Although there has been a great deal of research on second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition in recent years, one theme of this book from arguably the leading researcher in the area is that work on vocabulary is still outside mainstream SLA research. Meara goes even further and asserts that even among L2 vocabulary researchers, there are few scholars who have demonstrated any sustained interest in the research agenda that he and his graduate students have developed over the last 30 years to gain a deeper understanding of the structure and functioning of L2 mental lexicon.
This book focuses on one major strand of Meara’s research: the potential for word association data to provide insights into the links among words stored in the L2 learner’s brain. The main body of this volume comprises seven previously published articles by Meara and, in some cases, former doctoral students as co-authors. The author has added a general introduction as well as introductory commentaries for each of the four main sections of the book to provide a context for the articles and to trace the development of his thinking since the 1970s about various methods of eliciting and analyzing word associations from learners.
The articles in the first section, which were originally published in 1978 and 1983, report on Meara’s early work with the conventional approach to word association data, which had proven informative about the lexical development of native speakers but which turned out to produce much less consistent or interpretable results in the case of foreign language learners. The second section includes two more recent articles, co-authored with Fitzpatrick, that discuss their efforts to develop and validate an instrument they call Lex30, using word association data as a practical means of estimating learners’ productive vocabulary knowledge.
In section 3, there are three articles, with Wolter and Wilks as Meara’s co-authors for two of them. This section focuses on their work to model the concept of the mental lexicon as a dense network of connections among words, using graph theory. The authors describe various procedures they have employed to elicit learner judgments about associative links between pairs of words. In the third article, they discuss the merits of using computer simulations as an alternative to actual learner data to investigate different theoretical assumptions about the way that L2 lexicons work and how they might grow over time.
There are two other sections in the volume. The fourth section consists of a comprehensive annotated bibliography of over 100 publications that report investigations of L2 word associations. This is a reminder of Meara’s long-standing role as an archivist and bibliographer of work in the field, especially given that such publications have often appeared in diverse and little-known locations. The summaries of the studies listed in this bibliography are a valuable reference source for researchers, even if the full publications are not easily accessible in some cases. Finally, the fifth section is made up of appendixes in the form of manuals for three Web-based programs that Meara has created to facilitate the collection and analysis of word association data, including the Lex30 program. The programs can be accessed, along with numerous other tests and research tools, on the author’s Web site (www.lognostics.co.uk).
Thus, in a number of respects, this volume is more a research handbook than a monograph or anthology of papers. Apart from the features just noted, Meara discusses throughout the book the methodological challenges he has faced in pursuing his goal of going beyond superficial concepts like a web of words or depth of vocabulary knowledge to achieve a more sophisticated understanding of the L2 lexicon through hard-core psycholinguistic research methods and computer modeling. He is quite open about the problems that persist and the fact that progress on his research agenda has been incremental rather than dramatic in nature. There is a risk here that his frankness may deter more than encourage the novice researchers he would like to attract to this area of study. However, for those who respond to the challenge, whether novices or not, the book provides a range of useful resources to direct their efforts and, at the very least, to help them formulate the right research questions. Who knows? Vocabulary research of this kind may yet find its place within mainstream SLA.
