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Cognitive Processing of Chinese and Related Asian Languages. Edited by HSUANCHIH CHEN. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1997. xvii, 456 pp. $39.50 (paper).
This book is the latest in an informal series of volumes that comprise papers presented at language processing conferences in China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan over the past two decades. On the positive side, the volume represents an improvement over its predecessors because it is better produced, because it more fully represents the range of work being done in the field, and because it downplays the field's traditional overemphasis on Chinese character processing by including articles in other important but neglected areas. On the down side, the quality of the contributions is still somewhat variable.
The volume's twenty-four articles are divided into four sections: (1) Speech and phonological processing; (2) Perception and processing of characters; (3) Processing of words and sentences; (4) First- and second-language acquisition processing. Although one might quibble with the assignment of articles to the different sections (for example, articles by Wu and Liu p. 47, Liu p. 65, and Taylor [p. 299 seem better suited to the section on character processing than the sections in which they were placed), each section nonetheless contains contributions that represent the best work currently being done in their respective areas.
In a study of spoken language processing, Zhou and Marslen-Wilson (p. 3) found that both the "non-tone-changed" form of a Chinese word (such as the...