This book addresses a fundamental question in the morphological analysis and representation of Semitic languages—namely, whether Semitic word morphology is root based or word based. As Shimron suggests, “there are reasons to view the templates, not the roots, as the more influential factor in determining Semitic morphology” (p. 5). Yet, as others would argue, there are reasons not to disregard the root-based hypothesis altogether. In the case of Arabic morphology, for example, verbal forms inherently contain three nonlinear levels: the consonantal root, the vowel pattern, and the templatic prosody. This nonlinear feature provided a perfect illustration of what has become termed in the literature as root-and-patterns morphology (McCarthy & Prince, 1986, 1990).

The question of whether Semitic morphology is best analyzed in terms of the root or the template (vocalic patterns) is by no means a new one. What is new in Shimron's book, however, is that this question is approached from the perspective of the mental lexicon of Semitic language speakers. Perhaps the book's major contribution to the ongoing debates regarding the morphology of Semitic languages is that it provides sound theoretical and empirical bases from which to challenge the long-held view that subscribes to the root-based analysis.

The first part of the book consists of chapters dealing with specific morphological phenomena in a number of Semitic languages, most notably Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese, and Ethiopian. The conclusion from these first chapters is that there seems to be a general consensus that the root-based approach needs to be revisited—if not dropped altogether—when analyzing Semitic morphology. In fact, both Bat-El and Benmamoun in their respective chapters on Hebrew and Arabic argue that the roots in Semitic languages are not the only governing elements in derivational morphology. Heath, on the other hand, goes a step further to argue that the validity of the root system in Semitic languages such as Arabic depends to a large degree on one's ability to “distinguish the formal elements needed for a morphological derivation from those needed for a parsing of a surface form, especially of a derived form” (p. 115).

Although most of the chapters contributed by linguists argue against the root-based approach to Semitic morphology and clearly favor a word-based (or in some cases stem-based) analysis, the evidence and data presented by psycholinguists support “the claim that is consistent with the decomposition hypothesis, or at least with the notion that roots and templates have an independent status in our mental lexicon” (p. 23).

For researchers interested in the mental lexicon and language acquisition, the chapters reporting psycholinguistic evidence for the validity of the root and template construct provide the strongest features of this book. Two groups of researchers contributed to this section of the book—namely researchers on child (first) language acquisition and researchers conducting experiments on laboratory linguistic behavior of adult speakers. Berman's study is representative of the former and presents an interesting perspective that uses children's lexical innovations as a way of testing their ability to access derivational patterns as established in their first language (Hebrew). The study's findings suggest that, in general, Hebrew-speaking children are able to “perform consonantal root extraction from as young as age three years both in interpreting and producing novel verbs based on familiar nouns and adjectives” (p. 274). The most relevant aspect of this study, however, is that it raises serious questions about what is known in the language acquisition literature as the universals. Berman challenges the dominant view that “applying psycholinguistic notions of relative formal or structural complexity” (p. 275) will affect the extent to which children are able to produce such forms. In fact, factors such as opacity and defective root structure will affect the speakers' performance in producing derivational verbal forms.

To a large extent, the book is an attempt to provide readers with the main competing views on whether or not Semitic morphology can be treated as word based or root based. Although the linguistic arguments presented in this book tend to advocate an analysis where word formation is essentially a byproduct of word stems and a process of affixation, the psycholinguistic data clearly shows that roots and templates occupy special entities in the mental lexicon of Semitic speakers; however, this in itself does not preclude the existence of other segments that might have their independent status.

Overall, this is a well-structured book with a number of excellent chapters on linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of Semitic morphology. It is obvious that Shimron has succeeded in turning a polarized debate about the nature of Semitic morphology into a fertile ground for linguistic analyses and experimental research that yielded solid if not always coherent findings.