This volume has been compiled both to review and assess Bates's contribution to the field of child language and to demonstrate that her influence and the ideas she stimulated live on and are being pursued by her colleagues. After an introduction by the editors, a brief compilation of some of Bates's aphorisms—for which she was justifiably famous—and her full curriculum vitae, the volume is divided into five parts, each of which addresses one of Bates's interests.

In Part 1, “Gestures and Word Learning,” Volterra, Caselli, Capirci, and Pizzuto discuss “Gesture and the Emergence and Development of Language” and Dale and Goodman consider “Commonality and Individual Differences in Vocabulary Growth.” In Part 2, “The Competition Model and Connectionism,” MacWhinney explores “New Directions in the Competition Model,” specifically addressing the question of whether a single language acquisition model can account for both first and second language. Elman, Hare, and McRae then consider “Cues, Constraints and Competition in Sentence Processing.” In Part 3, “Grammar,” Marchman and Thal discuss “Words and Grammar” and Devescovi and D'Amico explore “The Competition Model: Crosslinguistic Studies of Online Processing.”

Part 4, “Biology and Language,” contains “Rethinking Developmental Neurobiology” (Finlay), “Bates Emergentist Theory and Its Relevance to Understanding Genotype/Phenotype Relations” (Karmiloff-Smith), and “Language and the Brain” (Dick, Dronkers, Pizzamiglio, Saygin, Small, and Wilson). Finally, part 5, “Language Processing,” contains “The Lexicon, Grammar and Past Tense: Dissociation Revisited” (Marslen-Wilson and Tyler) and “Perceptual and Attentional Factors in Language Comprehension: A Domain-General Approach” (Aydelott, Kutas, and Federmeier).

As the dedication indicates, this volume is “an all-too-early tribute to Liz Bates” (p. vii), who died in December 2003. Although the chapters in this volume are not all of equal quality and accessibility, and only one deals directly with second language, the volume is a useful addition to the literature and a convenient source of understanding for those curious about the emergentist approach to language development.