121Book reviews / System 39 (2011) 113e127

were given attention, and use was made of information preceding the target words. However, while the repertoire ofknowledge sources was generally the same across conditions, different conditions also demanded more of one overanother (e.g. French speakers able to use word form, while Persian speakers tended to use collocation).

Irrespective of L1 and reading condition, all participants mostly drew on cues that were meaning oriented (e.g.world knowledge, sentence meaning, etc.), with sentence meaning predominating. Interestingly, however, the authorsfound that English L1 readers used multiple knowledge sources for most of their inferences, and this was largely thesame case among the English L2 readers, although in their own L1s more single knowledge sources were reported.Moreover, no relationship was found using multiple knowledge sources and successful guesses.

The authors conclude that the cross-linguistic commonalities found in the study can be considered as evidence fora kind of underlying strategic competence when searching for the meaning of unknown words, irrespective oftypology.

The study which forms the central focus of this book is certainly important, although it is not entirely clear howmuch it genuinely adds to the existing literature in the area. While is it is true that there had been a relative dearth ofresearch related to typological distance and L2 inferencing, the fact that Persian students were somewhat lesssuccessful than French-speaking peers when guessing words that had affixation, for example, similar to English, isprobably not too big a surprise. Nor is it really novel that inferencing training for reading is important in L2instruction. However, one valuable suggestion made by the authors in the light of this study is that when largetypological distances exist, reading and vocabulary instruction should include explicit work on morphology, and evenspecial attention to the commonest words in the L2 that are not lexicalized in the L1. Although this already exists inmany ELL programs, the newWesche and Paribakht’s study helps provide confirmatory evidence of the value of suchexercises, as well as for the inferencing training that also commonly occurs in instructed L2 contexts.

References

Haastrup, K., 1987. Using thinking aloud and retrospection to uncover learners’ lexical inferencing procedures. In: Faerch, C., Kasper, G. (Eds.),

Introspection in Second Language Research. Multilingual Matters, Clevedon, U.K, pp. 197e212.

Paribakht, T.S., Wesche, M., 1993. Reading comprehension and second language development in a comprehension-based ESL program. TESL

Canada Journal 11, 9e29.

Paribakht, T.S., Wesche, M., 1997. Vocabulary enhancement activities and reading for meaning in second language vocabulary acquisition. In:

Coady, J., Huckin, T. (Eds.), Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition: A Rationale for Pedagogy. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp.

174e199.

Ron MartinezSchool of English Studies,University of Nottingham,

University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD,United Kingdom

E-mail address: aexrm3@nottingham.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.system.2011.01.002

Connected Words: Word Associations and Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition, Paul Meara, John Benjaminspublishing company, Amsterdam (2009). 174 pp.

Paul Meara has admirably never shied away from the tough questions in vocabulary research and he does not breakfrom that pattern in his latest work. Connected Words is a carefully selected compendium and synthesis of a number ofstudies carried out in the area of word association and lexical networks by Meara and colleagues over the years. Thebook evolves from studies surrounding more traditional word association research to assessment, and finally tonetworks and current modeling, including computer modeling of word associations and acquisition.

122 Book reviews / System 39 (2011) 113e127

As Meara points out, vocabulary research has come a long way since the days in which it was relegated to a sub-section of grammatical competence. However, he also reminds us that although this is no longer the case, some of thefundamental assumptions underpinning word associations and vocabulary acquisition have gone relatively unques-tioned on the bandwagon of vocabulary research.

Section 1 looks back at some of the earlier work on word association studies, papers first published in 1978. Thefirst paper, ‘Learners’ word associations in French’, presents the findings of a conventional word association test bya group of low-level learners of French. Meara highlights the problem encountered in the study: how to tease out whatmade L2 word association different from L1 association, and its relationship to acquisition. The paper largely serves tosupport Meara’s thesis in the book, namely, that strictly adhering to prevailing models, in this case, ‘syntagmatic’ and‘paradigmatic’ association, may lead to insufficient and incomplete understanding, and therefore one needs to rethinkcertain assumptions. It is to this point that Meara returns in the second paper, questioning the stability, for example, ofthe L2 vis-a-vis L1 mental lexicon, and how new words may be integrated into an existing network.

Section 2 begins with a discussion of Meara’s YES/NO test and how insights gained from the lessons learned in thedevelopment of that and other vocabulary assessment interests helped to fuel the theorizing of L2 vocabularyacquisition as a whole. In particular, issues of vocabulary size, organization and accessibility come to the fore. Meara’saccount of the development of a productive vocabulary assessment tool, Lex30, is an example of how in trying to solvea tough problem (that of how to test one’s productive vocabulary) interesting questions can arise that can lead toimportant research endeavors. Lex30, a kind of word association task, was able to show that although there seemed togenerally be a linear relationship between receptive and productive vocabulary sizes, it was not always the case. Out ofthe 46 participants tested, four had productive vocabulary size scores larger than those of their receptive measures.Conversely, five participants had receptive vocabulary scores that were incongruously larger than their productivescores. The bottom line is that modeling the mental lexicon will surely be a complex task.

Section 3 contains three papers which directly address the question as to whether vocabulary is truly a network,and, if so, how exactly is that network operationalized? This question is not answered in the three papers, but the factthat it is attempted at all is laudable enough. Borrowing techniques from graph theory involving connected points(‘nodes’ and ‘arcs’), Meara illustrates what a word association network might actually look like. For example, in anillustration on page 61, he shows a ‘weather’ network, with many words like cold, snow, winter and fog pointing andfeeding into one another, but with one word, sleet, only being connected to the network via two connections, and withno incoming connections. Meara suggests that sleet in that position is roughly consistent with a notion of passivevocabulary knowledge, and that the words to which it connects, cold and rain, necessarily become activated shouldsleet also become activated. At the heart of the matter is an attempt to move beyond conceiving vocabulary know-ledge as merely boiling down to issues ‘breadth’ and ‘depth’, and exploring how size and organization interact.Various simulator options are discussed.

This book does what the author promises, which is to provide a snapshot of how far away we are from good modelsof word associations and L2 vocabulary acquisition, while providing some means for further exploration. Particularlyuseful is the annotated bibliography of word association research, in addition to references which link to Meara’swebsite where some of the electronic resources mentioned and discussed in the book can be downloaded. It almostseems as if Meara does not want to be the only one asking the tough questions about the nature of vocabularyknowledge in a second language and wishes to provide the next generation of researchers with a very useful wheel tospeed them on their way.

Ron MartinezSchool of English Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park,

Nottingham NG7 2RD, United KingdomE-mail address: aexrm3@nottingham.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.system.2011.01.006