April D.

Adams EN 721
July 23, 2000
Altmann, G. T. M. (1999). The Ascent of Babel: An exploration of language, mind, and understanding. New York: Oxford University Press. How do infants (and fetuses) learn language? How do children learn words? When do we start producing grammatical sentences? How do we access words in our lexicon? Garry Altmann answers these and other burning questions about language in The Ascent of Babel. Unlike a typical textbook, this is a very reader-friendly, and lighthearted introduction to psycholinguistics that also covers current issues in the field. In it, Altmann examines the mental processes that underlie our use of language while tracing the origins and development of language from sound to meaning, and more. In many ways, he reminds me of Pinker in the way he makes the scientific aspects of psycholinguistics accessible. I highly recommend this book.

Contents
1. Looking towards Babel 2. Babies, birth, and language 3. Chinchillas do it too 4. Words, and what we learn to do with them 5. Organizing the dictionary 6. Words, and how we (eventually) find them 7. Time flies like an arrow 8. On the meaning of meaning 9. Exercising the vocal organs 10. The written word 11. When it all goes wrong 12. Wiring-up a brain 13. The descent from Babel Chapter One. Includes: the origins of psycholinguistics, Chomskys influence, how the field of linguistics provided psycholinguistics with a vocabulary to talk about language, the ways sounds, words, and sentences are constructed. Chapter Two. Includes: how a baby can make sense of sounds in utero, prenatal learning, how the baby learns to distinguish patterns in sounds, how it associates meaning with sounds, how it produces new patterns of sounds, nonnutritive sucking and priming sound experiments.

Chapter Three. Includes: phonemes, the ability to tell one sound apart from another, McGurk study--what we hear is what we hear (or what we see), voice onset time, animal perception, phoneme boundaries and fast talking. Chapter Four. Includes: how children learn about words, first language acquisition, age variables, childrens vocabulary development, what constrains the childs interpretation of each word it hears, childrens pretend play, experiments with puppet talk, analysis of the earliest speech spoken to infants and young children, acquisition of nouns and verbs, Chomsky and Pinkers theories of acquisition of grammar, internal constituents of a language, sentence structure, knowledge of syntactic categories, prosodic characteristics, critical period (one of my favorite chapters). Chapter Five. Includes: the mental lexicon, how words are accessed, syllable monitoring, coarticulation of sounds and smallest details, what constitutes the access code. Chapter Six. Includes: morphemesstems, inflectional affixes, derivational affixes, process of accessing/activating the mental lexicon, neural circuitry, priming studies to activate lexical entries, accessing and recognizing a word, acoustic mismatching, lexical entries and the meanings of words. Chapter Seven. Includes: grammatical conventions, words and their combinations, ambiguities, sentences processing and interpretations, prosody and ambiguity, reading and listening to sentences, understanding a sentence. Chapter Eight. Includes: how meaning is arrived at, conventions, pronouns, ambiguity, role assignments, sentence processing, language constraints. Chapter Nine. Includes: neural activity and meaning, concept of meaning, conveying meaning, understanding utterances, levels of meaning, individual word meanings, meanings of combinations of words, sentences and mental models, prediction and experimentation in understanding language, prediction and meaning. Chapter Ten. Includes: speech production process, conversation, end-of-turn cues, two-step process to conveying information, questions and answers, ordering words in different stages of the production process, choosing words, error-blending words, word exchanges, speech errors and word position changes, queuing and buffering, phoneme exchanges, sketching-out process, chunking (one of my favorite chapters). Chapter Eleven. Includes: historical look at early writing, evolution of writing systems, use of symbols to refer to words that referred to things, introduction of phonetic symbols, development of sound-based writing system, syllabaries,

modern alphabets, Greek and Roman alphabets, how children learn to read, methods of teaching reading, reading process, eye movements, saccades (jumps) and fixation times. Chapter Twelve. Includes: the brain, left/right hemispheres, deficitsaphasias, dyslexias, other impairments. Chapter Thirteen. Includes: neural networks, brain wiring, artificial network, neural networks and predictive information. Chapter Fourteen. Includes: language evolution, Indo-European languages, diversity of languages.