Children's language: Interactional contributions to language development: Vol. 11. K. Nelson, A. Aksu-Koç, and C. Johnson. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001. Pp. 241.

Extract

For more than two decades, the Children's Language series has been publishing papers from the triennial meetings of the International Association for the Study of Child Language (IASCL). In this 11th volume, nine papers were selected from the 276 presentations at the seventh IASCL congress held in Istanbul, Turkey, in July 1996. Another group of seven papers, mostly on narrative development, which were presented at the same congress, were published in Volume 10 of this series by the same editors (Nelson, Aksu-Koç, & Johnson, 2001). At first glance, the title of this volume suggests that the theme that ties all the chapters together into a book is the study of children's interaction in face-to-face conversations. However, with a closer look, the reader discovers that, although some studies analyze ways in which input (either linguistic or nonlinguistic) plays a role in the emergence of language, the approach adopted in most of the chapters presupposes that no single factor can explain the processes involved in child language development. Interaction is understood as the interplay of multiple factors that combine the linguistic, cognitive, affective, or biological features on which developing abilities in the domains of grammar and the lexicon depend; this results in a broad picture of how children develop language.