This paper reports a paired-groups experimental study, which tests the Interaction Hypothesis in a computer-mediated communicative environment. Pairs of intermediate-level nonnative speakers of English (n = 24) interacted with one another in a synchronous mode over a local area network while attempting to jointly complete jigsaw and decision-making tasks that were seeded with largely unknown target lexical items. The data suggest that learners often engage in negotiated interaction when presented with unknown lexical items during the course of task completion. Results also show that previously unknown lexical items that were negotiated were retained significantly better as measured by immediate and delayed recognition (receptive) and object labeling (productive) posttests than those items where preemptive input alone was provided and where target items were not engaged. The results are interpreted as being supportive for the interactionist perspective on SLA, especially the importance of attention, as they provide evidence of a more direct link between negotiated interaction and acquisition.I would like to thank the following people for their input and interaction with various aspects of this work: Roby Ariew, Sue Gass, Greta Gorsuch, Jun Liu, and Mary Wildner-Bassett. I would also like to thank the five anonymous SSLA reviewers whose insightful comments certainly helped strengthen this article. Finally, I would like to thank the participants in the study, to whom I am greatly indebted.

Four teachers and their eight classes of 179 fifth-grade (10–11-year-old) students participated in this quasi-experimental classroom study, which investigated the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) and corrective feedback on immersion students' ability to accurately assign grammatical gender in French. The FFI treatment, designed to draw attention to selected noun endings that reliably predict grammatical gender and to provide opportunities for practice in associating these endings with gender attribution, was implemented in the context of regular subject-matter instruction by three of the four teachers, each with two classes, for approximately 9 hours during a 5-week period, while the fourth teacher taught the same subject matter without FFI to two comparison classes. Additionally, each of the three FFI teachers implemented a different feedback treatment: recasts, prompts, or no feedback. Analyses of pretest, immediate-posttest, and delayed-posttest results showed a significant increase in the ability of students exposed to FFI to correctly assign grammatical gender. Results of the written tasks in particular, and to a lesser degree the oral tasks, revealed that FFI is more effective when combined with prompts than with recasts or no feedback, as a means of enabling L2 learners to acquire rule-based representations of grammatical gender and to proceduralize their knowledge of these emerging forms.This study was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (nos. 410-98-0175 and 410-2002-0988). Parts of this study were presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in Salt Lake City on April 7, 2002; the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities in Toronto on May 26, 2002; and at the Congress of the International Association for Applied Linguistics in Singapore on December 12, 2002. I am grateful to the participating teachers and their students, to Lucy Fazio for her role as research associate in the data collection, to José Correa for his assistance with the statistical analyses, and to the following research assistants for contributions to various phases of this research: Susan Ballinger, Kristina Eisenhower, Andréanne Gagné, Sophie Beaudoin, Laura-Annie Bouffard, France Bourassa, Sophie Bourgeois, Elisa David, Mélanie Mathieu, Sophie Prince, Andrea Sterzuk, and David Syncox. I gratefully acknowledge Leila Ranta, Iliana Panova, and four anonymous SSLA reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Pinker and Prince (1988) argued that two dissociable systems underlie the development of linguistic representations: one rule governed and the other associative. These two dissociable systems of representation and processing are claimed to be a linguistic universal (Pinker, 1999). Therefore, one should expect that nonnative speakers of a language also manifest the same kinds of dissociations in performance between rule-based and associative features of language as native speakers. The study reported here extends the work of Prasada and Pinker (1993) into the second language (L2) domain to test whether nonnative speakers (a) perform similarly to native speakers and (b) dissociate rule-based from associative features of language. In Prasada and Pinker, the degree of similarity between a nonce verb and a real English verb influenced past-tense generalizations on nonce irregular verbs but did not influence generalizations on nonce regular verbs. In the experiment reported here, first language (L1) and L2 participants of different ages and language groups were compared on the same task as that used by Prasada and Pinker. Participants overall produced more verbs with a past-tense suffix for nonce regular items than for the nonce irregular items. Significant group effects indicate that participants' varying levels of experience with English play an important role in their past-tense productions of nonce verbs. Furthermore, similarity influenced both the regular and irregular verbs on a production task. These results are discussed in terms of whether there are two dissociable systems underlying L2 linguistic knowledge and whether an alternative single associative learning mechanism could be responsible for the development of the system of regular and irregular inflectional morphology in both L1 and L2 learning.This research was partly funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant (no. 752-94-1808). I appreciate the help of Jennifer Graham in collecting the data and am grateful to Nick Ellis, Nina Spada, Lydia White, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

INPUT AND EVIDENCE: THE RAW MATERIAL OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Susanne E. Carroll. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xviii + 462. $114.00 cloth.

The ambitious goal of this book is the exposition of “a truly explanatory theory of SLA” (back cover). Such a theory is bound to be multifaceted and complex, and indeed, Carroll draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks in exploring the relationship between input—or more precisely, the nature of the mechanisms brought to bear in processing language stimuli—and the nature of the language knowledge that (adult) second language (L2) learners ultimately acquire. In other words, a theory of acquisition must be integrated with a theory of speech processing to explain how language stimuli are transformed into abstract mental representations; this book represents Carroll's attempt to construct just such a model.

THE ACQUISITION OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL ASPECT. Ping Li and Yasuhiro Shirai. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Pp. v + 261. $106.00 cloth.

This book covers everything related to aspect in the field of language acquisition; I was amazed by how the authors managed to do this in such a clear manner in only 261 pages. The book discusses numerous topics related to the acquisition of aspect: from tense to grammatical to lexical aspect, from nativist to functionalist approaches, from a connectionist model to Universal Grammar, and from first language (L1) to second language (L2). It also covers relevant previous research in the acquisition of tense and aspect in Chinese, English, and Japanese. Although the aim of the book is not an extensive survey of the research done on aspect in all possible languages, given the importance of the work done on aspect in Slavic languages, one might have expected to see more discussion of this area.

PORTRAITS OF THE L2 USER. Vivian Cook (Ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2002. Pp. viii + 304. $89.95 cloth, $39.95 paper.

This volume will be a welcome addition to those who believe, as does Cook, that second language (L2) users should be studied for what they are and can do on their own terms, rather than in comparison to native speakers. However, the book might be less appealing to readers who do not share Cook's L2 user viewpoint, which is reiterated throughout the text. Instead of viewing L2 users as deficient native speakers, this book reflects a significant departure from traditional SLA research by accounting for L2 users' performance independently from that of monolingual native speakers. Cook proposes that this outlook will enable SLA researchers to examine the factors making L2 users what they are, instead of focusing on the reasons for which they have failed to become what they are not—that is, native speakers.

SECOND LANGUAGE WRITERS' TEXT: LINGUISTIC AND RHETORICAL FEATURES. Eli Hinkel. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. v + 370. $89.95 cloth, $45.00 paper.

This volume provides one of the most comprehensive analyses of academic writing in a second language (L2). Hinkel documents extensive research in the linguistic and rhetorical features found in L2 writing, weaving into her discussion a review of the research in first language (L1) writing. But this is not a book about contrastive rhetoric. Hinkel's purpose is to map out the particular features that constitute L2 academic writing through a review of the literature and her own empirical study, which dominates this book.

COGNITION AND SECOND LANGUAGE INSTRUCTION. Peter Robinson (Ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xi + 453. $77.00 cloth, $33.00 paper.

This book is part of the Cambridge University Press series in Applied Linguistics, edited by Michael H. Long and Jack C. Richards. The edited collection presents cognitive perspectives on second language (L2) learning, a topic that is currently receiving a great deal of attention in SLA research. The series editors, both of whom have produced notable research in L2 learning, point out: “cognition and cognitive factors, therefore, are central to any account of how and why SLA works, or so often fails, and equally central to the theory and practice of second language instruction” (p. vii). Robinson is one of the driving forces behind the current interest in cognitive approaches to SLA. He has proposed a view of the field that involves exploring the connections between SLA and aspects of human cognition, such as attention, awareness, and memory, as well as the role of individual differences in SLA and L2 learning conditions (e.g., Robinson, 1997, 2001, 2002). Robinson has assembled an impressive lineup of contributors.

CROSS-LINGUISTIC INFLUENCE IN THIRD LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVES. Jasone Cenoz, Britta Hufeisen, and Ulrike Jessner (Eds.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2001. Pp. 197. $54.95 cloth.

Although linguists often employ “native-language influence” as a shorthand for language transfer, most are well aware that crosslinguistic influence can come not only from the first language (L1) but also from the second language (L2) in cases where the target language is the third language (L3). Even so, there remains the question of just how similar the acquisition of L3 (or L4, etc.) may be to what is, strictly speaking, L2 acquisition. This question naturally intersects with the complexities of crosslinguistic influence, and the study of transfer beyond L2 has received increasing attention in the past 10 years or so. It was high time for a single volume that would bring together many strands of research on the problem, and this one edited by Cenoz, Hufeisen, and Jessner will no doubt become a key resource. The collection has an introduction by the editors and 10 chapters with the following authors: Cenoz; Hammarberg; De Angelis and Selinker; Ringbom; Dewaele; Ecke; Herwig; Kellerman; Fouser; and Gibson, Hufeisen, and Libben.

DEVELOPING ADVANCED LITERACY IN FIRST AND SECOND LANGUAGES: MEANING WITH POWER. Mary J. Schleppegrell and M. Cecilia Colombi (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. x + 274. $69.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This volume is an edited collection of essays that was based on a conference organized at the University of California, Davis in 2000. It consists of a preface and 13 chapters. The editors have managed to assemble a respectable and versatile group of contributors: Celce-Murcia, Baugh, Gee, García, Lemke, Martin, Christie, Merino and Hammond, Ramanathan, and Scarcella. These contributors, because of their varied backgrounds, guarantee a well-rounded account of literacy development from the viewpoints of functional linguistics, sociocultural theory, and SLA.

DESIGNING LANGUAGE TEACHING TASKS. Keith Johnson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. x + 196. $79.95 cloth, $26.95 paper.

First and foremost, readers should know that this book is not about how to design language teaching tasks. Rather, it is a pilot study of how professional task designers and teachers prepare language tasks for the classroom.

SPANISH SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: STATE OF THE SCIENCE. Barbara A. Lafford and Rafael Salaberry (Eds.). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003. Pp. xii + 332. $39.95 paper.

Lafford and Salaberry's new volume provides an overview of the past, present, and anticipated future of SLA theory and research on second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish. Chapters 1–6 summarize some of the major products of Spanish SLA research, whereas chapters 7–9 treat overarching theoretical concerns related to the processes involved in Spanish SLA. The final chapter examines the role of L2 instruction. This accessible work reports on major trends in the field and discusses the results and conclusions of landmark studies published during the last half century.

TASK-BASED LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING. Rod Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 387. $24.95 paper.

This book is part of the Oxford University Press series in Applied Linguistics. In the preface, Ellis explains that his goal was to produce a book that “attempts to examine ‘task’ from a variety of perspectives,” noting he was striving in particular for “a rounded, balanced account of how tasks have figured in both SLA and language pedagogy” (p. ix). As Ellis also notes, the book is not a “how to” guide for the teacher or researcher but rather a text that informs about current research and practice on task-based second language research and teaching.

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: THE GROWTH OF GRAMMAR. Maria Teresa Guasti. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Pp. xvi + 474. $55.00 cloth.

The interrelation between language acquisition and linguistic theory has long been recognized as a fruitful area of research. Guasti provides a detailed and comprehensive review of the major areas of the development of a first language and its relation to linguistic theory. The book consists of 11 chapters on the development of all areas of grammar, with an obvious emphasis on syntax. Each chapter begins with an overview of the theoretical tools necessary to understand the topic of the chapter, followed by the empirical phenomena, and a discussion that integrates the theory and the data.

CONTROVERSIES IN APPLIED LINGUISTICS. Barbara Seidlhofer (Ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 346. £22.05 paper.

Echoing Bakhtin's assertion of the importance of a dialogic approach to the study of language and literature and Kramsch's (1995) view that exploring differences is more important than achieving consensus, Seidlhofer's book focuses on the analysis of a collection of readings from original works by authors with opposing views on several topics in applied linguistics.

SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR. Lydia White. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv + 316. $65.00 cloth, $24.00 paper.

Actually, I could justifiably end my review here. Lydia White has come out with a new textbook on Universal Grammar (UG) and SLA; buy it. End of story. Still, I have 724 words left, so for those readers whose SLA research has been conducted on a different planet, let me pad things out a bit.

THE ACQUISITION OF SPANISH MORPHOSYNTAX: THE L1/L2 CONNECTION. Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux and Juana Muñoz Liceras (Eds.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002. Pp. xxiii + 247. $110.00 cloth, $50.00 paper.

Since the middle 1980s, the study of the acquisition of Spanish has blossomed, becoming a diverse field in which new avenues for original research are still quite abundant. More specifically, this volume addresses examples of morphosyntactic optionality observed in the interlanguage grammars of Spanish language learners, both first language (L1) and second language (L2). Furthermore, it describes how morphology can trigger the acquisition of new syntactic knowledge. A major strength of the collection lies in the numerous and varied original contributions it makes to our knowledge of the acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax.

EFFECTS OF THE SECOND LANGUAGE ON THE FIRST. Vivian Cook (Ed.). Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Pp. viii + 268. $89.95 cloth, $35.95 paper.

This volume represents the first attempt to assemble studies of the effects of the second language (L2) on the first (L1). Underlying the design of the book is Cook's (1991) notion of multicompetence, which refers to knowledge of two or more languages in one mind. From various perspectives and to varying depths, the authors bring evidence to bear on the conceptualization that the L1 of an L2 user is not encapsulated but susceptible to the L2 influence.

THE JAPANESE COPULA: FORMS AND FUNCTIONS. Tomiko Narahara. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. x + 210. $55.00 cloth.

This book examines the Japanese copula, da and datta, which occurs with predicative nominals and adjectival nominals. Narahara's primary contribution is to challenge the common assumption that the Japanese copula is a tense feature carrier (p. 12). She points out in chapter 4 that copula-less sentences such as Kwoo-wa nitiyoobi “Today is Sunday” and Kita-wa kotti? “Is north in this direction?” can still be interpreted with the present time reference. She proposes that, although the morpheme ta in datta encodes the past reference, the copula form da does not encode the present tense. In chapter 10, she shows that the copula form da is systematically excluded when the speaker lacks knowledge of the truth of the sentence. For example, the copula form never appears in yes/no questions such as Kwoo-wa doyoobi *da/Ø? “Is today Saturday?” and sentences with epistemic modals such as Yuuta-wa genki *da/Ø rasii “Yuta seems to be well,” whereas it is perfectly acceptable for the copula form da to occur in normal declarative sentences such as Kwoo-wa doyoobi da “Today is Saturday.” She suggests that the copula da is a modal expressing what she calls the anti-ignorative affirmative mode, and it is the anti-ignorative mode that makes the copula incompatible with yes/no questions and sentences with epistemic modals. Finally, in chapter 11, she discusses cases where the copula form da in normal declarative sentences alternates with the zero-copula. She concludes that the zero-copula is a device to tone down utterances and is used when the speaker attempts to make the expression less assertive and authoritative. This explains why women or children tend to use the zero-copula even in normal declarative sentences.

CONSTRUCTING A LANGUAGE: A USAGE-BASED THEORY OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Michael Tomasello. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 388. $45.00 cloth.

Michael Tomasello has an impressive opus of publications in both child language development and primate research. This book represents a synthesis of that work as well as the exposition of an account of language development, which provides a thought-provoking challenge to the generative enterprise. As such, it is an important contribution to the literature of first language acquisition, and by extrapolation, of SLA, because it offers an account of how learners can extract language from the input without reference to linguistic-specific predispositions. It succeeds in many respects and fails in others, as this review will try to explain.