HANDBOOK OF BILINGUALISM: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC APPROACHES

Extract

HANDBOOK OF BILINGUALISM: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC APPROACHES. Judith F. Kroll and Annette M. B. de Groot (Eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 588. $147.00 cloth.

The study of bilingualism has become an important field within applied linguistics, as indicated by the fact that in the past 3 years, several comprehensive volumes that relate to bilingualism have been published with the word “handbook” in their titles. Nevertheless, this volume offers new perspectives even to those who have read The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition (Doughty & Long, 2003) and The Handbook of Bilingualism (Bhatia & Ritchie, 2004). Whereas the previous handbooks summarize the state-of-the-art research findings and theories in the field of SLA, this new book, edited by Kroll and de Groot, familiarizes readers with the cognitive approach to the study of bilingualism. The majority of the chapters in this volume do more than just summarize psycholinguistic issues in SLA research; many of them present research findings not yet published (e.g., Christoffels & de Groot, Pienemann et al., Sanchez-Casas & Garcia-Albea, Tamar & Galan) and extend previous models of language acquisition and production to account for more phenomena of bilingualism (e.g., La Heij, MacWhinney, Myers-Scotton).