Psycholonguistics: Selected Papers: By Roger Brown, et al. New York: The Free Press, 1970. 392 pp.

'It is now eighteen years since the Social Science Research Council brought together three linguists and three psychologists for an interdisciplinary conference that led quite directly to the creation of the field of psycholinguistics.' Thus in the preface to this collection of papers, the reader is given the impression that he can be 'in on' the history of a 'hybrid' discipline, and indeed the scope of the book bears out this impression.

The papers in the rich first section of this volume contain data and formulations on the early development of language competence. One may read of the relationship between imitation, comprehension, and productivity, or of the sequential differentiations observed in the acquisition of adult grammatical forms. Most of these papers grew out of a detailed study of the speech development of three children during the period of rapid speech acquisition. More important for analytic education, the papers show how a group of lively minds utilized the hypotheses generated by a seminar whose members reviewed data from naturalistic observations.

This first section not only acquaints us with the problems and recent history of applying linguistic hypotheses to the actual development of children, but provides psychoanalysts with some new data on the early phases of ego development. Concepts such as internalization and ego nuclei may be easily read into the text to make some of the propositions more familiar, or rather to put some developmental meat on the bones of our speculative models of ego structure and differentiation. The distinction between linguistics as pure philosophy, and psychology as a complicating human substrate for language acquisition, was never so clear. The section ends with a new paper by R. Allen and Beatrice Gardner on their attempt to teach language to a chimpanzee by using gestural iconic signs. Dr. Brown's discussion of this work temporarily puts the lid on the issue of where man's symbolizing capacity differentiates