Handbook of Child Language Acquisition (1999). Edited by William C. Ritchie & Tej K. Bhatia. Academic Press, San Diego, CA 92101-4495. $99.95. Reviewed by Sara Sack, Kansas University Affiliated Program-Parsons.

Ritchie and Bhatia have embarked on a major task - to review the central issues in the study of child language acquisition, carefully study children's acquisition of syntax, consider the role of input to the child, review the research on children's acquisition of phonology and pragmatics, and address issues related to language and speech disorders.

To be honest, even for the person interested in child language acquisition, reviewing this book was a daunting task. There was not a light chapter in the book! However, the rewards for tackling this book and its complex issues were many.

Part I of this seven-part book reminds the reader that, in the 1960s, language acquisition was viewed as one element of the child' s overall psychological development. But by the 1970s the view had shifted grammatical structures and the pragmatics of the language of the environment were seen as events that could be isolated and that warranted study in order to better understand the acquisition process.

Part II features chapters by Noam Chomsky (On the Nature, Use, and Acquisition of Language), Kenneth Wexler ( Maturation and Growth of Grammar), Barbara Lust (On Universal Grammar ), William O' Grady (Syntactic Representations ), Derek Bickerton (The Language Bioprogram Hypothesis ), and Matthew Rispoli ( Functionalism in Language Acquisition ). Each of the chapters is carefully articulated and gives the reader much to consider in terms of his/her worldview of child language acquisition.

Part III, Semantics and Syntax in Child World Learning, opens with Paul Bloom' s interesting chapter on Rationalist Alternatives to Associationism. Bloom takes the reader through the argument that language acquisition is an intentional act and that the child notices how the speaker' s overt behavior indicates the affections of the mind, and it is this that allows him to infer what the word refers to (p. 250). Readers are introduced to contemporary scholars and studies that provide evidence for a rationalist perspective of word learning.

In Part IV, B. Elan Dreshler presents issues related to the logical and developmental problems of the acquisition of phonology. The author argues that in addition to studying the development of phonology in terms of prosodic templates, features, and segment structures, and rules that map features and segments onto templates, that a fourth dimension of complexity the network of sound patterns and relations among lexical items needs to be integrated into research. The author states tha Just as learners' phonetic surface forms become more complex, so, too, does their understanding of how words and sounds fit into the grammar as a whole(p. 339).

After considering the learnability of phonology, Anat Ninio and Catherine Snow' s review of the development of pragmatics is presented. Ninio and Snow begin by defining pragmatics in relation to formalist and functionalist views. Within the truth-conditional theory of meaning (a formalist approach) the sense of sentences is determined by knowing under which conditions a sentence is true. This theory supports a system of fixed symbols and of abstract rules for their lawful combination, all defined independently of their possible contexts of use. Within this framework, pragmatics is viewed as the description of phenomena related to the use of meaningful linguistic forms for communicative purposes--making statements, requesting, prompting, regulating conversational exchanges, and so on. An alternative philosophical approach is the use-conditional theory of meaning. This approach ties linguistic meaningfulness to the communicative use people make of language (p. 349). Ninio and Snow adopt a functionalist, use-conditional approach in their review. The authors detail the existing research on the development of preverbal intentional vocalizations and gestures, transitional communicative signals that combine nonverbal and verbal features, and pragmatics of early speech use. The development of skills used to control conversations turn taking, topic initiation and maintenance, repair strategies, and so forth, and individual differences in these skills are reviewed. Ninio and Snow conclude this interesting chapter with suggestions for further research in the domain of pragmatics.

Part V (Research Methodology and Applications) provides interesting discussions on issues such as eliciting linguistic behaviors, reduced behavior tasks that are designed to bypass performance and directly tap a child' s linguistic competence, and methods for sharing data.

Part VI (Modality and the Linguistic Environment in Child Language) examines language acquisition when the input is visual-gestural, as it is in sign language, and when the input to the child is two distinct languages, as is the case for the bilingual child. Lillo-Martin reviews current research on sign language acquisition and presents the argument that American Sign Language is acquired in much the same way as spoken language with the same sequence of steps and error patterns being made at roughly the same ages. Lillo-Martin concludes by saying that's only by including signed languages in the empirical database that a theory must explain will the goal of constructing a theory of language be met (p. 561).

For the reader with a solid background in child language acquisition, this book provides interesting area reviews and theoretical discussions. For the reader whose background may not be as solid, or who is not as disciplined, this may be a book to tackle with a reading club. The time spent actively wrestling with the issues presented is worthwhile.