Exploring the means by which people learn and use language to communicate ideas, this book discusses a wide range of topics related to speaking and listening, as well as reading and writing. Designed for courses in psychology of language and psycholinguistics the text uses technical terms only when necessary and includes traditional topics such as meaning, speech perception, comprehension, production and language acquisition. It also deals with non-traditional topics such as bilingual language processing and cortical processing of language, and explains how language and speech are used, perceived, comprehended, remembered and produced by normal adults, and looks at how they are acquired by children. The text also clarifies how language and speech are used by bilingual speakers and how they are impaired in brain damage.

might call the "world knowledge/deep reasoning" school of thought, which is the current paradigm in AI, engendered by Charniak's dissertation. He introduces frames, scripts and plans, MOPS, and information formats (from the Linguistic String Project, NYU). The chapter concludes with a discussion of handling dialogue. Although there is a good discussion of some points, this chapter is somewhat disappointing because many areas of research are left out or no examples are given: classic pragmatics is not discussed at all, story and text grammars are only mentioned, MOPs are only mentioned, and no mention is made of rhetorical structure theory. Perhaps the author felt that this area was not very well settled and therefore should not be treated extensively. Graduate students, however, should be treated to open problems as well as to (purported) solutions. The language generation chapter is quite brief and treats sentence generation from a syntactic point of view. A short discussion on text generation completes the chapter. Clearly, more could be done with generation even if it is "the poor cousin" of automated language research. Grishman spends little time trying to fill in the technical linguistic background of the reader. There are short introductions to the Chomsky hierarchy of grammars and predicate logic, but the reader is mostly presumed to be conversant with linguistic theory. The book is, after all, about computational linguistics. The amount of introductory material seems reasonable relative to the expository material. For computer science graduate students, however, this account would have to be supplemented with more introductory linguistics material. The book also contains little philosophical discussion. The author does not attempt to address the problem of defining meaning, let alone the role of meaning and language for the concept of mind (a hot topic for some cognitive psychologists and philosophers). Admittedly, such discussions can become abstruse and perhaps not very useful, and Grishman typically avoids such topics. The author frequently writes short evaluations of previous efforts in an attempt to weigh the contribution of the work. The evaluations seem very fair; Grishman does not take doctrinaire stances toward different approaches to natural language, an excellent way to write an introductory text. One nice touch of the book is the pursuit of topics through several different chapters. For example, the problem of quantifier ordering is discussed both in the semantics chapter as a representation problem and in the language generation chapter. Various such themes are pursued throughout the book. In summary, this introductory text takes a stand, a point of view, toward the computational linguistics field. It can be used most profitably in classes with students who already have some linguistics background. If supplemented with additional material, it could also be used for courses populated by computer science students. The book is interestingly written with many insightful discussions, and it is the only (introductory) computational linguistics textbook that looks at the field from a linguist's point of view. REFERENCES

Prologue: Dialogue and Useful Metaphors (M.M. Taylor, F. Neel, D.G. Bouwhuis E. Hutchins). User Models and Belief Structures (C.R. Perrault H.C. Bunt R. Cohen J.L. Edwards, J.A. Mason N.R. Shadbolt). Discourse Structure and Processing (R. Reichman D.A. Good G. Airenti, B.G. Bara, Colombetti M.M. Taylor R.P. Fawcett, M.M. Taylor P.J. Goillau D. Beroule). Parallel Communication (R. Reichman E. Chang W. Edmondson N.M. Brooke R.M. Taylor). Properties of Human Dialogues (I. Taylor M.J. Hunt M.A.A. Tatham R.J. Beun M.A. Morel J.A. Waterworth). Applications and Architectures (J. Siroux, M. Guyomard, J. Siroux J.R. Howes C. Proctor, S. Young A. Vilnat N.D.M. Ostler N. Carbonell, J.M Pierrel). Overview (M.M. Taylor, M.J. Hunt F. Neel, J. Waterworth, J. Howes C.A. McCann, W. Edmondson, R.K. Moore). References. Collected Abstracts. List of Participants. Indexes. Appendix: Sound Demonstrations.

In Speaking, Willem Pim Levelt, Director of the Max-Planck-Institut fur Psycholinguistik, accomplishes the formidable task of covering the entire process of speech production, from constraints on conversational appropriateness to articulation and self-monitoring of speech. Speaking is unique in its balanced coverage of all major aspects of the production of speech, in the completeness of its treatment of the entire speech process, and in its strategy of exemplifying rather than formalizing theoretical issues.