The Proceedings of the Thirtieth Annual Child Language Research Forum (review)

There are many questions surrounding the field of first language research: Is language innate? What is the importance of motherese or parental input? How do children learn two languages simultaneously? How do children learn about the aspects of language that are not obvious in the input? Are there crosslinguistic similarities in first language acquisition?

This book is a collection of short research reports by some of the major researchers in the field of first language acquisition (FLA). The contributors come from sixteen different countries and discuss seventeen different languages (e.g. English, Turkish, Taiwanese, French, Japanese, Hindi, and Icelandic), making the volume a truly crosslinguistic one.

The papers focus on general and particular aspects of language acquisition and feature a variety of domains, research questions, and social dimensions. The volume, however, is not organized to reflect this—neither by the approach, domain, nor research question. This lack of organization may be due to the number of papers included in the volume and also their complexity, as some papers cover multiple areas. While there is a general index at the back of the volume, I do think that more of an attempt could have been made to link the papers together.

Each of the twenty-seven papers is short and presents the authors’ recent research and findings in regard to a specific question. While all of the other papers are autonomous, the first four papers are the result of a special workshop on transitivity and verb arguments, convened by the editor. The workshop was intended as an opportunity for researchers with divergent positions to get together to compare ideas. The first of these papers provides an introduction to the workshop, a summary of each of the three presenting researchers’ viewpoints and methods, and some ideas for future investigation.

The following twenty-three papers cover a range of topics, including bilingualism, use of tense in narratives, the learning of inflection agreement from parental input, the verb lexicon, and children’s knowledge of word order. There is also a range of methodologies, such as naturalistic and experimental approaches, as well as longitudinal and cross-sectional studies. But again, each of these is presented autonomously, making no reference to other papers in the volume.

In short, a diverse range of questions, domains, views, and languages is covered, likely to interest anyone in the field of FLA, though scholars new to the field of FLA and (applied) linguistics may find themselves overwhelmed by the in-depth linguistic research presented here.