When I have a dinner party, it's a matter of great importance to me that all the places are set with the same tableware. It's the same at a restaurant – a group of people sitting down for dinner should be served on the same dishes. It's neurotic, I know. But aside from some primitive sense of symmetrical comfort, the plates tell you much about the meal that is to follow: Fine porcelain sets expectations of grace and elegance; brightly colored stoneware establishes a casual ambience; and simple plates communicate a utilitarian attitude to the ensuing meal. The form serves as a gatekeeper, announcing at the outset the intended clientele. If a family with small children in search of cheeseburgers and fries wanders by chance into an establishment that places Royal Doulton in front them, they will know instantly that the content will not meet their expectations. Form matters, and content is partly conveyed by the form.

Form matters in academic writing as well. There are different styles for presenting scholarship, and just as the form announces some aspect of the food we can expect, the form of academic writing anticipates the material we are about to read.

This collection edited by Nicol is a table set with different plates. The articles cross boundaries of style and content, offering a compendium of general reviews, detailed experimental reports, and hints of grand reflections. Some chapters appeal to a general audience that seeks a handbook-type overview of broad issues; others target specialists and report details of research that extends the edges of a specific issue in a very particular way. The variety of the chapters is in many ways a commendable asset. The problem is that we are never sure who was invited to the table.

One of the two dedications at the front of the book hints at an explanation for the nature of this collection. We infer from this dedication that the papers were originally presented as contributions to a colloquium series held in 1998. That information is useful and would have been helpful as an explicit frame around the collection: It explains both why the papers are so diverse (colloquium series) and why many of the contributions seems somewhat dated (1998).

The book contains nine essays covering a variety of issues in second language acquisition and use (and, to a lesser extent, bilingualism). The first chapter, by François Grosjean, outlines his important idea that bilingual research must consider his notion of “mode” and attend to the context in which the bilingual is functioning. Bilinguals, he correctly points out, do not become monolinguals when they use only one of their languages, and we must be more aware of the mental complexity of bilinguals when we attempt to assess their performance in one of their languages. The next chapter, by Mary Zampini & Kerry Green, presents a detailed account of the psychophysical differences between voicing contrasts in Spanish and English and uses that account to explain differences in the production of stop consonants by English monolinguals and English learners of Spanish at various levels of proficiency. Judith Kroll & Natasha Tokowicz summarize work from Kroll's lab that lays the foundation for their model describing the evolving relationship between L1 lexicon, L2 lexicon, and the conceptual system. Kenneth Forster & Nan Jiang report a series of studies demonstrating cross-language priming. The implications of the discussion from this and the previous chapter are important for constraining models of how two languages might plausibly be represented in a bilingual brain. Carol Myers-Scotton & Janice Lake offer an extensive survey of their research on code-switching, a topic important partly because it is unique to bilingual language use. The chapter, however, challenges the reader's ability to learn a new language of technical acronyms, containing myriad sentences like this: “First, it enables us to discuss how congruence between the ML and the EL influences the CS patterns found in classical CS” (116). The sixth chapter, by Nicol, Matthew Teller, & Delia Greth, tackles the difficult topic of language production, and in particular, syntactic production. They report two studies that point to limitations in the syntactic competence of second language learners. In the next chapter, Montserrat Sanz & Thomas Bever apply Minimalist theory to a set of data obtained from Spanish second language learners to elucidate both the competence of those learners and the organizing principles of the Minimalist Program. Paola Dussias reports studies that compare the parsing strategies used by native English speakers and Spanish-speaking English learners to determine reference in complex sentences. In the final chapter, Samuel Supalla, Tina Wix, & Cecile McKee describe an instructional program used to help deaf learners with the transition to English literacy by introducing a written system of sign that bridges sign language and written English.

The articles contribute to three major pursuits: methodological precision, theoretical advancement, and empirical grounding. The methodological contribution is implicit in all the chapters, although there is some ambivalence over whether the collection addresses bilingualism, as promised in the title, or second language acquisition, the topic of the majority of the papers. Bilingualism and second-language acquisition are obviously closely related, but they are not the same thing. Both the chapter by Grosjean and that by Kroll & Tokowicz explain how bilingual processing must be considered in terms of a more nuanced gradient that incorporates estimates of proficiency. Neither of these accounts, however, addresses second language acquisition. Other chapters are more concerned with the processes and strategies involved in building up competence in the second language, such as the chapters by Nicol et al. and Dussias. These issues seem less relevant to bilingual language processing than they do to second language acquisition. The difference between these subfields is most evident in their methodological approaches, which base their research on different types of populations and set different types of dependent variables as the goal of study. To be glib, second language acquisition is the study of how a nonnative language is acquired, while bilingualism is the study of how two languages are used (and the implications of using two languages instead of one). The book's title promises an examination of bilingualism in language processing, priming the reader for a discussion of the latter, but few of the chapters address that set of issues. These distinctions should be made clearer, at least to the extent that the relation between the two is explicated.

The greatest variation among the chapters is in their theoretical assumptions and contributions. This is an example of a place where matching dinnerware would have been helpful. In some cases, a particular theory is presented with insufficient context and alternatives for non-experts to evaluate the viability of the explanation; in others, we become distracted by the alternatives. The general state-of-the-art review that is best suited for a handbook and the closely argued description of evidence for a single framework that is best suited for a monograph do not combine well.

Finally, the collection includes a large number of empirical studies, some presenting new data and others usefully assembling existing data in one place. When new data are reported in refereed journal articles, one can assume a level of adjudication and reliability. Many of the new data reported in this collection, however, are cited from unpublished work, and insufficient methodological detail is provided for the reader to make a judgment about their interpretation.

The collection offers a wide-ranging review of many important topics in second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. All the chapters are interesting, and all the topics are important. The main problem is that there is no center, no glue that holds the pieces together. We are never sure what kind of meal we are being invited to share. A reader in search of an overview of the state of the field of bilingualism processing will be disappointed by the narrow perspective; a researcher concerned with the latest empirical advances will be frustrated by the lack of detail. The collection would have profited from a road map that contextualized the individual contributions and assembled them into a description of where we have come from and where we are going. The lack of such a map is the most conspicuous absence in this collection.