| Abstract: | Reviews the book, Orthography and Word Recognition in Reading by Leslie Henderson (1982). The scope of this book is perhaps broader than the title might suggest to the uninitiated. The diverse range of topics covered includes the nature of different writing systems, speech recognition, the structure of lexical information in memory, models of word recognition, speech production, language disorders, subliminal perception, contextual effects on word recognition, and several others. Each of these areas supports an enormous web of theories, data and controversies, for which Henderson has set himself the difficult task of reviewing and critically evaluating. He covers a lot of ground and has succeeded, in my opinion, in creating an essential resource. In sum, this is an excellent book because of the wealth of material that is clearly presented and closely analyzed. Much of the discussion is critical of recent research and theory, sometimes strongly so, but the criticism is fair, and insightful, and it appropriately reflects the state of the field. It helps that the book is as gracefully written as technical prose can be. The best compliment that I can offer is that in reading the book I often had to put it down--to mull the author's thought-provoking ideas. While the book is nicely printed and securely bound, there are quite a number of typographical errors and misprints (e.g., the numbering of the footnotes runs out of sequence, and Jim Neely is turned into a she). Something to consider when the book goes into its second edition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
