entertaining and insightful way. I was particularly impressed with Altmann's skill in choosing examples and his use of different metaphors for the various processes being described. For instance, the example of how lexical ambiguity interacts with structural ambiguity that is alluded to above clearly illustrates the sophistication of the human sentence-processing system. And the combination-lock metaphor he uses as the key to the mental lexicon is both powerful and apposite in relation to the research findings.Beyond this the book covers many other topics often missing from the traditional texts of the 1970s and 80s. These include reading and language production as well as disorders of spoken and written language. Finally, Altmann attempts to pull everything together in the context of a neural-computational framework strongly influenced by the work of Jeffrey Elman.One of the strengths of the book is in this broad coverage. However, at only 233 pages of text the discussion is condensed and this inevitably leads to some weaknesses. For instance, there is sometimes a tendency for the text to skip from topic to topic without resolving the point at issue. Nevertheless, Altmann has done an excellent job of highlighting the key research questions in psycholinguistics and of illustrating some of the exciting experimental work that defines the subject today. So if you have a free weekend, it is certainly worth a read.