A revised edition of the 2000 volume of the same name, this book aims to be a text for the beginning student, focusing on areas of agreement and disagreement within the field. However, whereas it succeeds to some extent, it has a number of shortcomings.

First, although this work covers many of the usual areas of acquisition (phonological, morphological, and syntactic development; the role of input; Universal Grammar; etc.), there are large portions (almost a quarter) of this slim book taken up with topics that bear a more distant relationship to the main thrust. Most notable are two chapters on the brain—quite fascinating but not (as presented here) directly related to acquisition. Similarly, the discussion of animal communication could have been condensed to a page or so in the present context (and should have been linked to recent discussions about the computational abilities of primates). Finally, the chapter on Piaget's work is almost exclusively on his theory of cognitive development (without reference to Donaldson's classic Reference Donaldson1979 critique). A brief discussion of Piaget's views on language in the context of the Royaumont debate with Chomsky—which takes up a separate chapter—would have been sufficient to help beginning students understand the issues. A chapter devoted to Halliday's approach (e.g., Halliday, Reference Halliday1975) sits unconnected to any of the other chapters, when links to pragmatic development and to sociocultural issues in acquisition could have been made.

The many largely overworked debates that form the focus of the book are not matched with the many important and interesting areas of controversy in current acquisition studies. For example, there is extensive discussion of behaviorism and why children do or do not learn from input, but there is no mention of recent work such as Saxton's on covert negative evidence (e.g., Saxton, Reference Saxton1997; Saxton, Houston-Price, & Dawson, Reference Saxton, Houston-Price and Dawson2005). There is no reference to the recursion/computation debate (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, Reference Hauser, Chomsky and Fitch2002, vs. Jackendoff & Pinker, Reference Jackendoff and Pinker2005). There is no discussion of bilingual first language acquisition or child SLA from any perspective. There is no reference to usage-based approaches such as Tomasello's (Reference Tomasello2005); and there is an explicit exclusion of coverage of a connectionist account. In fact, the text is riddled with statements to the effect that explanations of particular topics are too complex to be attempted. This is intensely irritating and risks causing students to feel hopelessly disempowered. The issues either needed to be addressed appropriately for the level of the text or not be mentioned at all (or perhaps only in footnotes).

Overall, this work was a disappointment. It had grand and appropriate aims, but, for various reasons, its effectiveness is compromised.