Language

Those of us who love speech perception are thrilled to look at a spectrogram or discuss the minutiae of one phonetic cue versus another. However, captivating a broader audience with the wonder and importance of speech for understanding language is a more difficult undertaking. In this beautifully written and illustrated book, Byrd and Mintz do just that. In a series of scholarly yet accessible chapters, they take the reader on a journey through discussions of classic issues such as what language is, how it is studied, and how the study of language informs our understanding of the mind. They introduce us to units and features, to notions of compositionality and productivity, to attention and memory and how they intersect with language use and understanding. In an integrative and clear fashion, readers are given a detailed description of language in its many forms, how language is implemented in the mind/brain, and how it is studied. And then, as if by surprise, by the end of the book readers will realize that they have also learned a lot about, and developed a new appreciation for, the actual medium—the speech signal—that makes language use and understanding possible.

This book is theoretically guided, but not theoretically restrictive. The authors take a functionalist approach, putting the study of speech processing and word recognition squarely within cognitive science. Language is a medium of communication through which we share knowledge, ideas, and plans with one another. At the same time, the book is by no means antiformalist. When necessary and useful, contributions from more formal approaches are introduced. The orientation and scope of the book are summarized well in the opening paragraph. Language and communication ‘are made possible by three facts: we can move our bodies in highly skilled ways; these skilled movements create physical changes in the environment that our senses can apprehend; our brains allow for development and use of a complex system of structuring information for expression to other individuals’ (1). The authors then proceed to provide a foundation for addressing these points throughout the rest of the book. [End Page 185]

Ch. 1, ‘Human language as a scientific phenomenon’, begins with a consideration of what language is. Always a difficult discussion because it is something all readers believe they know, B&M provide just enough information for the uninitiated reader to begin to appreciate the complexity of language, what its functions are, just how much implicit knowledge we, as language users, have, and some of the ways in which language might be studied scientifically.

In Ch. 2, ‘Speaking, sound, and hearing’, the reader is introduced to both the mechanics of speech production and the foundations of speech perception. We learn how the articulators move, how sound more generally—and speech in particular—can be precisely described and analyzed, how the ear breaks down sound, and what the steps are in transmission to the central nervous system. The reader is led through each of these content areas as if on a treasure hunt, with the knowledge that is transmitted along the way raising questions in the reader’s mind that are then introduced in the following section. For example, when the ‘anatomy of the ear’ is introduced, the reader is ready for this material since the foundation for understanding why it is important has already been given. Detailed and precise descriptions are given, but in a context that makes the material meaningful. For instance, the cochlea is described in great detail, including the differential responsiveness to low and high frequencies along the basilar membrane. But importantly, while this is described, it is also related both to the characteristics of the speech signal, of the spectrogram as a way to examine that signal, and to tonotopic organization in the brain and how that enters into the computations used in speech understanding.

Throughout the book B&M repeatedly first capture the reader’s interest in a topic, and then use that interest to teach the detailed material that is essential for...