The purpose of this dissertation monograph is “to determine whether bilinguals, with proficiencies in each of their languages sufficient to support responsible fluency, process linguistic input by employing the routines that are followed by monolinguals of each of their languages” (p. 211). In other words, the question is whether the sentence processing of bilinguals is dependent on the language of the sentence (language dependence) or on the dominant language of the bilingual (called language independence). The study first identifies a sentence type with crosslinguistic processing differences and then seeks to determine whether monolinguals and bilinguals process those sentences differently in online (early phase) and offline (postsyntactic) tests.

Fernández focuses on relative-clause attachment as a sentence-processing phenomenon with crosslinguistic differences between monolingual Spanish and English speakers: Someone shot the maid of the actress who was on the balcony. (Initial [online] interpretation: The actress was on the balcony; low attachment). Alguien disparó contra la criada de la actriz que estaba en el balcón “Someone shot the maid of the actress who was on the balcony.” (Initial interpretation: La criada estaba en el balcón “The maid was on the balcony”; high attachment; pp. 5–6.)

After discussing the comparative literature on crosslinguistic noun attachment preferences in relative-clause processing in Spanish, English, and a variety of other languages such as Italian, Greek, Croatian, and Dutch in chapter 2, Fernández explores the effects of language dominance and acquisition context on bilingual sentence processing in chapter 3. Chapter 4 is devoted to the evaluation, variable control, and pilot testing of test materials. Chapters 5 and 6 provide three-way comparisons between (a) monolinguals and bilinguals, (b) English and Spanish materials, and (c) online and offline processing, thus empirically verifying the assertions in the literature discussed in chapters 2 and 3, while going a step further to compare bilinguals' sentence processing. Results are presented and discussed as each test is presented throughout these two chapters. They are then summarized and discussed again in the chapter 7 conclusions.

The findings are not striking. The relative-clause processing differences between English and Spanish monolinguals were not as great as expected if sentence length is taken into account. Although the offline questionnaire resulted in English-dominant bilinguals preferring low attachment like English monolinguals and Spanish-dominant bilinguals preferring high attachment like Spanish monolinguals, in the online reading comprehension tests, “the bilingual subjects failed to match the patterns in the monolingual data” (p. 215). She ends by suggesting alternative explanations for the data, such as Fodor's (1998) antigravity law, and by calling for future research.

The publication, part of the John Benjamins series on Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, is well produced, with a detailed table of contents, list of tables, appendices, reference list, and extensive subject index. There are only occasional errors, such as an accidental mix-up of sample sentence translations (p. 41).

The author takes extraordinary care to define and substantiate each concept and premise in clear, well-organized prose. A particularly nice feature of Fernández's writing is that she regularly stops the presentation of new materials to recapitulate what has been presented to that point. Yet, despite the fact that each premise is so meticulously presented and tested, the results and interpretation are unconvincing. The results are inconsistent enough to suggest that the underlying premises are questionable. Indeed, the very narrow focus of the argument building may be precisely the problem. Although the author works hard to prove her case, she does not spend enough time finding, examining, and disproving alternative interpretations of and explanations for the observed phenomena. One such alternative might take into account the decidedly marked quality of the Norman genitive “the maid of the actress” as opposed to the unmarked Saxon genitive “the actress's maid” (Brysbaert & Mitchell, 1996). This is barely mentioned and footnoted by Fernández (pp. 14, 60), yet it surely affects the interpretation of all the English test sentences.