This book presents a psycholinguistic investigation of how the English past tense is interpreted by adult English native speakers (NSs) during on-line sentence comprehension. Structurally speaking, tense is a morphosyntactic category of the verb and bears semantic content: In other words, it locates the event described by the sentence with respect to the speech time and also other events in discourse. In chapter 1, Dickey presents extensive background on the semantic literature on tense and sentence processing and introduces several research questions: how and when the language processor assigns an interpretation to tense markers, whether the domain of interpretation is the sentence or the discourse, whether interpretation is assigned immediately or is delayed, and whether discourse or syntactic simplicity guides the analysis of temporal interpretation. To answer these questions, Dickey focuses on three phenomena—interpretation of aspect with temporal adverbials and adverb preposing (John had left at 5 vs. At 5, John had left), interpretation of tense in matrix contexts and temporal anaphora (Sheila had a party last Friday; Sam got drunk), and interpretation of sequence of tense phenomena (John said that Mary was sick)—which he develops and tests empirically in chapters 2, 3, and 4, respectively. In chapter 5, the conclusion, remaining questions are addressed. The book presents a total of seven experiments using a self-paced reading task, which measures reaction times at critical segments of a given sentence, to see how semantic ambiguity is resolved by the language processor.

One goal of these experiments is to evaluate whether a theoretical model of parsing called “Parsimony” makes the right predictions with respect to the interpretation of tense in English. In general, the experimental results are not consistent with this theory or with a referential approach to tense. Dickey argues that the opposite seems to be the case: Structural and compositional semantic aspects of the sentence, rather than discourse, play a role in how the processor interprets the morphosyntax of tense.

Deeply informed by current semantic and psycholinguistic theories, an advantage of psycholinguistic studies of this sort is that they provide an excellent testing ground for current formal models of the semantics of tense and human sentence processing. After all, any model of language must account for how people represent and access human language, and the linguistic behavior of real people is a much richer and more powerful source of linguistic data than the isolated judgments and intuitions of individual researchers.

The book is written very clearly, but those who do not have a strong background in formal linguistic theory, and formal semantics in particular, may find the book hard to digest because it is quite technical and theoretically focused. However, leaving formalisms aside, and given that Dickey's book certainly opens a new dimension in our understanding of tense in adult NSs, it has substantial applications for the field of SLA. The acquisition of tense and aspect by nonnative speakers (NNSs) has been attracting and continues to attract considerable attention in the SLA field. As Bardovi-Harlig (1999) describes, researchers on both sides of the Atlantic have been concerned with tracing the development of how tense and aspect morphology emerges and with how the expression of semantic concepts is expressed with different linguistic devices in discourse. Most recently, and from a formal linguistics perspective, the acquisition of the syntax and semantics of tense and aspect morphology has begun to be explored in adult second language acquisition as well (Montrul & Slabakova, 2002).

Dickey's work is a serious and useful contribution to linguistics and psycholinguistics, and it has implications and applications for SLA research. It certainly has the potential to inspire and encourage SLA researchers to expand the existing theoretical and methodological repertoire in the study of the expression and interpretation of temporality, by making room for other research questions and psycholinguistic methodologies that have already begun to be used in the SLA field with some success. Thus, studies of this sort should be replicated with other NSs and with NNSs of English and other languages for us to understand the role of processing and interpretation in the adult L2 acquisition of temporal semantics.