Book Reviews

Humpty Dumpty Meets the Neurolinguists: Review of B. Stemmer & H. A. Whitaker (Eds.), Handbook of neurolinguistics. San Diego: Academic Press, 1998. (xxvi + 788 pages). ELLEN BIALYSTOK, York University

Handbooks have proliferated in recent years. Combining, as they do, features of manuals (technical details) and state-of the-art collections (theoretical overviews), handbooks have become an invaluable tool for researchers because they compile the important scholarship of a diverse area into one convenient volume. Moreover, because handbooks are normally expected to present the breadth of a field through its most current thinkers, they also provide an opportunity for interested outsiders to get an authoritative overview of a field. It is in this latter capacity, as an interested outsider bearing equal measures of curiosity and expectation, that I approached the Handbook of neumlinguistics. I am neither a neuroscientist nor a linguist but have a deep interest in both domains. I believe that the syndiesis of mind and brain in the paradigms that are foundational to the neurosciences is an exciting advance, perhaps even shift, in psychological research. The fruits of such endeavours stand to contribute not only to specific areas of research, such as my own field of developmental psycholinguistics, but also to some of the most perennial and enduring questions of mind, such as the nature of language and thought. Put this way, neurolinguistics is at the vanguard of research in the language sciences. The book is organized around a Prologue followed by five content sections: I. History of Neurolinguistics, II. Clinical and Experimental Methods in Neurolinguistics, III. Experimental Neurolinguistics, IV. Clinical Neurolinguistics, and V. Resources in Clinical and Experimental Neurolinguistics and Related Fields. The Prologue is a bit mysterious; it is not clear why these three papers were selected for special attention. Each could easily enough fit into one of the content areas identified in the structure of the book. For example, the historical review of the technological advances in the neurosciences by Goodglass is interesting and useful, but would be an excellent companion piece to the historical review of clinical neurolinguistics presented by Whitaker in Part I, History of Neurolinguistics. The five main substantive sections provide thorough coverage of the field. In spite of the redundancy in their names, the sections are reasonably distinct and it is possible to identify the major theme covered

by each. Part II indeed focuses more on method than results, and Parts III and IV differ from each other in their starting points. Essentially, the chapters in Part III begin with a linguistic concept (e.g., phonology, syntax, computation) and explore its neural basis while those in Part IV begin with a pathology (e.g., dementia, Parkinson's disease, dyslexia) and examine the linguistic consequences. Some of it is an uneasy fit an entire subsection of Part II is devoted to issues in lateralization, not exactly an aspect of language, but not necessarily clinical pathology either. More striking, the chapter by Paradis on aphasia in multilinguals is included in Part IV with the various pathological disorders, rather than Part III with linguistic considerations, while the chapter by Corina on sign language in deaf individuals appears in Part III with linguistic factors. Do we conclude that rnultilingualism is a clinical condition but deafness a linguistic one? The subheading under which Paradis's paper appears avoids the obvious implication of its placement by referring to "Special Populations," but the multilinguals are the only special population in this section that do not have some identifiable disease, and, I would hazard, are no more special than the population of deaf signers. But all these are quibbles. Most of the chapters appear in sensible places and the connections among the papers provide coherence to the structure of the book and help to elucidate the editors' conception of the major components and contributions of the field of neurolinguistics. Books such as this are clearly intended to be used for reference I doubt that many readers will follow my own strategy of starting at the beginning and reading it through to the end. It is important, therefore, to consider how accessible the information is to the kind of search and rescue procedures that most users will engage. The structure of the chapters is helpful, of course, but a reader who wants very specific information will more likely turn to the end, to the index. To some extent, however, the subject index is too much a recapitulation of the table of contents. Looking up "bilingualism," for example, the reader is essentially referred to the chapter by Paradis; looking up "dyslexia," to the chapters by Martin and by Seymour. But the subject matter of these chapters is clearly indicated in their tides and would be easily

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Bialystok language, but the level of detail taken by each appears to be so incommensurate as to make communication impossible. This may be an inevitable consequence of the distinct nature of the two domains: Language, to be interpretable, must be discussed at a high level of abstraction, but neurological structures, to be usefully identifiable, must be described at the most precise level of detail. With these somewhat disjointed approaches, the main contribution of the field becomes a matter of interpretation. From my perspective, there are two essential questions we are faced with. The first question is what we can legitimately infer from the evidence amassed by these techniques; the second is what we can conclude about the nature of language. Consider first the nature of evidence. It is striking that the vast majority of data reported in the volume are based on patients with neurological disorders. Until recently, of course, such patients were the only source of information about the relation between structural features of the brain and behavioural descriptions of linguistic competence. However, patients with lesions in their brains do not have "normal" brains, so extrapolation from these observations to the relation between language and brain must be treated cautiously at best. There is a sense throughout the collection that the agenda is to address clinical disorders but not necessarily to use clinical populations as a scientific method for asking universal questions. However, developments in functional imaging techniques (described in the chapter by Demonet) mean that we no longer need to be restricted by this situation. The technologies of fMRI and PET provide access to data that are immeasurable in their richness and potentiality. Therefore, it is puzzling that so little of the field, at least if this volume is representative, has exploited these methods. For addressing questions of language processing, it would seem that functional imaging research on normal populations would be more fruitful than descriptions of linguistic deficit in clinical populations. The use of normal populations alone, however, would not necessarily change another essential premise in this kind of research. Presumably, the ultimate goal of neurolinguistics is to understand the relation between brain structures and language processes, but the enterprise appears to be stuck at a too literal level of interpretation. There seems to be an underlying premise that there is some mapping between cerebral structure and linguistic function, that impairment to a structure will impact on the function, and that these relations can be revealed through careful examination of the correspondences between the two. But is the brain necessarily organized like that? As Whitaker explains in his review of the field, the lineage of modern neurolinguistics can be traced to primitive phrenology, a field that had considerable investment in assuming that there was functional specificity associated with identifiable brain locations. More scientific evidence from the laboratories of Broca and Wernicke confirmed those premises. Hence the field inherited the paradigm that the

identified in this simpler way. The problem is that there were other references to bilingualism (e.g., chapter by Segalowitz and Chevalier) and dyslexia (e.g., chapters by Jarema and by Hagoort) throughout the collection but these are absent in the index. The more serious omission, however, is the lack of an author index. It would have been useful to be able to access the work of individuals directly. When one is sampling a field, it is helpful to focus on the work of a particular researcher and compare interpretations of the same sources. Finally, the last section of the book is a compilation of resources, including, almost by default, the combined reference list for all the chapters. This is a helpful guide to the field and it is useful as well for providing a sense of the growing productivity of the field. Some bold choices were made in creating the lists. For example, Stemmer and Gahl list software packages but caution that they have not evaluated them so are not responsible, and Stemmer and Hild present internet resources with the disclaimer that they may no longer exist. Although this imparts a "leading edge" atmosphere to the collection, a handbook of this calibre should not risk including sources that it would not endorse under more careful scrutiny. But what of the substance of the book? I begin with the premise that the contributing authors are the leading experts in their fields and that the coverage of topics is complete and authoritative, From this starting point, one is left with the daunting task of evaluating an entire discipline. Neurolinguistics is a hybrid field, combining the methods of the neurosciences with the content of linguistic inquiry. Presumably, an evaluation would need to assess its contribution to both. My interest, however, is asymmetrical what have the methods of the neurosciences contributed to our conceptions of language and mind? There is an overriding impression that the kind of collaboration implied by the agglutinated name of the discipline has not yet occurred. Approaches to problems in neurolinguistics seem at this time to be firmly rooted in one or the other contributing disciplinary traditions, namely neuroscience or linguistics. A number of the authors call for greater interdisciplinary collaboration, and some hail neurolinguistics as an example of such co-operation, but the fact is that there are only rare glimpses of how this can occur or evidence that it already has. The research that is motivated primarily by the goal of advancing neurological description of brain functioning, especially in cases of pathology, uses language as a window into the brain, as a tool to reveal the hidden mechanism of thought. Language is treated as fragments of data, suffering losses under certain conditions of impairment, but is not part of an inherently structured system. Conversely, descriptions that take language as the basis for discussion and place the linguistic detail in some theoretical context are vague about the neurology, often referring to not much more than hemispheric specialization. Both kinds of approaches are obviously essential to any understanding of how brains create

Book Reviews brain was functionally differentiated, and this premise is apparent in many of the chapters of this volume. Inferences about the plausibility of a language module, for example, follow from evidence that language, even specific aspects of language, appear to be distributed through various parts of the brain. But "language module" is a functional abstraction and need not reside in any identifiable, let alone unique anatomical space. The construct of language module is not undermined by the failure to place all of its constituent processes into a shared cortical destination. The problem is that the majority of the evidence amassed in neurolinguistic research concerns the Iocali2ation of linguistic functions in precise brain locations. Yet, several chapters attest to the variability by which similar lesions can lead to different deficits. If the premise is incorrect, and the correspondence between location and function is much weaker than had been assumed, then the data become difficult to interpret. Harris and Small in their chapter point out that these assumptions do not apply in connectionist models, where the massive interconnectivity of neuron-like nodes is responsible for the emergence of higher level functions, like language. Connectionist models, of course, have their own limitations, but the point is that information about cortical locations or functional specificity of neuronal sites may not reveal very much about how the brain processes language. The second issue is the nature of language that is implied by the represented body of work. In the effort to describe the impact that various cerebral sites have on language, the result is to create a landscape in which fragments of language are scattered throughout the brain. Language emerges as a collection of linguistic aspects that are unconstrained in their decompositional possibilities. Early neurolinguistics, of course, began with some simple neurologically based distinctions epitomized by the production-comprehension axis of Broca's and Wernicke's areas respectively. Distinctions unveiled through neurolinguistic investigation now encompass numerous ways of considering linguistic differences: nouns versus verbs, open versus closed class words, semantic versus syntactic processes, sensory versus functional features of words, prosodic versus segmental aspects of phonology, concrete versus abstract words, and so on. But what kind of linguistic theory makes these distinctions plausible? What is language if it can be so endlessly dissected and what is the role

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of the brain in processing language if the division of labour is so minute? The collection of chapters in this volume presents immense detail on a vast array of issues that connect the brain and language. There is much description but little interpretation: Few theories are proposed and few connections are made. But that is probably where disciplines begin. The present field of child language acquisition is rich in theory and explanation, but the humble beginnings of this field were in the simple observations of children's speech made by Roger Brown and his students in the late 1950s. At the time, there was no "theory of language acquisition"; indeed, such an idea would have been anathema to the high priests of behaviourism. The important contribution of Brown and others like him at the time was to carefully and systematically document what was happening: Adam said this and Eve said that. The interpretation of those utterances continues to this day, but it was the description of them that gave birth to the fertile field of child language acquisition. My impression is that neurolinguistics is now at the stage occupied by child language acquisition forty years ago. Advances in the methods of neuroscience have yielded a cornucopia of new information and access to data sources previously unknagined. What has happened, though, is that the somewhat uncoordinated attack by neurolinguists, consisting of researchers from different fields, bringing different questions and assumptions, has left shards of language scattered throughout the brain with no unifying sense of purpose. When linguistics was more of an armchair pursuit, it was easy to keep language as a coherent abstraction, whole in its form and unique in its character. That myth can no longer be sustained, but the result has been to abandon the construct in the service of neuronal differentiation. It is time now to begin the task of putting the pieces back together again. The glue that will cement these elements is theory. It is by examining the shards through the lens of a hypothesis that shape emerges and structure is made visible. All the king's horses and all the king's men may have failed with Humpty Dumpty, but teams of neurolinguists combining expertise in neuroscience, linguistics, and cognitive psychology may well succeed in assembling a rich and sophisticated understanding of language from the fragments scattered by our expanding knowledge of the brain.