PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT IN A SECOND LANGUAGE. Gabriele Kasper and Kenneth R. Rose. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Pp. x + 352. $36.95 paper.

The goal for this useful volume is to survey and evaluate research on pragmatic development of second language learners. In the first chapter, Kasper and Rose note that numerous studies in crosscultural pragmatics assess nonnatives' language use and contrast it with the performance of natives but that relatively few studies have focused on how language learners' pragmatic abilities change and develop over time. For researchers in SLA, however, this question of development is central.

BEYOND NATURE-NURTURE: ESSAYS IN HONOR OF ELIZABETH BATES. Michael Tomasello and Dan Slobin (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. ii + 339. $89.95 cloth.

This volume has been compiled both to review and assess Bates's contribution to the field of child language and to demonstrate that her influence and the ideas she stimulated live on and are being pursued by her colleagues. After an introduction by the editors, a brief compilation of some of Bates's aphorisms—for which she was justifiably famous—and her full curriculum vitae, the volume is divided into five parts, each of which addresses one of Bates's interests.

Nonverbal behavior has received little serious attention among second language acquisition researchers until now. Its importance is acknowledged with token attention in communicative competence frameworks and taxonomies of communication strategies, but empirical studies are few and far between. Marianne Gullberg's study of second language learners' use of gesture as a communication strategy is a welcome attempt to fill this gap.

Most current foreign language teachers and those about to enter this profession have themselves learned the foreign language by structural methods. The curricula under which they studied are not likely to be exchanged for communicative curricula, as such decisions are not made at the classroom level. Because of these conditions, my paper will concentrate on pragmatic problems of a communicative methodology – problems that arise in attempting to answer the question: does the functional-notional approach, without being either a curriculum or a method, and while operating under the constraints of the present school system, help develop a framework and a set of principles that will help teachers make foreign language learning more communicative than it is at the moment?

This edited volume consists of 20 chapters, and all but 3 are written in Spanish. The chapters are grouped under four major sections: the classroom, the standard language, teaching language through culture, and political aspects of the maintenance of Spanish. Each section is preceded by an overview.

This study presents a conceptual replication of Birulés et al.’s (2020, Experiment 2) investigation of native and nonnative listeners’ selective attention to a talker’s mouth with the goal of better understanding the potentially modulating role of proficiency in listeners’ reliance on audiovisual speech cues. Listeners’ eye gaze was recorded while watching two short videos. Findings from one of the videos replicated results from the original study, showing greater attention to the talker’s mouth among L2 than L1 listeners. In both videos, L2 proficiency modulated attention, with more fixations on the mouth among lower proficiency listeners, an effect predicted but not observed in the original study. Collectively, these laboratory-based findings highlight the role of visual speech cues in L2 listening and present evidence that listeners with more limited proficiency may be especially reliant on such cues. These observations warrant future investigations of the benefits of visual speech cues in instructional and assessment contexts.

This six-volume, beautifully bound, boxed set contains 112 reprinted papers covering the history and development of modern theoretical pragmatics from its beginnings back in the 1940s and '50s with Charles Morris, Rudolf Camap, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, via the major works in the 1970s of those such as Stalnaker, Bach and Hamish, J. L. Austin, John Searle, and Paul Grice, to the more recent contributions of, among many others, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, François Recanati, and Anna Wierzbicka. The bulk of the contributions, either free-standing papers or sections from books, come out of what one might term a philosophical approach to pragmatics, but toward the end of the collection there is an attempt to cover more ethnographically rooted approaches and even to get into applied pragmatic issues related to aphasia, first language acquisition, second language acquisition (one paper), and politics.

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.

This paper investigates the occurrence of null objects in a stable nonnative variety of English spoken in Nepal. Previous studies of zero anaphora with second language learners have assumed that advanced learners of English will acquire the native target norms, which highly constrain null object occurrences. This paper shows that in the construction of text speakers of Nepali English may omit both direct and indirect objects in contexts where native speakers may not. Pragmatic principles govern these occurrences although they differ for the two types of objects. Null direct objects are part of discourse topic chains and their referents are recoverable within the text, even across speakers. Null indirect objects, on the other hand, refer primarily to discourse participants and do not generally need textual coreferents. The resultant discourse organization for this variety of English is one that requires greater addressee participation than native English discourse. The paper shows that when learners are confronted with input from two typologically distinct discourse traditions they may develop a third framework that utilizes compatible features for each.

This special issue has attempted to ascertain the universal applicability of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977) by extending previous research in this area, which has focused on English and a few other European languages, to East Asian languages. To this end, five empirical studies have been reported; these studies yielded mixed results with regard to their support for the NPAH. Overall, what is striking to me in these results is the fact that despite the expectation of some researchers to find robust counterevidence to the NPAH, many of these studies ended up finding at least partial support for the NPAH, even in East Asian languages.