In Experiment 1, 42 multilinguals were able to maintain native language writing quality and fluency in the presence of unattended irrelevant speech while maintaining a concurrent 6-digit memory load. In Experiment 2, 80 bilinguals reduced fluency during writing with the 6-digit load only. In previous research, over 100 monolinguals of comparable verbal and nonverbal skills in three experiments reduced quality and fluency under both secondary tasks (Ransdell, Levy, & Kellogg, 1996). The results are interpreted in terms of a bilingual skill advantage in suppressing irrelevant information. Possessing fluency in another language may confer long-term working memory benefits during dual-task language conditions for bilinguals and even more so for multilinguals.

Two experiments investigated the role of inflections in verb learning. In Study I, 3- to 5-year-olds with typical language development were asked to extend novel verbs to new instances. They heard the verbs inflected with either -ed or -ing and were given a forced choice between events that maintained either the activity or the result of the original event. The younger children selected events according to the verb inflection: same-activity events for -ing and same-result events for -ed. Older preschoolers chose same-result events throughout. Study II was conducted to investigate the nature of this causal bias. A group of 4- to 5-year-olds with specific language impairment completed the same verb extension task. They were equivalent to the older Study I children in age and IQ but were at lower language levels than the younger group. Children in the SLI group used neither the inflectional strategy nor the same-result strategy. Findings from the two studies point to a developmental period during which children treat inflectional cues as reliable guides to verb meaning. The discussion focuses on the rise and fall of such inflectional bootstrapping and the linguistic character of the same-result bias that replaces it.

We analyzed the three main types of English dative constructions – the double-object dative, the to dative, and the for dative – in the spontaneous speech of seven children from the age of 1;6 to 5;0. The main findings were as follows. First, the double-object dative was acquired by most of the children before either of the prepositional datives; this was attributed to the greater frequency with which children heard this construction with individual verbs. Second, the verbs children used with these constructions were not only the adult prototypical ones, but also a number of the less prototypical ones; again, this was very likely due to their frequency and saliency in the language children heard. Third, no support was found for Ninio's (1999) analysis of the emergence of constructions in terms of a single “pathbreaking” verb; rather, children began using the double-object dative with many different verbs and did not follow the trajectory proposed by Ninio (i.e., a single verb is used for some months before an “explosion” of new verbs is introduced in the construction). Finally, most of the verbs initially used in the three dative constructions were first used in other constructions (e.g., a simple transitive); this was even true for some obligatory datives, such as give and show. The current results provide a starting point for determining the underlying representations for the different kinds of dative constructions and for explicating how children understand the interrelations among these and other constructions.

The phonological representations of adult less skilled readers (n = 25) were studied in comparison to those of adult skilled readers (n = 25) and adolescent reading-age controls (n = 25). Participants were tested on a paired confrontation naming and spelling test, given two times to evaluate consistency of performance, and a pseudoword repetition task. On confrontation naming, less skilled readers were less accurate and less consistent, and they made more phonological errors. Likewise, their spellings were less accurate and consistent than those of the control groups; inaccurate naming influenced their spelling significantly more often than it did the spelling of adult skilled readers. They also had fewer correct responses on the pseudoword repetition task. The results confirm that there are weaknesses in the phonological representations of known and new words for adult less skilled readers, with observable consequences for spelling.

“On 4 November 1995 Kasabe existed; on 5 November it did not.” This brief obituary in David Crystal's book (p. 1) does not refer to a creature. It refers to an African language, known as Luo, that had been spoken in Cameroon; on the day in question, Bogon, the last speaker of Kasabe, died, taking his language with him. According to Crystal, half of the world's current languages are in danger of dying, and the situation is so grave that an international and interdisciplinary effort must be mounted to rescue them. Crystal has written this book to alert us to the peril and to suggest ways in which our linguistic diversity might be maintained.

This anthology consists of 20 chapters contributed by 25 authors and coauthors; its articles are divided into three sections corresponding to the title categories: politics, pedagogy, and participation. As Trudy Smoke states in the preface, “I decided to use the term adult ESL in its broadest sense – non-native speaking adults who participate in ABE (adult basic education), community college, or senior college programs” (p. ix). However, about 75% of the articles are written from a community college or senior college perspective, with a focus on intermediate-level or above English language learners. There is nothing inherently wrong with this; in fact, it may be inevitable that college ESL teachers are more likely to be able to write articles than their ABE colleagues, who are among the most overworked and underpaid teachers in U.S. education. Smoke notes briefly that some ESL students in ABE programs eventually enroll in community and senior colleges, but for the most part the reader is left having to infer how the insights of college ESL practice and research might apply to teachers in community-based ABE programs in ESL. A more extended discussion of the similarities and differences between ABE and college-based learners would have made the book more useful, especially for new teachers or other readers not familiar with the field.

Despite the evidence for a core phonological deficit in dyslexia, the nature of this deficit at the level of the phonological representation is not well understood. In this study, the auditory word gating paradigm was used to examine the quality of the underlying phonological representations in dyslexic and average readers. Although the dyslexic children showed age-related nonword and rapid naming deficits, they did not differ from the age-matched controls in the amount of acoustic–phonetic input required to identify sets of words that varied in word frequency and phonological neighborhood density. These results indicate that input phonological processing, as tapped by the gating task, is normal in this group of dyslexic children, whereas their deficits on the RAN tasks suggest that there are problems with phonological retrieval. The implications of these results are considered in relation to the phonological representations hypothesis of dyslexia; the evidence suggests that what is impaired in dyslexia are the retrieval processes that operate on phonological representations.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) are often described as having great difficulty with grammatical morphology, but most studies have focused only on these children's use of verb morphology. In this study, we examined the use of noun phrase (NP) morphology by preschool-age children with SLI who are acquiring Swedish. Relative to typically developing same-age peers and younger peers matched according to mean length of utterance, the children with SLI had greater difficulty in the use of genitive inflections, indefinite articles, and article + adjective + noun constructions. Their difficulties were evidenced in omissions as well as substitutions. Furthermore, article omissions were more frequent in NPs containing an adjective and a noun than in NPs with only a noun. These findings indicate that in languages such as Swedish, NP morphology as well as verb morphology can be quite problematic for children with SLI. Factors that might have contributed to these children's difficulties are the lack of transparency of the gender of Swedish nouns, the morphological complexity of NPs containing adjectives in Swedish, the weak syllable status of articles, and the consonantal nature of some of the inflections.

This workbook is a revised edition of the volume published in 1984 by Larry Selinker and Susan Gass entitled Workbook in Second Language Acquisition. Like the first edition, this edition provides a research-centered view of second language acquisition (SLA) that seeks to build an awareness of the issues, types of data, and methods of analysis through a series of practical problems of data analysis and related questions. The data and problems, which all focus on English as the target language, are drawn from articles published between 1968 and 1993, the majority of them “SLA classics” published in the 1980s. The book includes a short glossary and has accompanying tape-recorded material not provided to the reviewer.

WordNet is an on-line relational database of the English lexicon developed by George Miller and coworkers at Princeton University (Miller, Beckwith, Fellbaum, Gross, & Miller, 1990). The meaning of a particular word in WordNet is expressed principally through its relations to other words and sets of synonyms, with the structure of the database reflecting the current psycholinguistic understanding of the mental lexicon.

A longitudinal study investigated the claim that phonological memory contributes to vocabulary acquisition in young children. In the first phase, children were given tests of receptive vocabulary, receptive grammar, nonword repetition, phonological sensitivity (or “awareness”), and performance IQ. In the second phase, children were given the nonword repetition and receptive vocabulary tests. In Session 1, both nonword repetition and phonological sensitivity accounted for variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar after performance IQ effects were controlled. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled, nonword repetition did not account for significant additional variation in receptive vocabulary and grammar. When performance IQ and autoregression effects were controlled, all Session 1 verbal ability measures predicted Session 2 vocabulary, but only Session 1 vocabulary predicted Session 2 nonword repetition. When phonological sensitivity was also controlled, Session 1 nonword repetition (leniently scored) predicted Session 2 vocabulary. Overall, these findings show qualified support for the claim that the capacity component of nonword repetition contributes directly to vocabulary in young children. They suggest that the association between nonword repetition and vocabulary in young children may, to a substantial extent, reflect a latent phonological processing ability that is also manifest in phonological sensitivity.

This stimulating volume is the outcome of a 1996 conference, the first in the laboratory phonology series to incorporate psycholinguistic topics, including six chapters addressing acquisition. Here, as in the earlier conferences, the primary focus is on the relationship between phonetics and phonology. For example, in the first section, “Articulation and Mental Representation,” Munhall, Kawato, and Vatikiotis-Bateson provide a lucid account of the state of the art in physical models of articulation; they conclude with a discussion of the difficulty of identifying the interface between phonology and speech production. In a related study, the relevance of overarching prosodic structure (“phrasal signatures”) to low-level articulatory effects is illustrated in some detail by Byrd, Kaun, Narayanan, and Saltzman, who find that “prosodic structure is manifest in the details of articulation. . . . The abstract symbolic representation useful to linguistics [must be integrated] with a dynamical model of human movement useful to speech scientists” (p. 85).

This book focuses on non-functional phonologies (NFP): that is, phonological disorders with no known physiological or neurological causes. It is a substantial book, well written and carefully researched, with an applied and pedagogical orientation that will make it invaluable for clinicians and students in speech pathology and child phonology. It is an ambitious and original work; its practical guidance for those assessing child phonology is based on a comprehensive and up-to-date descriptive and theoretical review of phonological systems and their realization in children's speech. It consists of six chapters, each of which introduces general concepts of phonology as well as modern concepts of nonlinear phonology and includes practical material, most notably a set of original worksheets that are geared to assessment or other types of intervention. It also has three appendices: the first reviews commercial tests, the second provides examples of stress patterns in English lexical items, and the third presents conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

The study of gesture, especially its relationship to spoken and signed languages, has become a broadly studied topic for researchers from various fields, including neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, evolutionary psychology, human development, and communication disorders. One possible reason for the wide interest in gesture is its universality. People of all ages and cultures use gestures for various purposes. Young language-learning, hearing children often use gestures alone or in combination with speech to help express themselves to their interlocutors, for example, pointing to a desired object while saying “mine.” As a more striking example, deaf children in Nicaragua who had previously been unexposed to any conventional sign language, used gestures to develop home-sign systems that eventually developed into Nicaraguan Sign Language (Kegl, Senghas, & Coppola, 1999). On the other hand, gestures are often used in situations where the underlying purpose of the gesture is less clear. For example, people who are blind from birth are nonetheless found to gesture in conversation (Iverson & Goldin-Meadow, 1997), and adults gesture frequently, and often subconsciously, during conversations with one another. Despite their omnipresence, we know relatively little about gestures' origins, their relationship to language, and, in some instances, the purposes they serve.

Judith Rosenthal has brought together a wide variety of articles on second language (L2) teaching and learning that will surely interest foreign language (FL) educators in U.S. universities who are struggling to increase or maintain enrollment in their courses or who are seeking new ideas to meet the needs and demands of an increasingly diverse student population. Rather than encourage individual language departments to continue their separate battles for survival, Rosenthal hopes to enhance the “integration” of FL programs in order “to better promote proficiency in more than one language” (p. 353). This volume clearly illustrates how teachers of various languages can collaborate and share experiences in order to find solutions to what are often very similar problems.

One of the most fundamental, yet often neglected, or even paradoxical questions in the field of language acquisition is how children who have not yet acquired stable grammar can process language and still manage to acquire new grammar. This question is further complicated by cross-linguistic differences, such as how English- and Japanese-speaking children process complex sentences in their respective languages. To answer these two intricate questions, we need to identify cross-linguistically common – possibly universal or quasi-universal – characteristics in terms of the development of language processing strategies. At the same time, we also need to know whether different language processing strategies are used by children who speak different languages. We thus need to take both developmental and cross-linguistic issues into consideration simultaneously.

Examining the language abilities of children with language disorders should be a deductive process, using much more than the data that formal measures provide. The assessment should be a systematic, psycholinguistic exploration of aspects of a child's input and output, with a focus on the attempt to pinpoint specific areas of deficit within the language-processing system. Chiat, in this insightful and extremely accessible book, provides basic profiles of children with language disorders, along with case study examples, that both illustrate various forms of language disorder and demonstrate the use of tasks, commonly applied in psycholinguistic research, to problem-solve specific cases. Chiat is a senior lecturer in Linguistics at City University, London, where she is an established researcher who focuses primarily on phonological development and disorders and the impact of impaired phonology on lexical/semantic development.

In the preface to this passionately argued text, the author makes the political aspects of the work quite clear. She states that she hopes readers will “become angry, desperate, frustrated, as well as reflective, optimistic and eager to join me and others in demanding, suggesting, creating, and implementing change” (p. xv). This statement sets the tone for the entire book: a mixture of self-professed utopian thinking (p. 600) and clear-sighted accounts of actually existing conditions. Recognizing that a simple call for justice is not enough in a world dominated by transnational capitalism and marked by institutionalized inequities in power, the author admits that a human rights approach to linguistic issues will only work if there is also a redistribution of the world's resources. The book is thus a call to action on a variety of fronts.