362 Book revietvs

In spite of all the above criticisms, this is undoubtedly a very important reference book and is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the various problems in conversion of text to speech. The detailed acoustic phonetic rules listed in the appendices, although almost certainly not optimum and specific to American English. are very useful as examples of the types of rule that are found useful. The chapter by David Pisoni on intelligibility and comprehension measurement is extremely valuable. and because it describes a specific set of experiments, it has quite properly been reproduced unmodified from its 1979 version. It is, however. a pity that the authors did not make a more comprehensive attempt to restructure the rest of the book away from the I979 course notes.

John N. Holmes

Words in the Mind: At? Introduction to the Mental Le.ricon by Jean Aitchison Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1987.

A diligent, but not particularly outstanding undergraduate once told me that Jean Aitchison’s The Articulate Mammal was the only book on psycholinguistics that he could understand. This remark indicates both the strength and the weakness, if indeed one regards it as a weakness, of Aitchison’s writing. Her great strength is the ability she has to communicate with a broad audience. The possible weakness of her writing is that she inevitably has to simplify both the facts and the arguments that she presents.

Words in the Mind, Aitchison’s new book on the mental lexicon, is written in the same style as The Articulate Mammal. The text is clear and straightforward, and the chapter headings and subheadings are light-hearted, though some are more amusing than others. Throughout, Aitchison illustrates and illuminates her ideas, again often in an amusing manner, from a wide variety of literary sources. So much so in fact, that I found myself hoping that her reading for pleasure had not been spoiled too much by searching after useful quotations.

Words in the Mind discusses a wide range of questions about words, their meanings and their mental representations. These questions range from the anecdotal (how many words do people know?) to the highly technical (how is the mental lexicon organized for language comprehension and production?). The book is in four sections; the first provides a general introduction to the problems that the book addresses. Aitchison’s approach is broadly psychological. Her aim is to “produce outline specifications for a working model of the word-store in the human mind.” (p. 4). The sources of evidence that might be used in constructing such a model-slips of the tongue, the linguistic deficits of aphasics. psycholinguistic experiments and linguistic analyses-are intro- duced in chapter two and, for the uninitiated. the notion of a model itself is explained in chapter three.

Section two “Basic Ingredients”, discusses three essential properties of words: their meanings, their lexical categories (and hence the roles they play in sentences), and their sounds. Five of the nine chapters are devoted to meaning. In the first of these chapters some less plausible versions of the hypothesis that words have fixed meanings are refuted. The notion of a prototype is then introduced as a means of overcoming the problems inherent in the idea that word meanings are fixed. Semantic feature theories are dismissed, rather summararily, in favour of semantic network theories, and there is a brief discussion of how children learn the meaning of words. The final four chapters in

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this second section discuss types of words, the internal (morphological) structure of words, their sound structure, and why children distort that structure.

The brief third section of the book deals with two kinds of novelty: new uses of existing words, such as metaphor and metonomy, and the creation of new words by processes such as compounding, conversion, affixation and reanalysis.

The final section assesses how the various kinds of information about words fit together in the mind. The first two chapters consider the general problems of selecting words in language production and of recognizing them in language understanding. The overall organization of the lexicon is then considered, and Aitchison comes to what is now the widely accepted conclusion that its organization is explained partly by constraints imposed by production processes and partly by constraints imposed by comprehension processes.

In writing Words in the Mind, Jean Aitchison was attempting to summarize what she regards as an “excessively fragmented” (p. vii) literature on the mental lexicon. But who will want a summary at this introductory level? The obvious target audience would be first-year undergraduates; the book easily contains enough material for an undergra- duate course. Some of the material is straightforwardly linguistic in nature, but much of It is psychological. A linguistics department, particularly one with a psychological bias, might well mount a course based on this book, though I doubt whether a psychology department would be prepared to devote a whole course to the mental lexicon. Nevertheless, the book would provide an excellent introduction to words and their meanings for psychology students taking a course on the psychology of language. The book might also prove useful for students of other disciplines, such as speech therapy or even natural language processing, at least for those areas of research in which the properties of the human language processor are important. However, Aitchison’s suggestion that the book could be “regarded as a general introduction to linguistics from a novel angle” (p. vii) might charitably be described as true but uninteresting. Finally, the readability of Words in the Mind will make it more than accessible to a well- motivated lay audience.

In more optimistic moments, university lecturers sometimes feel that they would like to use more difficult books that Words in the Mind with their students. Well, that may be possible on advanced courses and even with some students on introductory courses. but I think that some of us are more than a little bit jealous of people like Jean Aitchison who seem to reach a much wider audience with such ease. Given this observation. it would be churlish to attack Words in the Mind for oversimplifying difhcult material. Nevertheless, there are places where the simplifications threaten to turn into unjustified biases. For example, is it worth trying to save a concept so riddled with problems as that of a prototype, problems that Aitchison herself acknowledges, or should it be replaced by a more sophisticated notion ? Or, granted that semantic feature theories face “insuperable problems” (p. 71), are semantic network theories really in that much better shape? And, most generally of all, is there no question that there is one and only one mental lexicon?

I have no doubt that many undergraduates will welcome Words in the Mind or that some of them will say that it is the only piece of writing about the mental lexicon that they can understand. However, I hope that the better among their number will realise that this book by no means tells the full story. Its strength is that those better students <hould both find it full of useful information. and yet be able to see where there are questions we do not as yet have answers to.

A. Garnham