Reading and language processing Ed. by John M. Henderson, Murray Singer, and Fernanda Ferreira (review)

BOOK NOTICES 895 Helge Gundersen. Oslo: Novus, 1995. Pp. 192. This book is a revised version of a 1993 master's dissertation from Oslo University. It is interesting to see folk etymology being taken as a central theme for a linguistic project since it has so often been left isolated on the fringes. Gundersen argues that the label 'folk etymology' is misleading since no etymology is involved. Rather, folk etymology is just one kind of morphological reinterpretation. After a very brief introduction, (13-17), Ch. 2, 'Earlier research' (18-31), presents a critique of earlier work on folk etymology. Of particular interest m this chapter is a list of seven recurrent themes in discussions of folk etymology (21-2): (1) Familiarity : folk etymology makes an unknown word more familiar; (2) frequency, a higher frequency word influences a lower frequency one; (3) transparency: folk etymology creates a more transparent word; (4) isolation: the word changed by folk etymology is always a relatively isolated one; (5) word length: the word changed by folk etymology is usually long—which may have implications for its perceived structure in some languages; (6) morphosyllabic typology : languages which show a strong preference for monosyllables have great difficulty in adopting foreign polysyllables; (7) economy: folk etymology alleviates the burden on memory. Ch. 3, 'Theory' (32-58), introduces cognitive grammar in sufficient detail to allow the reader to understand G's own presentation in the next chapter. Ch.4, 'Analysis' (59-111), is the core of the book. G talks (59) of presenting a typology but actually presents several overlapping typologies or classifications . There is a psychological classification according to which folk etymologies can arise from misperception, misremembering, misproduction, and misinterpretation of the speaker's intent. There is a morphological classification of the output word as simple or complex and as containing an affected root, affix, or 'pseudo-morph' (a 'pseudo-morph' is, e.g. film 'film' in filmharmonisk 'film-harmonic' < filharmonisk 'philharmonic'). The motivations for a change are classified as phonological or semantic. The changes brought about by the folk etymology are classified as conscious or unconscious. In all of this, G covers many topics that would not normally be considered folk etymology, such as malapropisms, misinterpretations, etc. Finally, G considers the question of whether folk etymology has anything to do with etymology and concludes with a resounding negative. Ch. 5, 'Conclusions' (112-20), gives abrief summary of the work and also looks at the implications of folk etymology for the distinction between synchrony and diachrony. Folk etymology shows a synchronic structure which does not reflect the diachromc one. Ch. 6, 'Annotated word list' (121-85), isadetailed analysis ofmany examples of folk etymology in Danish , Norwegian, and Swedish. The title of the book is made up of three examples from this list. The value of this book is that it takes the subject of folk etymology seriously and that it presents so many interesting examples. It is unfortunate that the examples cannot be followed without an excellent knowledge of the Scandinavian languages, which is likely to make this work less accessible. [Laurie Bauer, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.] Reading and language processing. Ed. by John M. Henderson, Murray Singer, and Fernanda Ferreira. Mahwah , NJ & Hove, UK: Lawrence ErIbaum , 1995. Pp. iv, 351. Paper $34.50. This book contains thirteen experimental reports, the editors' introductory and concluding chapters, and author and subject indexes. The first two papers (5-50) focus on lexical processing. Lori Buchanan and Derek Besner use data from Japanese readers to illustrate what can and cannot be inferred about the three-route model ofreading aloud from the associative priming effect. Meredyth Daneman and Eyal Reingold report no difference in the initial detection of homophonic and nonhomophonic errors (e.g. blew/blow jeans) during reading (as indexed by eye movements), which suggests there is no early role for phonological recodmg in reading. The next two papers (5 1 -93) cover perceptual and attentional processes in reading. Alexander Pollatsek , Gary E. Raney, Linda Lagasse, and Keith Rayner conclude from two eyetracking experiments that in normal reading, little information is extracted from below the currently fixated line. John M. Henderson and Fernanda Ferreira argue that the lack of any effect of the difficulty of an upcoming parafoveal word on eye movement behavior on the currently fixated word lends support to the sequential attention/parallel programming model of eye movement control in reading. Four papers (94-21 1) deal with sentence processing . In two eyetracking experiments, Charles Clifton investigates the use of thematic role information to resolve a local syntactic ambiguity triggered by an ergative verb (e.g. Before the police/truck stopped the Datsun . . . disappeared . ) and concludes that readers make their initial parsing decisions without the benefit of thematic role information (i.e. ammacy of the subject police/truck) and are hence initially garden-pathed. The same structural ambiguity is studied by Fernanda Ferreira and John M. Henderson , who examine the effects of varying the length of the subject of the matrix clause (i.e. the 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-Lewis (Ch. 9, 'Telling from behind her hand', 1 14-28) argues that the narrative as well as the interpretation belong to the narrator. Part III details how relationships are forged and changed even after the original research has ended. Yorman Bilu (Ch. 11, 'Ethnography and hagiography ', 151-71) describes his discursive analysis of a legendary rabbi-healer. Bilu provides an account of the struggle he faces dealing with a public figure who opposes his basic findings. He attempts to frame this figure as a research object as well as a research associate . Amia Lieblich (Ch. 12, 'Some unforeseen outcomes of conducting narrative research with people of one's own culture', 172-86) reveals the difficulties in publishing her informant's personal narratives due to her belief that informants should read and approve their own stories. Part IV contains chapters written by graduate students who are learning how to do narrative research. June Price (Ch. 14, 'Snakes in the swamp', 207-15) describes some life threatening issues involved in her ...