An excellent introduction to anyone who is interested in the acquisition of French, this volume provides an overview of and begins to bridge the gap between various learning situations. In the preface, Prévost highlights three main goals he hopes to accomplish with this work: (a) “to describe linguistic knowledge developed by learners of French in different learning situations” (p. xv), (b) “to compare the acquisition process across the various learning situations” (p. xv), and (c) “to identify areas underrepresented in existing research on the acquisition of French and to propose new avenues of investigation” (pp. xv–xvi). With these goals in mind, four main domains of research—namely, the verbal domain, subject and object pronouns, determiner phrases, and questions and embedded clauses—are presented and discussed in the volume. Other areas of inquiry, such as phonology, are not included given the paucity of research. The organization of the volume would make it very easy for anyone to use and for teachers in particular, because each section (i.e., each domain of research discussed) is divided into four subsections: a chapter that provides some background theoretical information, a chapter devoted to first-language (L1) acquisition, a chapter that describes bilingual acquisition and acquisition by children with speech language impairment (SLI), and a final chapter that focuses on SLA in both child and adult learners. I must admit that the grouping of bilingual acquisition and SLI children in a single chapter was not always immediately clear, especially because the two populations are always treated separately in the different sections. It would have seemed more logical to include the discussion of SLI children with the chapter on L1 acquisition and the discussion of bilingual acquisition with the chapter on SLA. Another possibility would have been to have these two population types discussed in separate chapters. Nonetheless, the current organization makes it easy for anyone with an interest in a specific domain and population type to quickly access the relevant information.

With the ambitious goal of providing a description of the acquisition of French in different learning situations, Prévost must be commended for his efforts in providing a critical discussion of the different learning situations that deal with the acquisition of French; however, the book is not without a few shortcomings. First, it seems that Prévost chose to discuss the same studies across the different domains reviewed, which enables parallelisms between chapters and thus between the various populations and areas of research, but, at the same time, it limits the breadth of his discussion of the topics at hand. Indeed, Prévost himself points to the fact that most studies have focused on spontaneous data; however, to take the acquisition of gender as an example, there is a growing body of research that has incorporated different techniques such as processing evidence and comprehension data, which fails to be mentioned here. Second, given its rather ambitious goal, some details on the studies discussed by Prévost, especially those focusing on adult second-language learners (e.g., the level of proficiency and the age of the learners) are missing. Not only would the inclusion of those details have strengthened his discussion, but, on a practical level, it also would have allowed readers to access all of the information at once without having to search in the various articles mentioned. Third, the discussion of the different theories related to the domains reviewed here often seems to glance over the most recent minimalist proposals, which may leave some readers a bit unsatisfied.

Despite these limitations, this volume is recommended for anyone who is interested in discovering what has been said about the acquisition of French in various learning situations. Moreover, Prévost offers many research ideas throughout the book, thus fulfilling his third objective. Covering such a breadth of information, this volume should soon become a reference for those studying the acquisition of French.