When I reviewed the Blackwell Companion to Phonology (van Oostendorp et al., 2011) for Reference Reviews (RR 2012/014) I remarked on the fact that every single issue of the journal contains several reviews of books on different aspects of language. This enormous output of reference literature reminds us of the central role that language has in what it is that makes us human. All animals communicate to some extent, and use a variety of methods to do so. The role of scent in human relations is generally under‐estimated, and we are all now aware of the importance of body language and visual communication: in the same issue in which I discussed the Blackwell companion, Stuart Hannabuss took even more space for a detailed analysis of a new Dictionary of Visual Discourse (Sandywell, 2011) (RR 2012/11). For humans however, spoken, written or, more recently, texted language is the most important.
There are various minor differences between humans and the other great apes: humans have different shoulder and elbow structures which make them better at throwing than any other animal. The same adaptions, together with relative hairlessness, distribution of body fat, etc., make humans more suited to a semi‐aquatic existence than other apes. Humans make far more use of tools than any other animal. Humans interrelate more closely with other animals, most especially dogs, than any other species. Humans are the most aggressive of apes – one of the very few animal species in which adults regularly kill each other. Far and away though, the biggest distinction between humans and the other apes is the use of language. Human communities are closely genetically related but use an astonishing range of languages. It is language, more than anything else, which makes us human.
It seems obvious to us now that the use of language is deeply embedded in the human brain. The first person to point this out in modern times was Franz‐Joseph Gall, who was expelled from Vienna under pressure from the Catholic Church, for daring to suggest that the God‐given human intellect could be governed by grey matter in the head! His Des Dispositions Innees de l'Ameet de l'Esprit was finally published in Paris in 1811, so this book more or less marks a bicentenary. Gall's successor Paul Broca similarly faced clerical opposition for introducing Darwinian ideas into the study of the brain. Finally Chomsky suggested that every child has an innate language acquisition device – that humans are born to understand grammar. Theological readers may correct me, but I think that even the Catholic Church has now come to accept the idea that there is a neuropsychological basis for language.
Recent years have seen an enormous expansion in the study of the neuroscience of language. Respected books such as Language and the Brain (Obler and Gjerlow, 1998) or even Foundations of Language (Jackendoff, 2003) are already rather dated. There are several specialist research journals in the field, such as Brain & Language, the Journal of Neurolinguistics, and the Journal of Speech, Language & Hearing Research. Quite a number of new books have recently been published on the subject: I would note How the Brain got Language (Arbib, 2012) or Talking Heads: The Neuroscience of Language (Denes, 2011) as excellent examples. There is even, just published, an encyclopedia: the Concise Encyclopedia of Brain & Language (Whitaker, 2012). This is not even the only recent “handbook” on the topic, Stemmer and Whitaker (2007) got there first, though with a rather smaller offering than this. There is, therefore, a solid substratum of recent literature underlying this new book.
This book is divided into two volumes: basic science and clinical populations. In practice though, it is not possible to draw a sharp distinction between the two: the subject of language production in volume one part III obviously interrelates with the subject of the methods and paradigms of studying the neuropsychology of language in volume two part I, although I did not notice much evidence of the different authors having looked at each other's contributions – there is very little in the way of cross‐citation. There are 46 chapters in total, by just over a hundred contributors. The contributors include some extremely distinguished scholars – I feel quite abashed at putting my two‐pennyworth of comment in the face of such an array of expertise. My only criticism would be that this reads, to some extent, like 46 separate formidable articles, rather than as a cohesive whole.
In this, the book falls firmly into the tradition of the handbook. This is not an introductory textbook or companion, giving the neophyte an overview of the topic or starting with a general introduction. It plunges straight in with a detailed account of a research project designed to examine individual differences in brain organization for language. This, to my continuing annoyance, was based on a sample of “two hundred native English‐speaking students from the University of California, Riverside.” It has sometimes occurred to me that if all studies based entirely on samples of American undergraduates were banned we could throw away half of the Institute of Psychiatry library. I know that getting hold of your own students is easy, and that getting fair samples of any other population is very difficult and expensive, but I have read so many of them that any paper which starts off with the words “[…] sample of students from the university of […]” gets me into a temper: America is not the world. American students are not typical members of the world's population, or even of America's population. The actual paper is very good, once I got this outburst over and done with, squashing some ideas of the importance of the variables of sex and handedness and demonstrating that “there is more than one way in which the brain can support cognitive functions such as reading”. This has clinical implications – if variability is characteristic of healthy adults, then group averaging may not be such an effective way of studying say, aphasia or dyslexia in clinical populations. I am not sure that all of the authors in volume two have taken this point on board.
I cannot pretend that I have as yet read through this entire book. There is an awful lot of meat in here. Any one of these papers would form a useful basis for the weekly seminar of a masters degree course, so, with 46 of them, we have comfortably more than a year's work here. This brings me to one point which I should pick up. The blurb on the cover of the book says it is “a must‐read for students, teachers, and researchers in psychology and linguistics”. I would temper this by putting the word “postgraduate” or even “doctoral” in front of “students”. I showed the chapters on the brain bases of dyslexia, and on the neurobiology of specific language impairment respectively to a couple of DClinPsych (Doctor in Clinical Psychology) students, who both were extremely enthusiastic, but then they both already have first‐class honours degrees in psychology plus a year of some sort of clinical experience. I would expect undergraduates to have worked through quite a lot of basic neuropsychology and to have looked at books such as those by Arbib or Denes before being ready to tackle this.
All libraries catering for postgraduate researchers in neuropsychology can be strongly advised to consider this for acquisition. Research is, of course, continuing, but at the moment this book is right at the cutting edge of their field. Though they may not see the immediate need, academic libraries catering for courses in linguistics should be aware that the studies described here underlie much of their work: you cannot really study language and language acquisition without being aware of the brain behind it. Libraries catering for undergraduates in both fields may well find themselves being asked to get it for seminar reading.
