In looking back at the last review of research on the language-science connection to appear in ARAL (van Naerssen and Kaplan 1987), one is struck by the great changes in this relationship that have taken place over the past dozen or so years. On a general level, such changes are perhaps inevitable given the youthfulness of this area as a research domain, but more specifically, they can be traced in large part to two related trends: 1) a shift away from research with direct pedagogical aims and motivations, and 2) the powerful influence of the interdisciplinary field known as social studies of science. Both trends will be recurrent themes of this review.