Admittedly, this edited volume, Crosslinguistic Encounters in Language Acquisition: Typical and Atypical Development, has undertaken a difficult task by attempting to merge together different themes of language acquisition into a single volume. As outlined in the Introduction, there is a focus on typical and atypical development; on crosslinguistic, bilingual and bidialectal research; on language assessment and research methodology; on phonology, the lexicon, morphology and syntax. By turning this very diversity into a core theme, the primary goal of the book has been a uniting one, nevertheless. The book seeks for threads in language acquisition research that better serve academic knowledge of what is typical and atypical in the linguistic development of children crosslinguistically. It intends to view the enormous diversity underlying language acquisition research (e.g. in terms of disparate languages, acquisition types, disorders, individual differences, ages and methodologies) as a motivation to continue searching for those links that unite these and permit comparisons across the board. Ensuing goals and actual steps were the following:

• (a) to document some recent research developments by attempting to override differentiation between typical (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) and atypical (Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10) language development in children, and how they compare (Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9, 10);

• (b) to include language investigations that are less commonly represented in the literature, like Farsi (Chapter 10), Greek (Chapters 7, 8, 6), Icelandic (Chapter 4), isiXhosa (Chapter 1), Maltese (Chapter 5), Mandarin and Slovene (Chapter 5) without, however, excluding representative work in major languages like English (Chapters 1, 2, 3, 5) and Spanish (Chapters 4, 9);