Ethics and process in the narrative study of lives Ed. by Ruthellen Josselson (review)

896 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 73, NUMBER 4 (1997) Datsun in the above example) on grammatically judgment accuracy and on eye movements between the onset and the disambiguation of the ambiguity. They too argue for garden-path effects on initial parsing decision. Michael J. Spivey-Knowlton, John C. Trueswell, and Michael K. Tanenhaus question the invariance of garden-path effects by demonstrating that such effects can be removed by local semantic and discourse contexts. Marcel Adam Just and Patricia A. Carpenter explore the use of pupillometric measures as indices of the intensity dimension of sentence processing, exploiting the differential processing difficulty ofobject-/subject-relative and of filler-gap/whether-clause sentences. The last five papers (212-337) address high-level processes. Murray Singer tests a prediction about the reading of causally inconsistent sequences that follows from his validation model of causal bridging inference processing. Julia E. Moravcsik and Walter Kintsch show that writing quality and domain knowledge affect comprehension (as indexed by text recall) in insubstitutably different ways. Peter Dixon, Karen Harrison, and Dean Taylor study the differential memorability of action statements in procedural discourse containing transitive verbs, verbal adjectives, and implicit action forms. Betty Ann Levy, Lauren Barnes, and Lisa Martin, and Michael E. J. Masson both take an 'episodic' view of the basis for fluency transfer across repeated readings of the same text/sentence. Levy et al. argue that the episodic representation encodes information about the perceptual, lexical, and message aspects of a reading encounter while Masson maintains that it encodes perceptual and conceptual processing operations . This volume amply illustrates current issues and experimental paradigms in the study of reading and language in psychology. It is particularly worth acquiring if one has no easy access to the Canadian Journal ofExperimental Psychology, in which most of the papers first appeared in 1993. [Ming-Wei Lee, University of Wales, Bangor.] Ethics and process in the narrative study of lives. Ed. by Ruthellen Josselson . (The narrative study of lives, 4.) Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996. Pp. xviii, 293. Paper $22.95. This fourth volume of the Narrative study oflives series touches on a number of highly provocative ethical issues such as confidentiality, authorship, and the nature of relationships between researcher and informant rarely covered in textbooks on narrative research. The weakness of this volume lies in its lack of synthesis. First, this volume would benefit greatly from short summaries at the beginning ofeach part of the book which make connections between relevant theories and constructs across chapters. Second, while Josselson claims that this book attends to the nitty-gritty of ethical issues in narrative research, I found myself looking for stronger conclusions and recommendations from each essayist. For example, how much authority/ownership should researchers assert with their informant over the right to publish a narrative? Chapters in Part I are 'experiential accounts of narrative researchers who tell the stories of their struggles' (xiv). David Bakan (Ch. 1, 'Some reflections about narrative research and hurt and harm', 3-8) raises the pivotal question for this volume when he asks whether or not narrative research can ever be fully ethical in that it risks exposing sensitive aspects of real people's lives. Bakan's question raises another question which is, 'Can we define degrees of ethicalness?' Dan Bar-On (Ch. 2, 'Ethical issues in biographical interviews and analysis', 9-21) reveals his personal struggles as an Israeli Jew to bring himself to the study of children of Nazi perpetrators. He feels that once a narrative becomes a text, regardless of how the narrator feels about it, the researcher has a right to defend and clarify her own point of view. RJ (Ch. 5, 'On writing other people's lives', 66-7) wonders how her writings affect her female narrators. She contacts her informants after publishing her books and asks them what they thought of their narratives. 'Part II highlights how narrative researchers bring themselves to the inquiry, how they understand what they are doing, and how they position themselves vis-à-vis the participant' (xvi). Richard Ochberg (Ch. 8, 'Interpreting life stories', 97-1 13) claims that his orientation to the text gives him a special perspective from which to interpret. In contrast, Gwendolyn Etter...