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(More customer reviews)Lieberman's "Human Language and Our Reptilian Brain" is a surprisingly readable and fascinating exploration of language and the brain by one of the most ardent anti-Chomskyian neurolinguists writing today(Lieberman, a professor at Brown Univeristy, embodies a healthy opposition to the Chomsky/Pinker madness at MIT). The thesis of the book is that there is no one neural center or "seat" of the human capacity for language. Rather, what we call "language" is in fact a functional system distributed throughout the brain, and is entangled with subcortical circuitry that is not normally associated with language function. Lieberman discredits the blatant intuitionism of Chomskyian linguistics by citing some of the most recent studies in neurolinguistics.
The book assumes some knowledge of neural anatomy, and serious scholars are encouraged to make use of the bibliography. But I think that Lieberman's work exemplifies the neuroscientific approach to understanding human behavior, and I recommend this book for anyone with an intellectual stake in the nature of language and the brain.
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This book is an entry into the fierce current debate among psycholinguists, neuroscientists, and evolutionary theorists about the nature and origins of human language. A prominent neuroscientist here takes up the Darwinian case, using data seldom considered by psycholinguists and neurolinguists to argue that human language--though more sophisticated than all other forms of animal communication--is not a qualitatively different ability from all forms of animal communication, does not require a quantum evolutionary leap to explain it, and is not unified in a single "language instinct."
Using clinical evidence from speech-impaired patients, functional neuroimaging, and evolutionary biology to make his case, Philip Lieberman contends that human language is not a single separate module but a functional neurological system made up of many separate abilities. Language remains as it began, Lieberman argues: a device for coping with the world. But in a blow to human narcissism, he makes the case that this most remarkable human ability is a by-product of our remote reptilian ancestors' abilities to dodge hazards, seize opportunities, and live to see another day.
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