- Email: [email protected]
Breaking out of old reading habits
52
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TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.1 January 2002
36 Baars, B.J. (1993) Why volition is a foundation issue for psychology. Conscious. Cogn. 2, 281–309 37 Baars, B.J., ed. (1992) The Experimental Psychology of Human Error: Implications for the Architecture of Voluntary Control (Series on Cognition and Language), Plenum Press 38 Evans, J.R. and Abarbanel, A., eds (1999) Introduction to Quantitative EEG and Neurofeedback, Academic Press 39 Simard, T.G. and Basmajian, J.V. (1967) Methods in training the conscious control of motor units. Arch. Phys. Med. Rehabil. 48, 12–19 40 Baars, B.J. (1999) Attention versus consciousness in the visual brain: differences in conception, phenomenology, behavior, neuroanatomy, and physiology. J. Gen. Psychol. 126, 224–233 41 Baars, B.J. (1997) Some essential differences between consciousness and attention, perception, and working memory. Conscious. Cogn. 6, 363–371 42 Hilgard, E.R. (1988) Commentary. Professional skepticism about multiple personality. J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. 176, 532
43 Putnam, F.W. (1995) Investigating multiple personality disorder. Br. J. Psychiatry 166, 122–123 44 Gazzaniga, M.S. and Sperry, R.W. (1967) Language after section of the cerebral commissures. Brain 90, 131–148 45 Sperry, R.W. (1968) Hemisphere deconnection and unity in conscious awareness. Am. Psychol. 23, 723–733 46 Tononi, G. and Edelman, G.M. (1998) Consciousness and complexity. Science 282, 1846–1851 47 Edelman, G.M. (1989) The Remembered Present, Basic Books 48 Engel, A.K. and Singer, W. (2001) Temporal binding and the neural correlates of sensory awareness. Trends Cogn. Sci. 5, 16–25 49 Flohr, H. et al. (1998) The role of the NMDA synapse in general anesthesia. Toxicol. Lett. 100–101, 23–29 50 Llinas, R. et al. (1998) The neuronal basis for consciousness. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. B 353, 1841–1849
51 Newman, J. and Baars, B.J. (1993) A neural attentional model for access to consciousness: a global workspace perspective. Concepts Neurosci. 4, 255–290 52 Sheinberg, D.L. and Logothetis, N.K. (1997) The role of temporal cortical areas in perceptual organization. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 94, 3408–3413 53 Rees, G. et al. (1999) Inattentional blindness versus inattentional amnesia for fixated but ignored words. Science 286, 2504–2507 54 Duncan, J. and Owen, A.M. (2000) Common regions of the human frontal lobe recruited by diverse cognitive demands. Trends Neurosci. 23, 475–483 55 Newell, A. (1994) Unified Theories of Cognition: The William James Lectures, Harvard University Press
Bernard J. Baars The Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive, San Diego, California 92121, USA. e-mail: [email protected]
Book Review
Breaking out of old reading habits Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules by David J. Townsend and Thomas G. Bever, MIT Press, 2001. $24.95/£16.95 (x + 445 pages) ISBN 0 262 20132 1
‘Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time. Sometimes we do something new.’ So say Townsend and Bever in their new book about people’s ability to understand language. Such statements are obviously meant to amuse and perhaps also provoke the reader, but they also are intended to capture neatly the central theme of this excellent work: in general people tend to fall back on old habits but occasionally they do something novel. When this philosophy is applied to language processing, what emerges is the authors’ central theoretical argument: sentences are understood through a combination of associationist principles and computational mechanisms. http://tics.trends.com
Of course, the assertion that we usually see variations on the same theme with only the occasional new idea could be a cynic’s assessment of the state of theorizing in psycholinguistics. Most approaches to sentence comprehension assume that a combination of stored information and productive rules forms the basis of our linguistic competence and performance. So have Townsend and Bever managed to say anything new in this book? In many significant ways, they have. Their highly original suggestion is that all sentences are essentially processed twice – first, associations get activated and yield a tentative, global parse from which a ‘quick-and-dirty’ meaning representation is derived; then, detailed syntactic computations are performed on the same word string. This second process fills in syntactic details and, more importantly, verifies that the meaning derived earlier conforms to syntactic principles. Moreover, do not fear that the first-stage global parse is just some ad hoc structure invented by psychologists to capture a limited aspect of the data; Townsend and Bever are as aware as any psycholinguists of the usefulness of modern linguistic theory, and their proposal is that the first-stage parse creates units similar to those proposed in Chomsky’s Minimalist Program [1]. Another original assumption of the Townsend and Bever model is that the syntactic hypothesis
derived from the first quick parse is constructed using all sources of relevant information; that is, it is constructed non-modularly. It is the second stage of syntactic analysis that is thought to be informationally encapsulated. All these ideas are quite different from what other theorists have proposed, including psycholinguists from both the connectionist and computational camps. The book presents theoretical and empirical arguments for this habits-andrules approach, which they term LAST: ‘Late Assignment of Syntax Theory’. The findings that LAST attempts to capture are familiar to psycholinguists – that people are particularly attentive to function words such as the and was when they read sentences, and function words cue syntactic categories. Comprehenders access important aspects of meaning faster than they compute certain syntactic relations. At the same time, they are happier when sentence elements agree with each other on features such as gender and number than when they clash. And perhaps most critically, it appears that English language processors, at least, want sentences to conform to a fundamental agent–verb–patient (Noun–Verb–Noun, or NVN) template. This idea is hardly new; in fact, Bever made this suggestion over 30 years ago [2]. Yet, as they point out, it is astonishing how much of the extant data in psycholinguistics can be accounted for
1364-6613/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S1364-6613(00)01837-4
Forum
with this simple little principle. Indeed, their superb review here of the various other approaches to sentence comprehension that have been proposed over the last 20 years highlights those models’ complexity and sophistication. It is sobering to realize, then, that if all models of sentence comprehension were somehow destroyed in some great memetic catastrophe, we could certainly make do for a while with nothing more than the humble NVN principle. There are many reasons why this book should be on every psycholinguist’s bookshelf. The review of the literature is thorough and insightful. Complex models of parsing are described clearly, and especially useful are the summaries of the similarities and differences among them. Also enormously helpful is their review of the empirical studies of sentence comprehension. In addition, as anyone who is familiar with the authors and their previous writings would expect, the book is engagingly written. Readers will be entertained and enlightened by the ovular analogy of language production and comprehension that is provided in the fifth chapter, for instance. Of course, in a volume as ambitious as this one there are bound to be some
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.1 January 2002
weaknesses. More detail about what the output of the first stage looks like would have been helpful. It is not entirely clear what is artificial about pseudosyntax, and little detail about the operations of the computational component is provided. Not much is said about how languages other than English might be processed. Perhaps the most serious shortcoming in the book is the following: to motivate the idea of a global, gestalt-like initial parse followed by a real syntactic analysis, Townsend and Bever make some key observations about the nature of real sentence processing. In speech, words such as the cannot always be neatly segmented from the word that follows. Noise in the environment often occludes significant parts of the input [3], but words that are imperceptible early on can often be reconstructed given later material. It is unfortunate, then, that ‘pseudosyntax’ relies heavily on function words to establish the initial global guess about the sentence’s meaning, and in fact much of the empirical support for the model comes from studies of reading rather than spoken language comprehension. Nevertheless, ‘Habits and Rules’ would make an excellent textbook for a
course in psycholinguistics for graduate students or advanced undergraduates. The explanations of concepts such as connectionism, linguistic theory (including the Minimalist Program), and models and studies in sentence comprehension are excellent. The volume even includes a lovely introduction to event semantics. Overall, this book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how people integrate their knowledge about the statistical regularities in the linguistic input with their knowledge about the rules of language. Fernanda Ferreira Dept of Psychology and Cognitive Science Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1117, USA. e-mail: [email protected] References 1 Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program, MIT Press 2 Bever, T.G. (1970) The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Cognition and the Development of Language (Hayes, J.R., ed.), pp. 279–362, John Wiley & Sons 3 Ferreira, F. et al. Good enough representations in language comprehension. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. (in press)
Editor’s choice bmn.com/neuroscience As a busy cognitive scientist, searching through the wealth of information on BioMedNet can be a bit daunting - the new gateway to neuroscience on BioMedNet is designed to help. The new gateway is updated weekly and features relevant articles selected by the editorial teams from Trends in Neuroscience, Current Opinion in Neurobiology and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The regular updates include: News – our dedicated team of reporters from BioMedNet News provides all the news to keep you up-todate on what’s happening – right now. Journal scan – learn about new reports and events in neuroscience every day, at a glance, without leafing through stacks of journals. Conference reporter – daily updates on the most exciting developments revealed at the Annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience and other conferences – provides a quick but comprehensive report of what you missed by staying home. Mini-reviews and Reviews – a selection of the best review and opinion articles from the Trends, Current Opinion, and other selected journals. Why not bookmark the gateway at bmn.com/neuroscience for access to all the news, reviews and informed opinion on the latest scientific advances in neuroscience.
http://tics.trends.com
53
Forum
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.1 January 2002
36 Baars, B.J. (1993) Why volition is a foundation issue for psychology. Conscious. Cogn. 2, 281–309 37 Baars, B.J., ed. (1992) The Experimental Psychology of Human Error: Implications for the Architecture of Voluntary Control (Series on Cognition and Language), Plenum Press 38 Evans, J.R. and Abarbanel, A., eds (1999) Introduction to Quantitative EEG and Neurofeedback, Academic Press 39 Simard, T.G. and Basmajian, J.V. (1967) Methods in training the conscious control of motor units. Arch. Phys. Med. Rehabil. 48, 12–19 40 Baars, B.J. (1999) Attention versus consciousness in the visual brain: differences in conception, phenomenology, behavior, neuroanatomy, and physiology. J. Gen. Psychol. 126, 224–233 41 Baars, B.J. (1997) Some essential differences between consciousness and attention, perception, and working memory. Conscious. Cogn. 6, 363–371 42 Hilgard, E.R. (1988) Commentary. Professional skepticism about multiple personality. J. Nerv. Ment. Dis. 176, 532
43 Putnam, F.W. (1995) Investigating multiple personality disorder. Br. J. Psychiatry 166, 122–123 44 Gazzaniga, M.S. and Sperry, R.W. (1967) Language after section of the cerebral commissures. Brain 90, 131–148 45 Sperry, R.W. (1968) Hemisphere deconnection and unity in conscious awareness. Am. Psychol. 23, 723–733 46 Tononi, G. and Edelman, G.M. (1998) Consciousness and complexity. Science 282, 1846–1851 47 Edelman, G.M. (1989) The Remembered Present, Basic Books 48 Engel, A.K. and Singer, W. (2001) Temporal binding and the neural correlates of sensory awareness. Trends Cogn. Sci. 5, 16–25 49 Flohr, H. et al. (1998) The role of the NMDA synapse in general anesthesia. Toxicol. Lett. 100–101, 23–29 50 Llinas, R. et al. (1998) The neuronal basis for consciousness. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London Ser. B 353, 1841–1849
51 Newman, J. and Baars, B.J. (1993) A neural attentional model for access to consciousness: a global workspace perspective. Concepts Neurosci. 4, 255–290 52 Sheinberg, D.L. and Logothetis, N.K. (1997) The role of temporal cortical areas in perceptual organization. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 94, 3408–3413 53 Rees, G. et al. (1999) Inattentional blindness versus inattentional amnesia for fixated but ignored words. Science 286, 2504–2507 54 Duncan, J. and Owen, A.M. (2000) Common regions of the human frontal lobe recruited by diverse cognitive demands. Trends Neurosci. 23, 475–483 55 Newell, A. (1994) Unified Theories of Cognition: The William James Lectures, Harvard University Press
Bernard J. Baars The Neurosciences Institute, 10640 John Jay Hopkins Drive, San Diego, California 92121, USA. e-mail: [email protected]
Book Review
Breaking out of old reading habits Sentence Comprehension: The Integration of Habits and Rules by David J. Townsend and Thomas G. Bever, MIT Press, 2001. $24.95/£16.95 (x + 445 pages) ISBN 0 262 20132 1
‘Most of the time what we do is what we do most of the time. Sometimes we do something new.’ So say Townsend and Bever in their new book about people’s ability to understand language. Such statements are obviously meant to amuse and perhaps also provoke the reader, but they also are intended to capture neatly the central theme of this excellent work: in general people tend to fall back on old habits but occasionally they do something novel. When this philosophy is applied to language processing, what emerges is the authors’ central theoretical argument: sentences are understood through a combination of associationist principles and computational mechanisms. http://tics.trends.com
Of course, the assertion that we usually see variations on the same theme with only the occasional new idea could be a cynic’s assessment of the state of theorizing in psycholinguistics. Most approaches to sentence comprehension assume that a combination of stored information and productive rules forms the basis of our linguistic competence and performance. So have Townsend and Bever managed to say anything new in this book? In many significant ways, they have. Their highly original suggestion is that all sentences are essentially processed twice – first, associations get activated and yield a tentative, global parse from which a ‘quick-and-dirty’ meaning representation is derived; then, detailed syntactic computations are performed on the same word string. This second process fills in syntactic details and, more importantly, verifies that the meaning derived earlier conforms to syntactic principles. Moreover, do not fear that the first-stage global parse is just some ad hoc structure invented by psychologists to capture a limited aspect of the data; Townsend and Bever are as aware as any psycholinguists of the usefulness of modern linguistic theory, and their proposal is that the first-stage parse creates units similar to those proposed in Chomsky’s Minimalist Program [1]. Another original assumption of the Townsend and Bever model is that the syntactic hypothesis
derived from the first quick parse is constructed using all sources of relevant information; that is, it is constructed non-modularly. It is the second stage of syntactic analysis that is thought to be informationally encapsulated. All these ideas are quite different from what other theorists have proposed, including psycholinguists from both the connectionist and computational camps. The book presents theoretical and empirical arguments for this habits-andrules approach, which they term LAST: ‘Late Assignment of Syntax Theory’. The findings that LAST attempts to capture are familiar to psycholinguists – that people are particularly attentive to function words such as the and was when they read sentences, and function words cue syntactic categories. Comprehenders access important aspects of meaning faster than they compute certain syntactic relations. At the same time, they are happier when sentence elements agree with each other on features such as gender and number than when they clash. And perhaps most critically, it appears that English language processors, at least, want sentences to conform to a fundamental agent–verb–patient (Noun–Verb–Noun, or NVN) template. This idea is hardly new; in fact, Bever made this suggestion over 30 years ago [2]. Yet, as they point out, it is astonishing how much of the extant data in psycholinguistics can be accounted for
1364-6613/02/$ – see front matter © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII: S1364-6613(00)01837-4
Forum
with this simple little principle. Indeed, their superb review here of the various other approaches to sentence comprehension that have been proposed over the last 20 years highlights those models’ complexity and sophistication. It is sobering to realize, then, that if all models of sentence comprehension were somehow destroyed in some great memetic catastrophe, we could certainly make do for a while with nothing more than the humble NVN principle. There are many reasons why this book should be on every psycholinguist’s bookshelf. The review of the literature is thorough and insightful. Complex models of parsing are described clearly, and especially useful are the summaries of the similarities and differences among them. Also enormously helpful is their review of the empirical studies of sentence comprehension. In addition, as anyone who is familiar with the authors and their previous writings would expect, the book is engagingly written. Readers will be entertained and enlightened by the ovular analogy of language production and comprehension that is provided in the fifth chapter, for instance. Of course, in a volume as ambitious as this one there are bound to be some
TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences Vol.6 No.1 January 2002
weaknesses. More detail about what the output of the first stage looks like would have been helpful. It is not entirely clear what is artificial about pseudosyntax, and little detail about the operations of the computational component is provided. Not much is said about how languages other than English might be processed. Perhaps the most serious shortcoming in the book is the following: to motivate the idea of a global, gestalt-like initial parse followed by a real syntactic analysis, Townsend and Bever make some key observations about the nature of real sentence processing. In speech, words such as the cannot always be neatly segmented from the word that follows. Noise in the environment often occludes significant parts of the input [3], but words that are imperceptible early on can often be reconstructed given later material. It is unfortunate, then, that ‘pseudosyntax’ relies heavily on function words to establish the initial global guess about the sentence’s meaning, and in fact much of the empirical support for the model comes from studies of reading rather than spoken language comprehension. Nevertheless, ‘Habits and Rules’ would make an excellent textbook for a
course in psycholinguistics for graduate students or advanced undergraduates. The explanations of concepts such as connectionism, linguistic theory (including the Minimalist Program), and models and studies in sentence comprehension are excellent. The volume even includes a lovely introduction to event semantics. Overall, this book is required reading for anyone who wants to understand how people integrate their knowledge about the statistical regularities in the linguistic input with their knowledge about the rules of language. Fernanda Ferreira Dept of Psychology and Cognitive Science Program, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824-1117, USA. e-mail: [email protected] References 1 Chomsky, N. (1995) The Minimalist Program, MIT Press 2 Bever, T.G. (1970) The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Cognition and the Development of Language (Hayes, J.R., ed.), pp. 279–362, John Wiley & Sons 3 Ferreira, F. et al. Good enough representations in language comprehension. Curr. Dir. Psychol. Sci. (in press)
Editor’s choice bmn.com/neuroscience As a busy cognitive scientist, searching through the wealth of information on BioMedNet can be a bit daunting - the new gateway to neuroscience on BioMedNet is designed to help. The new gateway is updated weekly and features relevant articles selected by the editorial teams from Trends in Neuroscience, Current Opinion in Neurobiology and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. The regular updates include: News – our dedicated team of reporters from BioMedNet News provides all the news to keep you up-todate on what’s happening – right now. Journal scan – learn about new reports and events in neuroscience every day, at a glance, without leafing through stacks of journals. Conference reporter – daily updates on the most exciting developments revealed at the Annual meeting for the Society for Neuroscience and other conferences – provides a quick but comprehensive report of what you missed by staying home. Mini-reviews and Reviews – a selection of the best review and opinion articles from the Trends, Current Opinion, and other selected journals. Why not bookmark the gateway at bmn.com/neuroscience for access to all the news, reviews and informed opinion on the latest scientific advances in neuroscience.
http://tics.trends.com
53