This volume deals with issues related to the effects of age in foreign language learning, immersion programs, and situations in which parents are trying to raise their children as bilinguals. The critical period hypothesis (CPH) receives a great deal of attention throughout the volume, and some attention is also given to more general effects of maturation that might occur independently of any critical period. A recurring thread throughout the work is the authors' reaction to the popular belief that children are superior to adults in their ability to acquire languages. Many of the chapters that address this claim point to research that shows that children's advantage is restricted to their ultimate levels of attainment in the target language, whereas adults quite often outperform children at particular stages of acquisition. Several of the authors also refer to empirical research that shows little or no advantage to having children begin their foreign language studies prior to adolescence.
The volume is divided into three parts. The first part consists of three chapters that deal directly with the CPH, and it is noteworthy that the authors of these chapters have strikingly different views. Scovel's position is that the critical period affects the neuromuscular skills involved in pronunciation but does not affect a person's ability to acquire nativelike grammatical competence. DeKeyser, by contrast, discusses evidence that shows that a critical period may very well exist for grammatical competence. Chandler, in turn, seems to contradict both Scovel and DeKeyser by suggesting that learners have their own critical periods—each having a unique variable rate of decline in language-learning abilities as they grow older. Chandler also contradicts several of the authors in the volume by recommending that children begin studying a foreign language before puberty.
The second part of the book consists of five empirical studies conducted by researchers in Spain who specialize in age-related issues in foreign language learning and early bilingualism. Muñoz describes the Barcelona Age Factor Project and presents results that show a clear advantage for older learners over younger learners on a variety of measures and at three distinct time periods. Abello-Contesse shows that, in an English partial-immersion program in Seville, even young students tend to use their first language instead of the target language when asked to perform group tasks. Del Puerto and Lecumberri demonstrate that older Basque-Spanish learners of English are better able to discriminate a number of English vowel and consonant phonemes than younger learners, even when matched according to the number of hours of English instruction they have had. Pérez-Vidal looks at case studies of parents who have tried to raise their children as bilinguals and finds that the one person-one language principle alone is not enough to achieve productive bilingualism in children. Finally, Ruiz González explores her own experiences raising bilingual children with her husband and concludes that the one person-one language approach is not only insufficient but might also be the wrong approach to take in cases where children's only exposure to the minority language is in the home.
The third part of the book consists of two studies related to aptitude. The study by Milton and Alexiou shows that learners at different ages have different aptitude profiles, with analytical skills increasing and certain types of memory abilities decreasing over time. Finally, the study by Guijarro-Fuentes and Geeslin shows that Portuguese-speaking immigrants to Spain who arrived in the country after puberty are not fully able to acquire nativelike accuracy in the use of the Spanish copulas ser and estar “to be,” despite the fact that Portuguese and Spanish are so similar and despite the massive amounts of target-language exposure they have had in a naturalistic setting.
All of the chapters of the volume are carefully and competently written, and one can also not help but notice how well formatted and copyedited the book is. One of its additional strengths is how reader-friendly it is. All of the chapters are relatively brief and to the point, and this makes the work ideal for students, practitioners, and scholars who want a quick but competent overview of the burning issues in this area of research. Most of the chapters also include insightful and genuinely well-rounded pedagogical recommendations. The central message of the volume is that foreign language instruction should not necessarily be offered to young children, but, if it is, it needs to be delivered with substantial quantity, quality, and intensity of target-language experiences that are also age-appropriate.
