This 23rd volume of the Second Language Acquisition series consists of four parts and 10 articles on second language (L2) lexical processes. Part 1 focuses on the fundamental theoretical question of the integration or the separation of the first language (L1) and L2 lexicons. The first chapter, by Singleton, claims that although many lexicon studies in the literature seem to support the idea of integration of the L1 and L2 lexicons, they do not provide absolute evidence for denying the existence of two separate lexicons. A different perspective comes from Navracsics, who investigates the role of grammatical categories (e.g., nouns, verbs) in lexical representations by examining the performance of early and late bilinguals in a word association test. Navracsics supports the idea of integrated L1 and L2 lexicons, particularly for early bilinguals, whose L2 memory structures may be highly comparable to the memory structures of monolinguals.

Part 2 examines the lexicon in relation to speech perception and production. Gósy examines (dis)similarities in L1 and L2 perception mechanisms among 7-year-old bilingual (Hungarian-English) preschool students and 10-year-old Hungarian monolingual children. Gósy argues that although the performance of monolinguals differs significantly from that of bilinguals in her speech perception experiments, speech processing mechanisms in L1 and L2 appear to be comparable. Simon investigates the relationship between L1 and L2 perception and comprehension processes among 11- and 12-year-old Hungarian elementary students, using eight subtests on perception, lexical access, and comprehension of Hungarian and English (L2). She claims that the participants seem to implement their L1 perception and comprehension strategies in the L2. Keresztes examines English (L2) influence on Hungarian (L1) with a proofreading task in which students were asked to identify English-related features in Hungarian medical texts. She found that highly proficient L2 medical professionals tend not to recognize English contact-induced features in Hungarian medical texts, whereas the students who had taken an English-Hungarian medical translator course appeared to be good at locating the English influence.

Part 3 investigates the lexicon with reference to L2 writing. Witalisz emphasizes the complementary nature of quantitative and qualitative vocabulary assessment in writing. Doró investigates verbs in English narratives written by Hungarian 10th- and 11th-grade students and American 6th-grade children and argues that the use of high- or low-frequency words is strongly influenced by the task.

Part 4 explores the lexicon in SLA. Gergely analyzes the grammatically mixed speech of one Hungarian-English bilingual (when the participant was 2:6–3:0 years old), arguing against a unitary system of grammar at the initial stage. Cvikić examines the performance of 26 English and 6 Italian learners of Croatian in a translation test. She argues that some errors in the task are not explained merely by limited L2 lexical knowledge. Lengyel and his colleagues investigate word class identification in L2 lexical processes through a cloze test by Hungarian learners of English or German, emphasizing the dynamic nature of L2 proficiency.

From a psycholinguistic perspective, online techniques (e.g., measuring reaction times) must be a good complement to offline methods (e.g., untimed measures). Given this, a limitation of this book seems to be that none of the 10 studies was concerned with the time course of L1 and L2 lexical processes, although one may have expected this type of research based on the book's title. For example, although measures of lexical accuracy, as used in the studies in this book, are critical for understanding the L2 lexicon, the corresponding reaction times of responses could provide a fuller picture of lexical processes and representations (see, e.g., Jiang, Reference Jiang2002). Nonetheless, the diverse, multidisciplinary approach to the L2 lexicon is a strong point of this book. In particular, the empirical investigation of rarely reported languages is an important contribution to SLA.