Reading and language processing . John M. Henderson, Murray Singer and Fernanda Ferreira (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995. PP. 351.

Reading has been a central issue to modem experimental psycholinguistics from the earliest days of the field. The short introduction to this volume gives us some clues as to the reasons for this focus on reading. The issue of reading in PDP models (actually it played a crucial role in the birth of the very idea of parallel processing; see Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982) is mentioned as well as the relevance of reading to claims about modularity. In the early days of psycholinguistics, however, reading was used merely as an indicator of hidden grammatical processes, with the assumption that the specificities of reading as the "input channel" were trivial. Only the reflection of higher level processes, namely grammar, in all kinds of linguistic performances was treated as important. Most of the first studies reported by George Miller (1962) on the psychology of sentence processing used reading in this nonsophisticated way. Reading as the logogen model, originally proposed by Morton (1964), was the first attempt to treat reading and language processing on the same level of sophistication, without merely presupposing and leaving one of them in the background. The present volume belongs to an even more sophisticated trend or stage in the unfolding relationship between psycholinguistics and reading research: the testing of specific and complicated psycholinguistic models either general ones, like the modularity of parsing, or specific ones, like the timing of the activation of thematic roles is combined with an interest in reading theory and practical issues of reading. The chapters in this volume represent a new stage, both in technical sophistication and in processing considerations. The technologies used are close to the best word-by-word reading is supplemented with eye movement tracking and pupillometry though the newest technologies using ERPs or PET scans are not represented. The authors in this volume are clearly trying to relate models of reading to models of psycholinguistic processing. The 13 experimental reports in the volume can be divided into several groups. One group of chapters deals with issues one could call "low level reading. " The chapter by Lori Buchanan and Derek Besner begins by addressing the issue of whether orthographies with a high grapheme-phoneme correspondence do support a prelexical "reading aloud" or whether there are lexical effects even in these languages. After a careful review of the pathological and crosslinguistic evidence, they present studies on Japanese naming in priming conditions across the different writing systems. The priming effects suggest that both full-form and partial-form priming exist and also support interactions during reading, as Rumelhart and McClelland (1982) suggested. In another chapter, Meredyth Daneman and Eyal Reingold compare fixations of forms like vain man/vein man/vine man and find that even similar sounding forms (vein) result in long fixations. This suggests that orthographic information is consulted first before phonologically recoded information takes over.