Reviewed by Roberta D’Alessandro, Leiden University

This book reports a special event taking place in the Basque Country in 2006, which saw Noam Chomsky as the interlocutor of several scholars from different disciplines discussing with him issues regarding language, mind, and the brain. The book is divided into four parts. Each chapter is authored by a leading scholar in linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, cognitive neuroscience, comparative cognitive psychology, or evolutionary biology, and includes a discussion at its end.

The book opens with an introduction by the editors, followed by Part 1, which offers a joint introduction to the themes treated in the book. These introductions are meant to serve also as a general reference for readers with varying backgrounds and are hence written in a non-technical fashion. In the first chapter, Noam Chomsky traces the history of biolinguistics and outlines the main questions that have interested generative linguists throughout the years. In the following chapter, Cedric Boeckx traces a parallel between language and other cognitive systems, attempting to reduce what is traditionally believed to be language-specific to more general cognitive factors. C. R. Gallistel follows, examining the parallel between human and animal cognition, and Marc D. Hauser discusses the ontological commitments that babies have prior to the maturation of language, which primates lack. Gabriel Dover then discusses the extent to which a biology of language can be pursued at all, and Donata Vercelli defends the view whereby language cannot be completely reduced to other cognitive functions. In the final chapter of Part 1, Christopher Cherniak discusses the optimization of brain wiring and non-genomic nativism.

Part 2 addresses the question, ‘What is language, that it may be part of biology?’. In his chapter, Wolfram Hinzen addresses the origin of human semantics, which James Higginbotham follows up with a discussion of the ‘two interfaces’: that between syntax and semantics and that between linguistic semantics and the world. Luigi Rizzi examines locality and movement in his chapter, and Angela D. Friederici shows how the brain differentiates hierarchical and probabilistic grammars. Part 2 concludes with a round table discussion between Cedric Boeckx, Janet Dean Fodor, Lila Gleitman, and Luigi Rizzi on language universals.

Part 3 is devoted to language acquisition. In the first chapter, Rochel Gelman discusses innate learning, which is complemented by Lila Gleitman’s chapter, ‘The learned component of language learning’. Janet Dean Fodor examines the inputs that can allow a learner to fix syntactic parameters, and Thomas G. Bever addresses the extended projection principle (EPP) as a problem for acquisition.

Part 4, ‘Open talks on open inquiries’, features a chapter by Marc D. Hauser on the illusion of biological variation, in which he claims that at different levels of granularity some core invariant mechanisms always emerge. Itziar Laka addresses the question of the content of universal grammar, while Núria Sebastián-Gallés wonders whether linguistic differences may be caused by perceptual difficulties. In the following chapter, Angela D. Friederici presents a thorough overview of what is known about language and the brain, and the book ends with a conclusion by Noam Chomsky.