The handbook of East Asian psycholinguistics. Vol. 1: Chinese, and: The handbook of East Asian psycholinguistics. Vol. 2: Japanese (review)

The handbook of East Asian psycholinguistics is an ambitious enterprise whose scope can be paralleled to that of an encyclopedia on psycholinguistic research focusing on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.¹ It seems, at least to those who are outside of mainstream psycholinguistic research, that the field is only vaguely defined and that the nature of its research is viewed only as falling somewhere between linguistics and psychology. The handbook serves the ideal purpose to those nonspecialists by providing overviews of a broad range of topics that collectively represent the nature of the field. While Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have increasingly gained attention over the past several decades in our understanding of language and cognition on empirical and theoretical grounds, the extent of this attention is still not comparable to other, often western, languages that count as more frequent bases for research investigations. The potential contribution that an examination of these East Asian languages could make, however, is immense, and The handbook helps the reader realize the richness of the resources that East Asian psycholinguistics can offer through the languages' typological similarities and unique characteristics.

Volume 1 is dedicated to Chinese psycholinguistics, and is divided into three parts: Part 1, 'Language acquisition' (thirteen chapters), Part 2, 'Language processing' (eleven chapters), and Part 3, 'Language and the brain' (eight chapters). The topics in 'Language acquisition' include the relationship between phonology and orthography/reading, classifiers, verbs, lexical and grammatical aspects, and binding principles. In addition to the discussions on L1 acquisition, Part 1 offers chapters on L2 and bilingual acquisition. Many of the chapters in Part 2, 'Language processing', are concerned with Chinese characters in their connection to the processing of phonological and semantic properties. Perception of tones, comprehension of referential items, and ambiguity resolutions are also discussed in this part. The chapters in Part 3 report on language-related research in neuroscience that utilizes positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). These are able to help detect which parts of the brain are responsible for language-related activities. Studies on aphasia and impairments as well as on computer modeling are included in Part 3. A total of fifty-four scholars contributed to this volume. The length of the chapters ranges from six to sixteen pages.

Volume 2 contains forty-four chapters on Japanese psycholinguistics and consists of two parts, Part 1, 'Language acquisition' (twenty-five chapters), and Part 2, 'Language processing' (nineteen chapters). Part 1 gives overviews of a wide variety of topics in L1 and L2 acquisition, ranging from phonology, morphology (e.g. lexical categories, tense/aspect, negative, passives), syntax (e.g. numeral quantifiers, binding theory), to pragmatics and discourse. The L1-L2 ratio of the coverage is five to one. The choice of the topics included in Part 2 is equally diverse, inclusive of not only standard topics such as speech prosody, sentence processing (involving syntactic issues like scrambling and empty categories), and embedding, but also discussions focusing on orthography, brain-language relations, computer modeling, and gesture. Fifty-four scholars contributed to Vol. 2, and the length of each chapter ranges between five and ten pages.

The quality of chapters throughout the two volumes varies, as would be expected of a work of this size. There are chapters that are well written in their own right but are not explicitly positioned in the context of psycholinguistics enough to make the reader understand their relevance and significance. It also seems that within each volume, some chapters on similar topics could have been more effective if they had been combined or at least better coordinated, so that a fuller discussion could have resulted without giving repetitive background information. For example...