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Book Review |
The neurobiological basis of language
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These volumes deal with three different aspects of language: its evolution (Lieberman), its acquisition (Tomasello) and its neural organization in the adult (Grodzinsky and Amunts). Readers of all three will thus obtain an up-to-date, rich, picture of contemporary views regarding virtually the entire range of topics in the biology of language. But they will obtain something more: a glimpse of the depth of the disagreements in this field. Unlike many other areas of neuroscience and cognitive neuroscience, there is no agreement about the most basic issue in the area of language and its biological basis—what language is.
It would be difficult to find three books that present more disparate views regarding this fundamental matter. All the authors in these volumes conceive of language as a mental capacity that represents items, events and their relations in symbolic ways that are unique to humans. However, Lieberman, Tomasello, and some contributors to Grodzinsky
Massachusetts General Hospital
Harvard Medical School