Language Development across Childhood and Adolescence: (3 Trends in Language Acquisition Research)

This volume brings together work by scholars with backgrounds in linguistics, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, education, and language pathology. As such, the book adds psycholinguistic and crosslinguistic perspectives to the clinical and classroom approaches that have dominated the study of “later language development”. Incorporating insights from prior language acquisition research, it goes beyond preschool age to consider both isolated utterances and extended discourse, conversational interactions and monologic text construction, and both written and spoken language use from early school-age across adolescence. Data from French, Hebrew, Spanish, and Swedish as well as English cover varied domains: morphology and lexicon, syntax and verb–argument structure, as well as peer interaction, spelling, processing of on-line writing, and reading poetry. The epilogue suggests explanations for the findings documented. Across the book, the authors show how cognitive and social maturation combines with increased literacy in the path taken by schoolchildren and adolescents towards the flexible deployment of a growing repertoire of lexical elements in varied morpho-syntactic constructions and different discourse contexts that constitutes the hallmark of maturely proficient language use.

Table of Contents:
1. List of contributors; 2. Series editor's preface; 3. Preface; 4. Research on later language development: International perspectives (by Nippold, Marilyn A.); 5. Between emergence and mastery: The long development route of language acquisition (by Berman, Ruth A.); 6. Lexical acquisition in the eraly school years (by Dockrell, Julie E.); 7. Derivational morphology revisited: Later lexical development in Hebrew (by Ravid, Dorit); 8. Discursive constraints on the lexical realization of arguments in Spanish (by Khorounjaia, Ekaterina); 9. Syntactic ability in children and adolescents with language and learning disabilities (by Scott, Cheryl M.); 10. Growing into academic French (by Jisa, Harriet); 11. Learning to spell in a deep orthography: The case of French (by Pacton, Sebastien); 12. Text-writing development viewed through on-line pausing in Swedish (by Wengelin, Asa); 13. The role of peer interaction in later pragmatic development: The case of speech representation (by Blum-Kulka, Shoshana); 14. On reading poetry: Expert and novice knowledge (by Peskin, Joan); 15. The nature and scope of later language development (by Tolchinsky, Liliana); 16. References; 17. Author Index; 18. Subject Index

Review :
The editor, Ruth A. Berman, must be congratulated on compiling a book of such high academic caliber. The book is not a systematic introductory book, but rather an impressive overview of the field, written by leading researchers. There is no doubt that this book will become a classic.