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REVIEWS The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 4. Ed. by Dan Isaac Slobin. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. Pp. xvi, 454. Cloth $99.95. The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition. Vol. 5: Expanding the contexts. Ed. by Dan Isaac Slobin. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997. Pp. xvi, 339. Cloth $89.95 Reviewed by Margaret Thomas, Boston College Volumes 4 and 5 of The crosslinguistic study oflanguage acquisition are the last installments* in editor Dan Isaac Slobin's series by that title, completing work begun in 1980. Together, they are representative of the whole oeuvre, which comprises some 2,800 pages produced by 36 collaborators. The impetus for the series was S's sense that the study ofchild language acquisition needs more, and more typologically diverse, data (vol. 4:xii). To address that need, S commissioned selective reviews of what we know about children's learning of different languages. He imposed on the authors a common organizational template (though not all maintain it) but no common theoretical framework. Of the five volumes of CSLA, three comprise independentlyauthored reviews ofresearch on the acquisition ofspecific languages. Vol. 1 (Slobin 1985a) covers English, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Kaluli, Polish, Romance languages, Samoan, Turkish, and ASL. Vol. 3 (Slobin 1992) covers Georgian, West Greenlandic, K'iché Maya, Warlpiri, Mandarin, Scandinavian languages, and Sesotho. The new Vol. 4 covers Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian (in a single comparative chapter), Finnish (by itself), Greek, and Korean. (Hungarian is also addressed in a chapter of Vol. 2 (Slobin 1985b).) The other two volumes of CSIA consist of essays by scholars of child language which reflect diverse points of view on the material in the data volumes. Vol. 2 prominently includes a chapter by S arguing that a set of innate operating principles (OP), deduced from study of cross-linguistic regularities in acquisition, guide child language development. The contributors to CSLA variously support, reject, or ignore S's OP. Vol. 5 contains five interpretive and synthetic essays, two authored by S. Given their different roles in the overall scheme of CSLA, I will describe Vols. 4 and 5 separately. The four chapters ofVol. 4 adhere fairly closely to the editor's organizational template, offering: (1) a grammatical sketch of the relevant language(s); (2) a summary of the extant acquisitional data; (3) discussion of the overall course of development, sometimes separating off early or 'error-free acquisition' from aspects of the language learned later or more slowly; (4) a section which takes up in detail issues which have been better investigated (the identity of which naturally varies from language to language); and (5) a conclusion. Lisa Dasinger's Ch. 1 (1-86) purports to compare the acquisition of Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian and does contain useful descriptions of these related languages. But the most sustained topic Dansinger examines, morphophonology, compares only Hungarian and Finnish because data on learners of Estonian are very sparse. Ch. 1 inevitably overlaps somewhat with Jorma Toivainen's Ch. 2 on the acquisition of Finnish (87-182) since Dansinger and Toivainen make use of some of the same corpora. But Ch. 2 contains a more detailed overview of Finnish and addresses topics not covered by Dansinger, like negation and questions. Toivainen organizes his narration of how children learn the complex morphology of Finnish according to the learners' ages, in one section breaking up the course of development into four-month increments. In Ch. 3 (183-333), Ursula Stephany organizes her data on the acquisition of Greek by linguistic categories, for example, treating the acquisition of each subvariety of nonpast verb, then each subvariety of past verb; learners' ages provide a secondary level of organization. The existing research on Greek seems more balanced across phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, but still the bulk of the chapter focuses on inflectional morphology. A lucid chapter on the acquisition of Korean (335-443), by Young-joo Kim, closes Vol. 4. As relatively more research has been carried out on Korean, Kim has to select which data to foreground. She chooses topics about which there are conflicting theoretical claims, including negation, relative clauses, and null subjects. For the 156 REVIEWS157 most part, the authors of Chs. 1-3 treat predictive statements...

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